Saturday, April 11, 2020, Holy Saturday

Psalm 24, 7-10

Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lifted up, O eternal gates: and the King of Glory shall enter in. Who is this King of Glory? the Lord who is strong and mighty: the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lifted up, O eternal gates: and the King of Glory shall enter in. Who is this King of Glory? the Lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory.

On Holy Saturday, we remember how our Lord, after his Death on the Cross, descendit ad infernos, in the Latin of the Apostles Creed, and there, in “the lowest places”, “he went and preached to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3, 19).  He had announced early in his public life that he would do this: “Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life” John 5, 28-29.  Because infernos was translated into early English as “hell”, from the Germanic word for the underworld, early versions of the Creed said that Jesus “descended to hell” after his Death.  His preaching to the souls there and leading the just to heaven at the time of his Resurrection became known as “the harrowing of hell”, as “harrow” derived from an Old English word for “despoil”.  Jesus “despoiled” hell of the just souls of those who had died, from the time of Adam and Eve up to the time of his own Death on the Cross.  The “hell” here is not the hell of eternal punishment — again, originally it was merely the Germanic name for the place where all human souls went after their death, and it came later to be the English name for the place of the damned.  Christ is said to have despoiled it because in the ancient and medieval mind, before Christ, all the souls of the dead, the good and the wicked, went to one place to await his coming.  The gates of heaven were shut, but so were the gates of hell, during this time.  This place was a sort of limbo, a waiting room, where the only suffering was the waiting.  Christ emptied it out with his arrival.  The souls of those who believed in him followed him out to heaven, and the souls who rejected him were cast into the hell of the damned.

The fullest expression of the harrowing of hell is to be found in the so-called  Gospel of Nicodemus, which was written no earlier than the fourth century A.D., and in the miracle plays of the Middle Ages which were put on during religious festivals.  The Gospel of Nicodemus centers around the Death of the Lord, his Resurrection, and appearances of the dead who rose at that time to many of the Jews (cf. Matthew 27, 52-53).  The following is from this apocryphal work, and is spoken by a man who has been raised up in the harrowing of hell.  He is speaking to the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, instilling terror in them: 

“When, therefore, we were kept in darkness and the shadow of death in the lower world, suddenly there shone upon us a great light, and Hades and the gates of death trembled. And then was heard the voice of the Son of the Father most high, as if the voice of a great thunder; and loudly proclaiming, he thus charged them: Lift up your gates, you princes; lift up the everlasting gates; the King of glory, Christ the Lord, will come up to enter in.  Then Satan, the leader of death, came up, fleeing in terror, saying to his officers and the powers below: My officers, and all the powers below, run together, shut your gates, put up the iron bars, and fight bravely, and resist, lest they lay hold of us, and keep us captive in chains. Then all his impious officers were perplexed, and began to shut the gates of death with all diligence, and little by little to fasten the locks and the iron bars, and to hold all their weapons grasped in their hands, and to utter howlings in a direful and most hideous voice.”

We see how verses of Psalm 24 are applied here.  In Nicodemus and the miracle plays, verses 7-10 were interpreted as a dialogue between the angels accompanying Christ and the devils, guarding the gates of hell from them.  One of the most powerful choruses from Handel’s “Messiah” interprets them this way as well.  The angels cry out, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; And be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; And the King of glory shall come in.”  The devils cry back, from behind their locked gates, “Who is this King of Glory?”  The angels reply, “The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; Even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; And the King of glory shall come in.”

The mystery of the harrowing hell is presented here very concretely and physically and this helps us concrete and physical people to understand the meaning of what Jesus did, to envision its reality.  Let us recall that the present time is our harrowing.  Satan fights a very real fight, one much more dangerous than a mere physical battle, in order to tear salvation from us, while the Lord, and his angels and saints, offer assistance that we might live holy lives and be saved.  On Easter Sunday, let us glorify the Lord who is risen from the dead, and let us commit ourselves to live in him that we too might rise.