Shane Hughes 3-8-26

You with us, we're in a series on the Apostles Creed, and we're also in the season of Lent. Now, you may remember, the season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, where we remember, you know, from dust we came and dust we return. We're going to die. The day before that is called Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday or Madagra, maybe you've heard of that term. That's where you kind of get cleaned out.

You get. You kind of. You know, traditionally, it's where you. You cooked all the stuff that you weren't going to be able to eat during Lent because it was going to go bad. And then at the end of Lent, we start Holy Week, and you may be familiar with that Palm Sunday.

And here at Highland, we celebrate that by our children waving palm branches and coming forward. And this is the time where Jesus rides into Jerusalem. It's a triumphant entry. And then later that week, he has a meal with his disciples. Maundy Thursday, he says what we experience in communion, this is my body.

This is my blood. And then, of course, you know, Good Friday, it's the day that Jesus was crucified. And then Easter, the day that Jesus rose again. But there's another day in between, Friday and Sunday, Holy Saturday. And that's interesting because we don't really have a celebration for that.

There's not pancakes to eat. There's not ash to put on your head. There's no palm branches to wave. It's a very quiet day. And in some ways, that's intentional because that's the Sabbath.

It's the day where we rest. But have you ever wondered what happened on that day? I mean, what exactly was Jesus. What happened? Was Jesus dead in the tomb?

His body was there, his spirit was there, his mind was there. And so he just. Just dead, like asleep. Maybe Jesus in that moment ascends to reunite with the Father and the Spirit. And it's kind of in a green room on the side of the story, waiting for his moment to come back on stage.

Sunday morning. What. What happened to Jesus on. On Saturday? If you've ever wondered that question, you're not alone, because theologians for the past 2000 years have asked that question and, and dug through Scripture together.

And we're going to talk, talk about that passage today. First Peter is a book. It's written to communities of believers that were scattered across Asia Minor, Pontus Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, and. And Peter described them as living as. As resident aliens, as strangers, exiles.

They're living as. As a Minority in a culture that views them with suspicion, with which is kind of strange because most of them have lived in their communities their entire lives. But because of Jesus, they find themselves estranged. Maybe they were Jews living in a Jewish community and the synagogue has kicked them out. They used to worship with all of them on Saturday, but they can't no longer.

And so they've broken friendships and even familial relationships. Maybe they grew up as a Greek in Asia Minor, and. But they heard about Jesus and they gave their life over, they gave their heart over, and they could no longer do the things they used to do. And so they didn't go to the big festivals or the parties anymore because that was celebrating foreign gods, and they just. They couldn't stomach it.

The letter is fundamentally about how to suffer well, how to maintain dignity and hope and ethical integrity when the surrounding world is hostile against you. And. And chapter three is in the middle of that conversation. It's this long exhortation about honorable conduct in the face of unjust treatment. Just before our passage, Peter has said, hey, it's better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil.

The suffering of Jesus is not just an example to imitate. Peter wants us to know it's a cosmic event that changes the world.

And so our passage, if you want to look in your Bible, it's first Peter, chapter three, beginning in verse 18. And this verse opens, and Peter's probably quoting something that these Christians had already heard of, they already knew. It's a confessional statement. Christ suffered once for our sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. Now, there's three things that are happening here at once.

First is the word once. Jesus suffered once for sins. And that has a considerable amount of theological weight. It insists on the finality and sufficiency of the death of Jesus. It is not a repeated sacrifice in the way of the temple system required.

It happened once and it was enough.

Second is the offering of righteous for the unrighteous. And this is the same pattern we see in Isaiah 53. In fact, I think Peter is using the lens of Isaiah, second Isaiah, to look at what happened to Jesus in Isaiah 53. It's about the suffering servant who bears the iniquity of others. And the third thing we see, Christ suffered once for sin, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

The third thing we see is the purpose.

The word used there is the word about access to a royal or Priestly presence. A better word for bring might be ushered. You have this sense when you're ushered into a presence that something important is about to happen. It's not just you just get to walk in. If you don't have a guide with you, you're not allowed.

There was one time when Natalie had. She was going to a conference in Baltimore and. And so I went with her. And one day I just took the train up to Washington D.C. and I was just kind of sightseeing, I'd never been there before. And so I visited the Capitol and it's this beautiful place.

You may not know this, but you can just walk into your representative's office and ask for a visit. In fact, they're delighted to talk to you because you're one of their voters and they would love some face to face time. And so I went and I sat in the, I talked to the administrator of my representative's office and I said, hey, can I talk? And they're like, sure, just wait 15 minutes, they'll be right with you. And so I sat down in this beautifully ornate room and it's a gorgeous place.

And I wait for about 10 minutes and then someone comes and says, you know, your state rep will see you now. And we walked over and then I got to have this face to face conversation for like 10 minutes with my rep. And she asked me about my family and what I was concerned about. And we just, we just talked for a little bit and then, then it was time to go. But I guarantee you, I guarantee you, if I did not have that escort, I would not have been allowed in that office. You don't just get to wander in, you're ushered in.

And this is what Christ's life and death does. It allows us to be ushered into the presence of God.

It removes the barrier.

And now we get to the, the part what commentator Wayne Grundum, who's kind of an expert in First Peter is called one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament, because the next thing that, that Peter says is Jesus went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, which opens up so many questions. First of all, who are these spirits? Second of all, when did this proclamation happen and what exactly was proclaimed? So if you've always wanted to know what happened on that silent Saturday, that holy Saturday, First Peter seems to indicate that what Jesus did was made a proclamation to the spirits. And then Peter goes on to explain this and he makes a reference to Noah.

And some people think that what actually happened is Jesus came in the Time of Noah to preach to those that were about to die, to hope to save them. But others think that this is a metaphor, right? He's talking about his baptism, our baptism, that when we encounter Christ, we are saved in the same way that those eight people were saved on the ark. In fact, archaeologists have discovered early baptistries that are. Have octagon shapes.

There are eight sides to throw back to that story of the eight people who were saved. This is true also in your churches of Christ. If you ever went to a church of Christ in the. The Midwest and Tennessee or Kentucky, most of those churches have the exact same architectural structure. What it looks like is a boat that's been flipped upside down.

That's the auditorium. That's on purpose. In the same way that Noah and his family were saved in the ark, we are saved through the church.

In the ancient church.

There's this line in the Apostles Creed, and most of us just, I think, kind of speed our way through it to get to the resurrection, because that's an exciting part. And you might say it quickly, almost apologetically, as though we're not quite sure we believe it, or maybe we're not quite sure what it means. And the line is, he descended into hell. And then before anyone can ask any questions, we say, and he rose again on the third day. But I want to pause there for a minute.

I want to linger in that descent, because I think it may be the most important thing we confess about God. Not the ascent, not the triumph. I think it might be the going down. In fact, this week we had a worship meeting and people were saying, hey, how are you going to handle this Sunday? What are you going to do about this, this text?

And I said, I'm not exactly sure. And so I spent some time reading some of the ancient thinkers, ancient theologians, and the. The Patristic Fathers about what did they think this meant and how did this affect their lives. The ancient church called it the Harrowing of Hell. This is what happened on Saturday, the harrowing of Hell.

Harrowing is an interesting word. I thought until this week that harrowing meant like a near miss of danger. Like that was a harrowing experience. I was saved. I was nervous, but I made it through.

Right. It was dangerous, but we cleared it through. I thought that's what harrowing meant. Actually, harrowing means something very different. The word itself is agricultural.

To harrow is to drag iron teeth through the earth. So in the ancient near east, in the first century, you'd have this long iron bar that had teeth in it. And. And you would drag that behind you. If you had an animal, they would pull it, but you'd drag it behind you and you would tear up all the ground behind you.

It's an agricultural term, and I didn't know that.

You break open the hard, packed ground so that something new might take root. And farmers know what harrowing costs because the soil does not give up compaction easily. Man, you can tell I've been in West Texas for seven years because I almost said soil. The soul does not give up compaction easily. And so the image suggests that whatever happened between the cross and the empty tomb was not a gentle pastoral visit.

It was a breaking open. It was a disruption of the dark. It was an act of violent, redemptive agriculture in the realm of the dead. And the theological tradition behind this doctrine draws from a handful of striking texts. The one we're looking at today, Peter writing about Christ going to preach in the spirits of prison.

Paul speaking about the descent, Christ descending to the lower parts of the earth in Ephesians. The psalmist crying out from the depths and discovering that even here, even there, God's hand was present. Where can I flee from your presence? The psalmist asked, if I make my bed in Sheol? You were there.

And you know, when I was in seminary, that clause in the Apostles Creed that we're looking at today, that Jesus descends into hell, seems like a footnote. But the more I've sat with it and the more I've read the great theologians that wrestled with it, the more I think it might be the most important thing we can possibly reflect on. And here's the interesting thing. When you look at those great theologians, they don't all agree about exactly what's going on. Augustine, who was the towering North African bishop, was careful.

He was almost cautious because he didn't want anyone using the descent as kind of a loophole, a backdoor to salvation for people who had rejected God in life. And I think Augustine is right to warn us. The scent doesn't undo the seriousness of how we respond to God right now. Our choices matter, and they. They have weight.

But then you have someone like Clement of Alexandria, who's writing even earlier than Augustine, who looked at the descent and said, what kind of God would deny someone the gospel simply because of when they were born? And that question has real force. It's the kind of question that a skeptical friend might ask you over dinner. And Clement believed that Christ preached to the dead so that divine justice would have been seen as truly just so that all it doesn't matter where you were in terms of time or geography, if you didn't have the opportunity to hear about Jesus, this was the moment. Thomas Aquinas was a brilliant and systematic theologian as any.

His. His work isn't measured in pages, it's measured in inches because he wrote so much. It's the kind of gave us a kind of theological map. And he. He kind of layered out the different levels of shale, of hell.

And he said that Christ descended to different places in different ways, liberating the righteous who had trusted in God and were waiting, offering something to those in purification, but not overturning the final judgment of those who had hardened their hearts against God. And as you read Aquinas, it's tidy, perhaps too tidy for some of us, but Aquinas is pointing at something real. The descent of Christ is ordered. It's Percival, purposeful. Christ doesn't descend in chaos, he descends as Lord.

And then there's Luther, Martin Luther, who characteristically throws out the map entirely. He says, no, you are all missing the point. Christ didn't just slip quietly into the realm of the dead to collect the righteous. He went into hell itself. And he fought.

He confronted Satan on Satan's own territory, and Jesus won. It's almost violent in his imagery. And I find that strangely moving.

And I think, here's what's interesting, because all of these theologians, for all their differences, they're all circling around the same thing. They're trying to say something about the totality of what Jesus did. Because I think most of us, when we think about the cross, we think about a transaction. When you come to the cross, your sins are forgiven, your debt is paid. And that's true.

That is gloriously true. But the descent says something more. It says that Jesus did not just deal with the consequences of darkness from a safe distance. Jesus entered into it. He went all the way down.

Jesus goes into death, into the place of the dead, into the uttermost reach of human lostness.

The philosopher Charles Taylor talks about how modern people feel a kind of loud cosmic loneliness, a sense that we are alone in an indifferent universe. And when we suffer, we suffer in a void that no one truly understands the power could possibly understand pain. And I want to say to that person, have you considered what it means that the Son of God descended? And so the Church looks at all of these texts and then looks at the Cross and then looks at that. That day of silence between Friday and Easter.

And they said something happened in that silence, something happened in that dark. And the medieval imagination is. Is explodes the details generously. And there are these icons in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. And they're beautiful.

They make you catch your breath. And one of those icons is of Christ standing on the broken gates of Hades. The hinges are burst open. It looks shattered. And Jesus is reaching down with one hand and the other, and he's pulling Adam and Eve, our original parent, mother, and father, and is pulling them out of Hades and grabbing them by their wrists.

And he's not waiting for them to climb out on their own. He didn't just offer them a ladder, he's grabbing them and he's hauling them up. The force of the resurrection reaching backwards through time to gather in all the ones who had been waiting in the dark. So let me give you a little bit of background, because the Bible has this whole conception of the realm of the dead, and it's really almost totally lost on modern readers. In Hebrew, it's called Sheol, and in Greek it's called Hades.

And in the ancient Jewish imagination, Sheol is not a place of punishment. That's a later idea. Most of us get the idea of hell more from Dante's Inferno and Paradise, Milton's Paradise Lost, than we actually get from Scripture. Sheol is the realm of the dead. It's the place where everyone goes when they die.

It's a place of waiting, of shadow, of diminishment. The psalmists cry out of Sheol. Job wants to flee to Sheol. And the core conviction of Israel is that Yahweh, the God of the living, has not abandoned those in Sheol, but no one has ever broken out of it until now.

So here's the logic that the church was working with. Jesus dies. He goes to the realm of the dead, to Sheol, to Hades, to the place where all the dead go. And then something unprecedented happened. The early Christians look at their text like Psalm 16, which says, you will not abandon my soul to Sheol.

And they said, that's about Jesus. And Peter quotes this in Acts, chapter 2, and Paul quotes this in Acts chapter 13. The resurrection is being interpreted as God doing something in the realm of the dead, not just the resurrecting of a body. Matthew 16 reflects on this. Jesus himself.

He's speaking to Peter. He says, I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Now, here's the thing, and I don't know if everybody's thought about this before, but gates are designed to keep people out, not keep people in. And when a City's gates are broken. It's meant that the invaders can just come and go.

You can't stop them. It's kind of this ultimate flex of power. They can just go as they please. Jesus isn't saying, you can't keep my kingdom in hell. He's saying, you can't keep my kingdom out of hell.

Now I'm a preacher, which means I have to be careful about what I claim to know. And so I'm going to tell you honestly. I can't tell you exactly what happened on Holy Saturday. The New Testament does not give us a transcript. The creeds give us a line, part of a line.

What we have is not a systematic account. What we have is conviction. It's a stubborn, wonder filled conviction that the love of God does not stop at the threshold of death. But here is what I can tell you, here is what this doctrine does for me and maybe what it can do for you. What it tells me is that there is no place that God has not been.

What it tells me is that there is no pit too deep. What it tells me is there is no darkness to absolute. There is no locked room of the soul. There's no room for you to keep all of your old broken shame. There's no room for you to keep all of your old worthless grief.

There's not a room where all of the people died before they heard the good news, where they are waiting. There is no room in all creation that Jesus has not already entered. He descended into hell. He went to the place that we are the most afraid of. He went to the place we believe God could not possibly be.

And then he harrowed it. He dragged his iron love through the hard packed earth of death and broke it all open. And I think about the people this week, I thought about the people this week that feel as though they're living in hell right now. Not some sort of metaphor, that actually feel like they're living in hell. The ones who are suffering so deep and is so unrelenting that the word hell is not a hyperbole, it's a description.

And what I want to say to them. And if this is you in this room right now, I want you to hear it. You are not belief, you're not beyond the reach of the one who descended. The Christian gospel does not only speak to the living, it doesn't only comfort those who are healthy and those who are hopeful. It goes down.

It goes all the way down. It goes not as an observer, it goes as one who break open the doors. This is the God that went to go look for the sheep in the dark. This is the God who ran down the road toward a son who had ruined everything. This is the God who, when even death tried to be the final word, he said, no, not even here, not even you.

He descended into hell. He heralded it and he rose again.

And that means the darkness, even the darkness you are carrying right now, is not the end of the story.

The darkness is just the place where the harrowing begins.

This is the moment where God plants something new. This is the moment that changes everything.

At the end of our service, for the last few weeks, we've been standing, we've been saying this confession, the Apostles Creed together. And I want to invite you to stand and say this with me. And it may be that you're not at the place yet where. Where you can say this because it's not your heart, it's not what you believe, but I want to invite you to stand.