Easter Saturday. God, apparently, is dead. At least for today, because we know that Sunday is coming...tomorrow. For now though, Jesus is in the tomb. cold. dead. utterly dark. silent. sinews rigid, corpse, almost blood-drained, scarred, naked apart from the burial shroud. Humiliated, cut, brutalized.
The Apostle Peter, writing some years later, mentions a beautiful early Christian tradition (1 Peter 3:18-20) that Jesus was not inactive in His death, but that He was busy in Hades bringing new life to those who had died trusting in God, for all the years leading up to this momentous day. The penitent thief who died alongside Him on the cross would have experienced hades turned into Paradise as Jesus came to greet him. The faithful men and women, boys and girls of Old Testament times too. Even the ancient ones who died in and before the great flood, says Peter.
Wherever Jesus Christ walks, death turns to life, darkness to light, indifference to love.
There is a movement among some modern Christian theologians to think that hell cannot exist, because it is incompatible with the central notion of the loving all-power all-knowing God. Yet Jesus, whom I follow, never taught such thinking, Notably, Jesus Christ taught more often and at greater length about hell, that he did about heaven. God, He reminded us, is equally about justice, as He is about love. And justice seeks righteousness. Since Jesus IS God, He is speaking with self-understanding here. Who will provide the righteousness needed to undo the the darkness we each carry? It was God come to us, revealed to us as Jesus, who allowed all humanity - the hegemony of state power (Imperial Rome), and the baying crowds, and the self-righteous right-wing conservative religious elite (Pharisees), and the left-wing liberal intelligentsia (Sanhedrin) - to brutalize, mock, marginalize and execute Him. The Holy One absorbed into Himself all the darkness, hatred, self-righteousness and brutish ignorant stupidity of humankind. There is noting more we can do to Him, we have done it all in our fore-fathers, confirmed in our every micro-decision to prefer our own ways. Yet here comes Jesus, walking though the hallways of our minds, bringing paradise, bringing life, and always saying - "come follow Me".
Love has satisfied Justice and here He comes. On Easter Saturday we get the chance to decide to follow Him into Resurrection Sunday, or stay in hades.
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