”˜One morning you will see in the newspapers “Moody is dead”. Don’t believe it! I shall never be so alive as I will be that morning.’

–D.L .Moody (1837-99)

What is the one single event that has most influenced and changed human history? The disciples of Jesus Christ have only one answer, which they proclaim without reservation, indisputably and absolutely: the dying and rising of God’s only-begotten Son, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Yes, the rising of Jesus Christ from His human death on the cross to new and unending life on the third day has forever influenced and changed human history and, indeed, our lives. One sentence in the Easter Scripture readings, from the Gospel according to Saint John, gives us the key to understanding how and why the rising of Jesus Christ makes all the difference: “And he saw and believed.”

Read it all.

When pastors gaze upon their flocks after sunrise on Sunday, many will see congregations cast in shadows””haunted by diminishing investments and the prospect of losing jobs and homes.

Amid this fear and doubt, the clergy must lead the faithful to a message of hope””the miracle of the Resurrection commemorated at Easter.

To do it, many will rely on the Gospel of Mark, a tale that embodies the anxiety of confronting the unknown. Mark tells the story of Jesus’ life and death, but it closes with a cliffhanger: Three women go to his tomb, only to tremble with fear at finding the crypt bare.

It is that sensation of emptiness, terror and mystery that is drawing pastors to this scripture.

Read it all.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans will be attending Church services this Easter, according to a poll released by the Knights of Columbus.

The fraternal organization released on Thursday the results of a poll conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

Of those surveyed, 63% said they plan to observe Easter by attending a Church service. Among Catholics, 74% said they would attend a service.

Read it all.

We are interested in your theological as well as personal reflections.

The more specific you can be the better.

The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation ”” This story begins and ends in joy.

— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that ”” pierced ”” died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

–John Updike (1932-2009)

The music is from the Second Chapter of Acts originally. Listen to it all.

Jesus’s disciples had their lives turned upside down. At the moment of his death, they were fearful, living under occupation and behind locked doors. The news that the women in their group had seen him alive astounded them and completely changed the way they lived. Their fear was transformed into courage, their anxiety turned into confidence, and they were able to speak publicly about what they believed to be true.

It is often said that Jesus Christ never wrote any books or held public office, hardly travelled from the place where he was born, or produced any plans for the ordering of society. Yet all the armies that ever marched or kings that ever ruled have not had so profound an effect on the world as that travelling preacher and healer. That is because of the resurrection message that was transmitted across the known world by excited men and women who had found something extraordinary.

Jesus’s disciples thought they had lost the teacher who had taught them that the kingdom of God belongs to children, that human life should be characterised by compassion and dignity, whatever your status, and that life is lived not for the maximising of one’s own comfort but for the common good.

Read it all.

Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn’t have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he’s still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he’s gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.

The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn’t defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon – He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.

Let’s be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn’t mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God’s life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect – and in the whole world.

Read it all.

Do you know that God exists? the interviewers ask; or, How do you know Christian faith is true? There are two tempting ways of responding, both wrong. There is the apologetic shuffle of saying, ‘Of course, I don’t really know; this is just the truth as it appears to me and I may be wrong’. And there is the confident offer to prove it all to the hearer’s satisfaction; here are the philosophical arguments, here is the historical evidence, now what’s the problem?

Two kinds of mistake: the first because it reduces faith to opinion and shrinks the scale of what you’re trying to talk about to the dimensions of your own mind and preferences; the second because it keeps you at arms’ length from the whole business by making it impersonal: here are the proofs and it doesn’t much matter what I or anyone may be doing about it. It’s just true in much the same way as it’s true that Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles. You may say, ‘Well, there you go’ but are unlikely to fall to your knees.

St Paul in today’s epistle makes it clear that to speak of Jesus’ resurrection is also to say something crucial about who and where we are, not just to make a claim about the past.. Now we should not doubt for a moment that Paul means what he says and that he takes for granted that the resurrection of Jesus is not a piece of fantasy or wishful thinking but the actual emptying of a grave. However, the point of Paul’s entire teaching on the resurrection is to take us much further than that. This event, the emptying of the grave, has done something and has brought the Christians of Colossae – like all Christians – into a new universe. They are living in a new climate, with new ‘thoughts’ – a climate in which the various ways in which we’ve put up barriers between ourselves and God have been shattered and our old selves are dead. We may still go on trying to put those barriers back up again, but something has happened that opens up a new kind of future. Our selfish and destructive acts and reactions can be dealt with, overwhelmed again and again by the love shown in the cross of Jesus. Because of Jesus’ death and rising from the dead, our resurrection has started, and our citizenship in heaven has begun. There is a hidden seed of glory withinus, gradually coming to its fullness.

Resurrection has started. How do we know? Not by working it out and
adopting it as well-founded opinion, not by deciding that this idea
suits us, not by getting all the arguments straight, but because we are
dimly aware of something having changed around us. For Paul’s converts
in Colossae, Corinth, or wherever, it’s about the impact on them of his
early visits: here was someone who although he wasn’t a good speaker or
a charismatic teacher (so he himself tells us) was so intensely aware
that the world had changed that he changed the world for those around
him. They trusted him; they were prepared to risk all the mockery and
harassment and worse that Christians had to put up with because they
were able to say, ‘It’s so real for him that we can sense the sort of
imperative urgency in what he says and what he sees; whatever he
believes, this is life at a new level’.

That’s why the two sorts of defence of faith I mentioned earlier aren’t
good enough. It’s not that this is an attractive theory that I’ve
decided to try out – but I may be wrong. Nor is it that I now have a
knock-down argument that will convince everyone. There is something
compelling here. I can’t help being drawn to this promise of life and
freedom, it isn’t about my opinions only; yet I know that I can’t put
this into neat words that will make everyone say, ‘Oh yes, it’s obvious
really’.

For a great many people, the burning question about faith is not just,
‘Can anyone believe this?’ but ‘Can anyone live like this?’ Is it
possible to live ‘in heaven’, in such a way that our selfishness is
eroded? To live on the basic assumption that people can be healed of
their miserable compulsions to fear and resent each other and to cling
to their grievances and injuries? Last weekend’s television drama, ‘Five
Minutes of Heaven’, was a painfully sensitive reflection on what it
takes to make reconciliation more than words alone, when a former
terrorist gunman meets the brother of the man he killed in cold blood.
Both, it turns out, are still locked into that past event: the gunman,
though he has now become a sought-after speaker on reconciliation, is
still trapped in self-loathing; the victim’s brother, who witnessed the
shooting as a boy of ten, is equally trapped, traumatised by what he saw
as a child, helpless with rage that his brother’s murderer has been
‘forgiven’ by a society with a short memory. When they meet at last, it
is in an explosion of near-murderous violence; yet something is
released, some future is opened.

‘Five Minutes of Heaven’: we’re left in no doubt that if real
reconciliation were possible, that would be what it was, five minutes of
something quite other than the expectations and routines of this tragic
world. And we’re left in no doubt that getting there might be the most
painful thing imaginable. The drama spared us nothing; but it did
-courageously – suggest that ‘heaven’ was not an illusion. Can anyone
live like that? Well, perhaps, perhaps just getting to the outer edge of
something ‘outside’ the endless weary exchange of retaliation. A
fleeting image of what Paul is talking about: another world that has
taken root in this one – only not just through the chance experiences of
a few individuals but because something has happened once and for all to
declare that sin has been dealt with, the prison of the self has been
broken open by God. The impossible is now possible. Your life is hidden
with Christ in God, and you live from a depth newly opened up in you.

And the only way of saying that, of course is for it to be lived out.
It’s no use talking endlessly – preaching endlessly – about
reconciliation and forgiveness and liberation. No argument can persuade
anyone about this, only the lived reality. It’s worth remembering that
Paul of Tarsus joined the Christian community not as a well-meaning
religious enquirer but as someone who had been the equivalent of a
terrorist gunman, someone who had supervised the activities of a private
militia devoted to abducting and imprisoning members of the Christian
sect. He is a perfectly intelligible figure in the back streets of
modern Beirut or Baghdad. And he has to find his ‘heaven’ by going,
undefended and unvouched for, to the people he has been trying to
silence and kill. Can anyone live like this? If the Colossians or
Corinthians or Philippians had asked this, at least Paul would have been
able to say yes: I have lived it, or, It has lived itself out in me and
in those who were my victims. No wonder that he goes back over this so
many times in his writings, and, in his second letter to Corinth,
angrily protests that, whatever else may be true, he is not doing this
for the sake of his comfort or power. Why should the Corinthians trust
him (especially when there are more attractive teachers around)? Well,
at least he has lived through the most appallingly painful realities of
the reconciliation that Jesus made possible; he has lost an entire
career, an entire identity, he has put his life at daily risk. The one
thing the Corinthians can be sure of is that this is not an opinion or
an argument.

And the moral of all this? It’s boringly familiar. If we want to commend
our faith, we have to show the difference. The new world has to be
visible. In the days of the early church, writers trying to defend the
faith naturally used all sorts of complex intellectual arguments; but
they also said, ‘Look at us. We try to live forgivingly with each other.
We don’t try to get revenge when we’re killed by the state authorities
or the lynch mobs. We treat every life as precious, including the lives
you don’t care about. We try to be peaceful and faithful, in private and
in public, and to live lives of sexual faithfulness and self-control [as
much of a challenge, we might add, in the late Roman Empire as it is
today]. Does all this suggest to you that there might be another way of
living that offers healing to the casualties of so-called ordinary human
behaviour?’

Early Christians could point to the martyrs – but also to those who
freely decide to live lives of continence and poverty in the first
monastic communities, the men and women who tried to live out the life
of heaven in the daily discipline of life together, giving themselves
time to discover their most deeply hidden failings and fears, their most
deep-seated difficulties with themselves and other people and not
running away but letting the action of God through the life of the
community heal them bit by bit. We’re still fascinated by this life – we
joke about it, yet have an uneasy respect for it, as a whole series of
television presentations will confirm. But there is a real question here
to the Church, not least to the Church of England. More people than
perhaps ever before want to have access to what the monastic life
promises, the wisdom of mutual patience, shared silence and prayer,
space to grow out of childish ways – yet the profile of monastic
communities and the recognition given to those who seek the path of
contemplation is pretty meagre. Is it time to pray for and work for a
radical new affirmation of this life and a proper valuation of its gift
to the Church and the world? To pray harder for vocations to this life
an to encourage people of all ages to explore it and to have the courage
to take those costly promises so as to begin to show the world what
difference the faith makes – what the resurrection looks like?

It could hardly be a more propitious time for this. The present
financial crisis has dealt a heavy blow to the idea that human
fulfilment can be thought about just in terms of material growth and
possession. Accepting voluntary limitation to your acquisitiveness, your
sexual appetite, your freedom of choice doesn’t look so absurd after all
as a path to some sort of stability and mutual care. We should be
challenging ourselves and our Church to a new willingness to help this
witness to flourish and develop.

But it is of course only one form of witness. When all’s said and done,
the call is to every one of us. We need to hear what is so often the
question that’s really being asked when people say, ‘How do you know?’
And perhaps the only response that is fully adequate, fully in tune with
the biblical witness to the resurrection is to say simply, ‘Are you
hungry? Here is food.’

This is the real meaning of Easter…

No tabloid will ever print the startling news that the mummified body of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered in old Jerusalem. Christians have no carefully embalmed body enclosed in a glass case to worship. Thank God, we have an empty tomb.

The glorious fact that the empty tomb proclaims to us is that life for us does not stop when death comes. Death is not a wall, but a door. And eternal life which may be ours now, by faith in Christ, is not interrupted when the soul leaves the body, for we live on…and on.

There is no death to those who have entered into fellowship with him who emerged from the tomb. Because the resurrection is true it is the most significant thing in our world today. Bringing the resurrected Christ into our lives, individual and national, is the only hope we have for making a better world.

“Because I live ye shall live also.”

That is the real meaning of Easter.

–Peter Marshall (1902-1949), The First Easter

It is easy for us to forget that that is where the first disciples were on Easter morning—in the cul de sac. They had no place to go. Peter and Andrew, James and John, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James and the other women. The enterprise was based on Jesus of Nazareth. This movement which they had given themselves to—this God thing—it was all dependent upon him. The healing of the sick, delivering people from dark drives and obsessions, loosening the grip of loss, the teaching about how God works in peoples’ lives, (not just religious practices), but having the ability to bring people into God’s presence, into an experience with the living God by his words and presence. When Jesus was around, God came to them; forgiveness flowed; broken lives were mended. All this seemed to happen around him. You can see the problem I suppose—Jesus was the franchise. There was no way to posture or pretend about these things. Without him it would be futile to carry on.

To further illustrate my point, remember the disciples didn’t have any of these. The Pharisees and the scribes had the Hebrew scriptures; the priests in the temple had the altar of sacrifice, the altar of incense, the candelabra, the shew bread, the robes, the Holy of Holies—all that the disciples had was Jesus. Frankly, if he had not been raised we would never have heard of him. And just to have heard of him is hardly enough anyway. Without Jesus they were clearly in the cul de sac of death, which Karl Barth once called “the hopeless cul de sac.” That’s what those who stumble over Jesus’ seemingly exclusive statement that he is “the way, the truth and the life” too often forget. The Easter message is quite clear here—there’s one way out of the cul de sac and Jesus pioneered it.

Read it all.

Sam believes that Gandalph has fallen a catastrophic distance and has died. But in the end of the story, with Sam having been asleep for a long while and then beginning to regain consciousness, Gandalf stands before Sam, robed in white, his face glistening in the sunlight, and says:

“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?”

But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from bed… “How do I feel?” he cried.” Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” –he waved his arms in the air– “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Return of the King

Many people are facing this Easter with a great sense of fear and trepidation for the future. The recent dissident murders have created a degree of nervousness about the safety of members of the PSNI. And, with all the recent layoffs in manufacturing, there is also the devastation of unemployment for people in jobs which had seemed secure.

For all of us who experience traumatic circumstances in our lives, it can feel like the long Good Friday ”“ that nothing will ever be right again, that we will never laugh heartily again and that there is no possible future we can imagine.

The Easter story is a reminder that that is not so. There is always hope when God is involved and always new life to be experienced in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The message of Easter morning is this: Christ is risen! Life is worth living! God has the future in his hands both in this life and in eternity.

–The Rt. Rev. Harold Miller

This is what happens to “trumped up” messiahs. This is what happens to people who rock the boat. This is what happens to those who threaten the establishment. This is what happens to those who lift up the poor and broken-hearted. This is what happens to those who choose the way of love. Christ’s last words from the Cross, the shout “tetelestai” (“It is finished”) had seemed to mean “it’s all over”. Jesus’s life had ended, so it seemed, in ignominious defeat.

But it was a cry of victory: “It is done! It is accomplished!” So what had seemed to be finished had for them only just begun. The risen Jesus sends them back to Galilee, where it had all started, and they have to relearn it all in the light of Easter.

So the fearful became fearless. They and those who came after them would stand before emperors. They would brave the lions. They would travel to the ends of the world, driven by the fire burning within them, the message that Christ is risen, showing that God is love.

A “Happy Easter” is not going to resolve the crises of today. It is joy we need, surprising, transforming joy. The joy that floods and overflows. like a dark room that’s suddenly flooded with light. The joy that is found in knowing forgiveness of past wrongs, life in the present and hope for the future. This is Easter joy.

Read it all.

Christianity takes it for granted that whether you succeed or fail, you’re valuable. God’s view of you doesn’t depend on how you do, it’s always the same love, always giving you a second chance. And once you let that sink in, you can face failure without fear and rage. You’ll still try your best, but you’re also free to see that if you can’t do or get just what you wanted, you still have your dignity before God and so you still have a future.

This is the sort of thing that the Church gives space for ”“ a realistic picture of who you are, based on a vision of who God is. You may not know exactly what if anything you believe about God. But the presence of this building and this community of people simply reminds you ”“ it could be different, you could find a new perspective on who you are and a new connectedness with other people and the world.

‘Haunted by religion’. Yes, in the sense that no-one seems to want these possibilities to be outlawed or forgotten. They need that space as much as the students need Rochester Cathedral or a little village in Norfolk or Lancashire needs the local church for its postal services.

Haunting, of course, isn’t the best word for this; it’s about ghosts from the past. But one thing that the Bible says about Jesus when he has been raised from death is that he tells his friends that he isn’t a ghost. He is simply fully alive again. It could be that this Easter you realise that what felt at first like no more than a ghostly ”“ if friendly ”“ presence turns out to be alive here and now. And that’s when Christian memories and sympathies turn into faith.

Read it all.

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844”“89), “Heaven-Haven”

Watch it all.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity. In his preaching at Corinth, Paul initially wants to know nothing but the Cross, which “destroys the wisdom of the wise and wrecks the understanding of those who understand”, which “is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles”. But “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Cor 1:19, 23, 25).

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

”“Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), A Short Primer For Unsettled Laymen

The third great symbol of the Easter Vigil is something rather different; it has to do with man himself. It is the singing of the new song ”“the alleluia. When a person experiences great joy, he cannot keep it to himself. He has to express it, to pass it on. But what happens when a person is touched by the light of the resurrection, and thus comes into contact with Life itself, with Truth and Love? He cannot merely speak about it. Speech is no longer adequate. He has to sing. The first reference to singing in the Bible comes after the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel has risen out of slavery. It has climbed up from the threatening depths of the sea. It is as it were reborn. It lives and it is free. The Bible describes the people’s reaction to this great event of salvation with the verse: “The people ”¦ believed in the Lord and in Moses his servant” (Ex 14:31). Then comes the second reaction which, with a kind of inner necessity, follows from the first one: “Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord ”¦” At the Easter Vigil, year after year, we Christians intone this song after the third reading, we sing it as our song, because we too, through God’s power, have been drawn forth from the water and liberated for true life.

There is a surprising parallel to the story of Moses’ song after Israel’s liberation from Egypt upon emerging from the Red Sea, namely in the Book of Revelation of Saint John. Before the beginning of the seven last plagues imposed upon the earth, the seer has a vision of something “like a sea of glass mingled with fire; and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb ”¦” (Rev 15:2f.). This image describes the situation of the disciples of Jesus Christ in every age, the situation of the Church in the history of this world. Humanly speaking, it is self-contradictory. On the one hand, the community is located at the Exodus, in the midst of the Red Sea, in a sea which is paradoxically ice and fire at the same time. And must not the Church, so to speak, always walk on the sea, through the fire and the cold? Humanly speaking, she ought to sink. But while she is still walking in the midst of this Red Sea, she sings ”“ she intones the song of praise of the just: the song of Moses and of the Lamb, in which the Old and New Covenants blend into harmony. While, strictly speaking, she ought to be sinking, the Church sings the song of thanksgiving of the saved. She is standing on history’s waters of death and yet she has already risen. Singing, she grasps at the Lord’s hand, which holds her above the waters. And she knows that she is thereby raised outside the force of gravity of death and evil ”“ a force from which otherwise there would be no way of escape ”“ raised and drawn into the new gravitational force of God, of truth and of love. At present she is still between the two gravitational fields. But once Christ is risen, the gravitational pull of love is stronger than that of hatred; the force of gravity of life is stronger than that of death. Perhaps this is actually the situation of the Church in every age? It always seems as if she ought to be sinking, and yet she is always already saved.

Read it all.

All night had shout of men, and cry
Of woeful women filled His way;
Until that noon of sombre sky
On Friday, clamour and display
Smote Him; no solitude had He,
No silence, since Gethsemane.

Public was Death; but Power, but Might,
But Life again, but Victory,
Were hushed within the dead of night,
The shutter’d dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone.

–Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

O LORD Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who at this evening hour didst rest in the sepulchre, and didst thereby sanctify the grave to be a bed of hope to thy people: Make us so to abound in sorrow for our sins, which were the cause of thy passion, that when our bodies lie in the dust, our souls may live with thee; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

This ultimate solidarity is the final point and the goal of that first ‘descent,’ so clearly described in the Scriptures, into a ‘lower world’ which, with Augustine, can already be characterised, by way of contrast with heaven, as infernum. Thomas Aquinas will echo Augustine here. For him, the necessity whereby Christ had to go down to Hades lies not in some insufficiency of the suffering endured on the Cross but in the fact that Christ has assumed all the defectus of sinners…Now the penalty which the sin of man brought on was not only the death of the body. It was also a penalty affected the soul, for sinning was also the soul’s work, and the soul paid the price in being deprived of the vision of God. As yet unexpiated, it followed that all human beings who lived before the coming of Christ, even the holy ancestors, descended into the infernum. And so, in order to assume the entire penalty imposed upon sinners, Christ willed not only to die, but to go down, in his soul, ad infernum. As early as the Fathers of the second century, this act of sharing constituted the term and aim of the Incarnation. The ‘terrors of death’ into which Jesus himself falls are only dispelled when the Father raises him again…He insists on his own grounding principle, namely, that only what has been endured is healed and saved.

That the Redeemer is solidarity with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality- this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ (hormemati blethesetai, Apocalypse 18, 21; John 12; Matthew 22, 13). But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity…This vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way.

–Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter