Going Down - Article 3/39

3. OF THE GOING DOWN OF CHRIST INTO HELL

AS Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell.

We're not good at death. Our feelings are not having a good time and our language tries to clutch at straws of hope. And conversations never continue well after one party has said 'Go to hell.'

No, we're certainly in a deathmess. I have been required to overhear so many final eulogies about, let's call her Violet, 'looking down on us and smiling'. No amount of accurate preaching of the gospel and the resurrection that is to come will shake Violet's family and friends from the comfort they take from that 'looking down'.

Christ really, actually died. He didn't swoon and resuscitate. That is what Article 3 wants us to know. Whatever it means to be dead between Good Friday afternoon and Easter Sunday morning – that is what Jesus was.

Oliver O'Donovan again: 'We think, quite properly, that the liberation of the dead is something which has been accomplished. And we think of the blessedness of the dead as present. We remember Paul's conviction that to die was to gain more of Christ, and Jesus's promise to the thief on the cross, 'Today you will be with me in Paradise', and we cannot believe that the dead are kept hanging around. The three tenses, the past present and future, are all points at which a reality beyond our time touches our time. They are all correct tenses to use. But we are mistaken if we try to systematize them into a series of temporal events which befall the dead, as though in our time, with hypotheses of intermediate status, purgatories and so on.'

And furthermore Belinda Carlisle was wrong. Heaven is not a place on earth. Although there are some gripping glimpses and thin places.

We need to embrace the welcome of death. After six hours on a cross death comes as a merciful blessing. We would all prefer to say goodbye to our family and friends whilst gripped by superior palliative medicine. Better than mind that car, what car, splat any day (I think I stole that from Red Dwarf – respect).

In The Amber Spyglass Philip Pullman invented a species of a humanlike race which lived with their own death as if a personalised accomplice. So when that creature whispered in your ear 'It is time', there was no fear. You went off hand in hand to another place.