Where was Jesus during the 72 hours before he rose from the dead?
Where was Jesus during the 72 hours before he rose from the dead?
There are two days in the Christian calendar that everyone knows. Good Friday, the day when Jesus died. On Easter Sunday, the day he came back to life. But there is a third period that almost no one examines. Almost three full days in which the body of Jesus of Nazareth lay in a sealed tomb, in the most silence absolute that history has recorded.
A period that the Scriptures surround with a brevity that is disconcerting, almost as if the text did not want to say too much about what was happening in those hours. What was happening exactly while the world went on spinning outside? Where did Jesus go during those 72 hours? Because there is something that the four gospels make it perfectly clear.
The body was in the tomb, but Jesus was not I was just resting. There is a letter from the apostle Peter that talks about a trip. There is a text in book of Acts that mentions a place specific. And there is a Greek word in the creed of the apostles who for 2000 years have generated more theological debate than almost any other in the entire New Testament.
Today we are going to go through those 72 hours, no to speculate, but to see what the text really says and what the history confirms. To understand what It happened in that grave, first you have to understand the world in which that grave existed. It was the Jerusalem of the first century of our era, a city that in the days before Easter radically transformed.
Under normal conditions, Jerusalem It housed between 50 and 80,000 inhabitants permanent, but in the days of Jewish Passover, the number multiplied exponentially. The historian Flavius Josephus, who was born just a few years after crucifixion and that he wrote with the accuracy of someone who knew the city in person, he estimated that during Easter they could concentrate on Jerusalem up to 2.
5 million pilgrims. A number that modern historians adjust to the low, but still reduced to 300 or 400,000 people, still represents a radical transformation of a city built on limestone hills and connected by streets that did not exceed the 2 meters wide in its widest areas dense. They came from Egypt, from Mesopotamia, from the coasts of Asia Minor and from the confines of the Empire Roman.
Diaspora Jews who had lived all his life in cities where the Greek was the dominant language and They returned to Jerusalem only once in life or perhaps never again. They brought offerings, they brought animals for the sacrifice, They brought the accumulated weight of a year entire life in exile and hope that in that place, in that temple that Herod the Great had spent decades rebuilding up turn it into one of the structures most impressive of the ancient world, some of that weight was going to be lifted.
The political tension was palpable. Rome ruled Judea with efficiency calculated from who knows that the greatest danger is not the enemy army, but the crowd that convinces itself to have reason. Pontius Pilate, the prefect Roman, there was expressly from Caesarea maritime to Jerusalem to supervise the Easter week.
It was not a visit courtesy, it was a military presence deliberate. a reminder of who had the power real in that city. The Roman legions They reinforced their positions in the Tower Antonia, who dominated the north patio of the temple from a height that allowed soldiers see any disturbance before it became a riot. The temple guards kept double surveillance.
Any spark in a city this full could become a fire in a matter of hours. And in that exact context, in that exact week, Jesus of Nazareth had entered Jerusalem in the middle of a popular acclaim that the authorities nuns had observed with a mix of alarm and cold calculation. The man who had raised Lazarus from the dead in Betania less than 3 km from the city was now the topic of conversation every corner.
Those who had been present at that tomb of Bethany they could not shut up Those who listened to them They looked with that particular mix of disbelief and desire to believe that it is characteristic of human beings when they are presented with something that exceeds his ability to explain. To understand this world is to understand why that the death of Jesus was not just one more execution of the many that the Roman Empire carried carried out with systematic regularity in their territories.
Crucifixion was a form of execution specifically designed for communicate a public message, which power of the State was absolute, that whoever challenge him could expect not only the death, but the most humiliating death, slowest and most visible possible. The Romans crucified on the roads main, not in hidden places.
They wanted people to see them, they wanted that the message was unmistakable. and However, even within that logic of calculated brutality, the execution of Jesus had a burden particular that differentiated it from the dozens of crucifixions that Pilate I had ordered before. the burden of frustrated expectations of an entire town, the burden of scattered disciples, the burden of religious authorities who had bet their credibility on this man was silenced definitively.
Now, there is something that the world of first century understood about death that we, with our sensitivity modern we tend to overlook. For a first century Jew, death does not It was simply the cessation of functions biological, it was a threshold, a passage towards a different state of existence that the Hebrew scriptures described with a specific word, Sheol.
The word appears 65 times in the Hebrew Old Testament. It wasn’t him hell in the sense that Later imagination would represent it, with flames and eternal torments designed for punishment. It was literally the place of dead, the place where all the who died, just and unjust, while They were waiting for the final judgment.
Psalm 139 describes it as a place from which even God is not absent. The Ecclesiastes describes it as destiny inevitable for every living being. The book of Job describes him as a place of silence and shadow, where existence continues, but in a way radically diminished. It was to that world to which Jesus had descended on Friday in the afternoon, at the exact moment that in the temple the last one was sacrificed paschal lamb of the day.
And what I was going to to do there was something that, according to texts that we will examine below, no human being had done before. The garden of Joseph of Arimathea smelled of freshly cut cedar and myrrh. Myrrh and Aloe. According to the gospel of John, Nicodemus, the Pharisee who had visited Jesus secretly during the night, several years before, brought a mixture of these two substances aromatics that weighed approximately 30 kg.
John 19:39. an extraordinary amount, an amount that in the context of the First century burials were not simply a gesture of respect, but a statement, the same amount that was used in the funerals of kings and supremes priests. Nicodemus, who had come to Jesus from night because I had too much to lose If anyone saw him during the day, he was.
burying like a king in public, in front of the same people who they had condemned. The body was wrapped in cloth flax, with aromatic spices distributed between the layers of fabric according to Jewish burial custom. It was a practice that served two simultaneous functions: slow decomposition time enough for the duel could be carried out with dignity and create a physical tactile record of the presence of the body.
Each layer of linen It was also a hug, the last caress that the living could offer to those who they were leaving. The tomb was new. The gospel of Matthew specifies it with precision. which seems unnecessary until understand its meaning. It was a tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had ordered to dig for himself in the rock alive. Matthew 2760.
It was not the grave of a criminal who it would have been a mass grave without a name no sign. It was the grave of a rich man carved in the limestone of the slopes west of Jerusalem with enough space for one person I could enter standing. a camera sepulchral sealed with a large stone round that rolled through a carved channel on the floor and fit into a niche in front of the entrance with a weight that made it impossible to move it from within.
Outside, the city continued to breathe. The Shabbat had begun at sunset. Friday sun. The streets of Jerusalem they had calmed down with that stillness characteristic that Jewish cities acquired since sunset on Friday until Saturday. The pilgrims They had returned to where they were staying. The markets had closed.
the temple, that hours before he had witnessed the death of the paschal lamb, rested in the liturgical silence of the day sacred. Somewhere in that city, a group small of men and women processed something their minds had no categories to process. The disciples had fled. Pedro had denied three times man for whom he had said he would give life.
And the sound of the rooster that he remembered followed him to the rest of his days. Judas had died that very same tomorrow, according to the book of Acts, in a field that since then would be known as the field of blood. Facts 1:18 to 19. Those who remained were locked up, according to the gospel of John, for fear of the Jews. John 20:19. It was the specific fear of those who know who have been associated with someone who has just been executed by the State.
The fear of those who wonder if they are the next on the list. but the women They had not locked themselves in. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome. Lucas adds Juana. They were the ones who they had remained at the foot of the cross when the men had fled. They had seen the body taken down, wrapped, deposited in the tomb.
And according to the three synoptic gospels, They had noticed exactly where it was the stone, exactly how it had been sealed, with the precision of those who already They were planning to return as soon as the sabbath will end. They were waiting, but what they were waiting for was simply re-anoint the body someone they loved.
They weren’t expecting what they were going to find. And while they waited in Jerusalem, while the disciples hid and the religious authorities slept dream of those who believe they have won, in the sealed garden tomb, or more precisely in the dimension of existence to which Jesus had agreed when crossing the threshold of death, something was happening, something that Pedro would describe years later with a brevity that only increases the mystery.
First letter of Peter, chapter 3, verses 18 to 20. Because Christ also suffered only one once for sins, the righteous for unjust, to bring us to God, being truly dead in the flesh, but quickened in spirit, in which he also went and preached to the imprisoned spirits, those who once disobeyed. These two sentences have generated more theological discussion that almost any another passage from the New Testament outside of the gospels.
And the reason is simple. If taken in Seriously, they imply something that most believers have never contemplated directly. They imply that between death and resurrection, Jesus did something, he went to somewhere, he communicated with someone. There are three questions that this passage opens immediately. The first, what does quickened mean in spirit? The second, who are those spirits imprisoned? The third, what did he preach to them? Let’s start with the first question because It is the one that holds everything. The phrase
original Greek is sooyeteis pneumati, vivified, made alive in spirit. It is not a reference to the resurrection corporal. That would come on Sunday. This is something that happened between death and the resurrection, a form of active existence, aware that Jesus maintained during the hours in which his physical body remained in the grave The theological tradition has called to this state of different ways.
The best known in the language of the apostles’ creed is that which has generated the greatest controversy historical. He descended into hell. Philology is crucial here. the word Latin that the creed uses is inferna, no infernum, in the sense of place of eternal torment. Inferna, in classical Latin, designated the world below, the place of the dead, the direct equivalent of the word Greek Hades and the Hebrew word Sheol.
We are not talking about hell Dante with his circles of fire and his torments. designed for eternity. We’re talking about the place they were going all the dead, without exception in the Old Testament cosmology. The place that the book of Ecclesiastes described as the common destiny of all the living beings.
The place that Psalm 88 describes as the deepest abyss in darkness, in the depths. Psalm 16, which Peter quotes verbatim in his speech on the day of Pentecost in The book of Acts says this: “No you will leave my soul in Hades, nor You will allow your saint to see corruption.” Acts 2:27. Peter was quoting David talking about Jesus.
And the direct implication is that The soul of Jesus was in Hades, not permanently, not without purpose, but it was there. Now the second question, who are the spirits imprisoned? This is where the interpretations diverge more clearly and it is important to present the three main with the honesty that they deserve.
The oldest interpretation and most widespread in the first centuries of the Christianity maintains that these spirits are the righteous of the Ancient Testament, the patriarchs, the prophets, all those who had lived and died before the arrival of the Messiah and who waited in Sheol for the fulfillment of the promises that God had made to over centuries.
Abraham, who had believed in the promise when I still had no human form, Isaac, who had lain on the altar and He had come down from him alive. Jacob, who had fought with the angel and had crossed the Jordan with his entire family. Moses, David, Isaiah, who had prophesied the coming of the servant suffering with a precision that still leaves those who read Isaiah speechless 53 for the first time.
All of them waiting and Jesus descending to the place where they waited to announce that the wait had finished. This interpretation has a name, the descensus adferos. The descent into hell and appears in writers as early as Ignatius of Antioch in the second century. The second interpretation defended mainly by Agustín de Ipona and for a significant part of the Protestant tradition, maintains that imprisoned spirits are specifically the contemporaries of Noah and the preaching he did to them Jesus was not an announcement of salvation,
but a proclamation of victory, a declaration that the power of death had been defeated, not a second chance for those They had rejected the first one, but one formal notification that the trial had avoided in life now it was definitive, because the only one who could having redeemed them had completed his work.
And there is a third reading present in some of the church fathers who they wrote in Greek, which links this passage with the image of Psalm 24, where a voice cries before the doors of the Hades. Lift up, oh doors, yours heads and lift up your doors eternal and the king of glory will enter. Psalm 24:7. It is not a request for permission, it is a order.
The image of someone who does not call to be opened, but he tears down which is closed. The three interpretations have something in common. None of them describe those 72 hours as a period of inactivity. Jesus wasn’t just waiting. But the biblical story does not end with Peter. There is another text that adds a dimension that is often overlooked high and that is in the least place expected.
First letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15. The resurrection chapter that Paul writes with the urgency of someone who knows that he is transmitting something that is not can afford to explain poorly. Because just as in Adam everyone dies, also in Christ all will be vivified. But each one in his own order, Christ, the firstfruits, then those who are of Christ at his coming.
First of Corinthians 15 22 to 23. The word first fruits is key and deserves stop here for a moment. In the context of the agricultural calendar of Israel, the first fruits were the first portion of the harvest offered to God before the rest could be collected. It was a consecration of set through part. The gesture of bringing the firstfruits to the temple it just meant thank you for this first fruit, meant what this fruit represents.
All the harvest that comes after it is already yours. It was a forward-looking statement based on evidence of the present. Paul is saying that the resurrection of Jesus does not It was an isolated and unprecedented event that happened only once in history and will never be repeated. was the first of a series, the beginning of something that has not yet it’s over.
And that means that those 72 hours were not just the break between death and return. They were the moment when something fundamental in the structure of the cosmos, the structure that determined what happened with the dead, where they went, how much time they waited, what could break that state. was altered in a way permanent. The letter to the Ephesians expresses it with an image that the ancient world understood perfectly.
Taken from Psalm 68. Climbing to the top, he took captive the captivity. Ephesians 4:8. It was the image of a victorious general returning from battle with the freed prisoners marching behind of him. In the Roman world, that parade called triumph. It was public and formal recognition that the enemy had been defeated, that the captives were free, that the order that had existed before the battle no longer existed.
Paul is applying that image to what occurred in Hades during those 72 hours. And all this happened in silence, without human witnesses, without any evangelist who could report what I had seen from inside. Just the text with its brevity deliberate, pointing towards something that occurred in a dimension of existence which no living human being had access.
There is a passage from the Gospel of Mateo, which is so brief and so disconcerting that most readers pass overlooked. Matthew 27 52 to 53. The tombs were opened and many bodies of saints who had slept rose up and came out of the tombs after his resurrection, They entered the holy city and They appeared to many. two verses, four sentences and without However, if taken seriously, they describe something that has no parallel anywhere another New Testament text.
The tombs were opened at the moment of the death of Jesus on Friday. The bodies did not come out until Sunday after the resurrection. Matthew is describing two events separated by two days. The first coincides with the moment in that Jesus crosses the threshold of death, the second with the moment in which cross back in the opposite direction.
That interval, those hours between Friday and Sunday when tombs were open, but the bodies had not yet emerged. It is the interval that no sacred text describes from within. It is the mystery that has been most silent generated in the history of thought Christian. Here is something that most Holy Week sermons never they mention.
The image of the descent of Jesús Salades It was not a surprise to the first readers of these texts. It was an image that they recognized, an image with a very long story behind it, both inside and outside the biblical world. Let’s go to Psalm 88, one of the most obscure and least cited of all psaltery.
It is the only psalm that does not ends on no note of hope. It begins in darkness and ends in darkness. The psalmist writes from a place that describes how the abyss, the darkness, the place of oblivion. And there is a line that is especially disturbing when read in its original language. Will you perform wonders for the dead? Will the dead rise to praise you? Will your mercy? Psalm 88 10 to 11.
In the context of the thought of Old Testament, the answer implicit to those questions was no. The The dead did not rise. Sheol was a place not known returned, a place of suspension permanent. But something started to change in Jewish thought throughout the period that historians call the second temple, from the 6th century before of Christ until the destruction of temple in the year 70 of our era.
began to articulate more clearly the idea that Sheol was not a state definitive for all, but a state of wait for the righteous, there was a category of dead that were not simply in the shadows, but awaiting the fulfillment of a promise that had been made in history and that had not yet been completely fulfilled.
The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm this in a way that is remarkable. Discovered in the Kumran Caves in 1947. These texts were dated with accuracy between the second century before of Christ and the year 68 of our era. Exactly contemporary with the ministry of Jesus and with the writing of the New Testament. They are the oldest texts of the Ancient Testament that we possess and together with them texts from the community appear that preserved.
texts that express specific expectations about what the Messiah would do when he arrived. The fragment known as 4CU521 It says this and it’s worth reading. slowly The Lord will visit the pious and the righteous will call by name. About the humble their spirit will rest. To the faithful will renew with his power, because will glorify the pious over the throne of the eternal kingdom, will free the captives, he will give sight to the blind, He will straighten the bowed ones.
And the Lord will do glorious works that They have existed as he promised. For he will heal the wounded and the dead he will give life, and to the poor he will announce good news. A text that circulated in the Jewish world from the time of Jesus. A text that disciples could have known and that describes with a precision that is difficult to attribute to chance exactly what that the New Testament states that it happened.
But there is something more than most Western believers do not know, because it is kept in a tradition that the Christian West has ignored for centuries. The icon of the Anastasis, which is the Greek word for resurrection in orthodox iconography eastern. This icon does not show Jesus coming out of a grave while the angels blow trumpets and women They run to give the warning.
show something completely different. Show Jesus standing on the broken doors of the Hades, pulling Adam’s hands and Eve to bring them out of the abyss. at your feet The chains and padlocks are broken. Around him, waiting his turn, there are the righteous of the Old Testament. David with his harp, Moses with the tables of the law, John the Baptist pointing out forward as he did in life.
This image is not a medieval invention nor a late artistic elaboration. Your iconographic roots go back to 4th century and its theological roots to the first fathers of the Church who They wrote in Greek in the language of New Testament and who knew the weight exact of the words that were interpreting Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who died as martyr around the year 110 of our era, less than 80 years after the crucifixion, wrote about the descent of Jesus you wing with the naturalness of someone for whom it was a piece of information
established within the Christian faith, not a marginal speculation. Irenaeus of Lion in the second century describes it as the fulfillment of the mission of Jesus in all dimensions of the existence. heaven, earth and place of the dead. Tertullian, to end of the second century mentions it as part of the faith received.
There is a word in the book of Revelation that collect all this with an economy amazing. John writes that Jesus appeared on the island of Patmos and said, “I am the first and the last and the one who I live and I was dead, and here I am alive forever and ever. Amen. and I have the keys to death and give them. Revelation 1 to 18.
The keys. In the ancient world the keys were the symbol of power over access. Who had the keys to a place decided who entered and who came out. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission, no negotiated, He had authority. Jesus did not leave Hades the same way he entered. He entered like any mortal who crosses the threshold of death with the difference of that no mortal had crossed it being who he was.
came out like someone who had taken control of that threshold forever. The image is not that of a prisoner liberated, but that of the liberator who enter the prison, break the chains and He leaves taking the prisoners with him. And in that difference lies the reason why that Paul in that same first letter to the Corinthians can write with a irony that almost seems like a challenge directed at death itself.
Where is it, oh death, your sting? Where oh grave, your victory? First of Corinthians 15:55. This is not an empty rhetorical question. pronounced from the comfort of who has never had to face death up close. Paul had been stoned and given up for dead. He had been shipwrecked. He had spent nights in prisons that They looked nothing like prisons modern. He knew death closely.
and However, he questioned her like this, because something had happened in those three days that forever changed the rules of the game. There is a scene at the end of the Gospel of Luke that is almost always reads like a coming-of-age story resurrection desserts. Two disciples walking towards Emmaus 11 km from Jerusalem on the same Sunday the resurrection.
a stranger who joins them in the He walks and asks them what they are talking about. and them, with that mixture of disbelief and pain that only those who have seen have die their hopes, they respond with a phrase that is one of the most summaries honest about the spiritual collapse that It exists in all biblical literature.
We hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Luke 24:21. Imperfect past tense. We hoped, We no longer wait. And then the stranger does something that It is extraordinary in its simplicity. He does not show them his hands with the marks of the nails, it doesn’t make any supernatural demonstration. He tells them, “It was not necessary for the Christ suffered these things.
and enter into his glory. And starting from Moses and from everyone the prophets, he declared to them in all the scriptures what of him they said. Luke 24 26 to 27. all the scriptures since Genesis, the promise made in the garden of eden from a seed of the woman who would crush the head of the snake. Genesis 3:15.
The lamb that Abraham found among the bushes when God stayed his hand on Isaac. Genesis 22:13. Psalm 22, which begins with the same words that Jesus spoke from the cross My God, my God, why have you abandoned? Psalm 22:1, Matthew 27:46, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, wounded by our transgressions, crushed for our sins, whose wound would bring our healing.
Isaiah 53:5. Zechariah and the 30 silver coins thrown into the potter’s field. Zechariah 11 12 to 13. And the prophet Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish and that his own Jesus had pointed out in the gospel of Matthew as the only sign that would give his generation. Matthew 12:40.
All Old Testament history pointing towards that exact point, towards that tomb, towards those three days, towards that Saturday silence that was the break between two acts of the same story that It had been developing for millennia. The two disciples of Emmaus They recognized the stranger while They walked for hours.
They recognized it in an instant, the moment he left the bread And at that same moment he disappeared from his sight. The first thing that They did was tell each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he was talking to us on the road?” Luke 24:32. The burning heart is not a metaphor wanders with religious emotion. It is the physical description of what happens to a mind when something that does not I could see suddenly see.
when the scattered fragments of a story that I didn’t understand suddenly they fit when the silence that seemed empty turns out to be the silence of something that was happening just below the surface of the visible. Many people watching this have lived or are living their own three days, that period in which something they loved or What they believed in is in the grave.
that inner Saturday in which Friday It’s over, but Sunday isn’t yet arrived. that silence that can be interpreted two completely different ways, as abandonment or as something that is occurring in a dimension to which no access yet. women who went to the tomb on Sunday morning tomorrow they did not go with expectations of resurrection, They went with myrrh and spices to anoint a dead body They weren’t expecting what they found and yet they found it.
Not because they had foreseen it, no because they would have asked for it with enough faith, but because it happened regardless of your ability to foresee it or deserve it. There is a detail in the story of the resurrection that John includes and that the other three gospels they do not mention Such a small detail It is easy to read it without stopping at it.
When Peter and John ran to the tomb upon hearing Mary’s report Magdalena, Juan arrived first, but no came in. He stood at the entrance and looked He looked inside and saw the canvases laid out. John 20:5. Peter, who arrived later, entered directly, as was his custom, and He saw the linens and the shroud that were been on the head of Jesus, no put with the linens, but rolled up in a separate place. John 27.
This detail, the rolled shroud, separate, placed in one place specific, has fascinated scholars for centuries. It’s not him mess of someone who has escaped in a hurry who had to fight to get out of the bandages that wrapped, that has left everything thrown in his urgency to leave. It is the order of someone who has finished what he had what to do and he has left everything in his place before leaving calmly, with purpose.
Juan says of himself in that moment he saw and believed. John 28. He did not see the resurrected body, he did not see the angel Didn’t see any demonstration supernatural He saw the ordered absence and that absence it was enough for him. There is something in that phrase that deserves stop long enough for land. Juan believed without seeing.
believed based solely on the arrangement of some linen canvases in an empty tomb, based on the order of what was missing, based on the way that the silence of that place communicated something that no words could have convey with the same clarity. Now, what exactly happened in those 72 hours? The honest truth is that the text gives us enough to ask the question with precision, but not enough to answer it with photographic certainty.
What we can affirm based on The texts we have examined today are this. The death of Jesus was not a passive state. The place he went to has name in the Scriptures. There was a proclamation, an act that the texts of the New Testament describe consistently as a victory. And when the women came to the garden at dawn on the first day of the week and they found the stone rolled away, no They were finding the end of the history.
They were finding the signal that what had happened in silence, in the darkness of those three days was already over. The angel who was sitting on the rolled stone said something that might seem unnecessary, since the tomb was visibly empty. However, he said it, “It’s not here.” Matthew 28:6. Three words, four in Greek. Ouk Estin Jode, It’s not here.
He went, he acted, he returned and the place he left, that tomb ordered with the linens perfectly arranged, it is the silent evidence that death, for the first time in the history of the humanity, was crossed in both addresses. The next question is, what does it mean? that this has happened for everything that comes later? And that’s exactly what we’ll explore.
in the next episode. What happened in those three days was not a parenthesis, it was the central chapter of a history that spans millennia developing. The body in the grave, the soul in movement and sunday morning an empty tomb with linens perfectly folded. next time We will talk about the first witnesses of the Sunday morning and what that It changed their lives forever.
Because there is something in those encounters that no one has examined it closely. If this video made you think, share it with someone who has the same questions. See you in the next episode. There are something else in Peter’s text that deserves careful attention and rarely examine. The letter says that Jesus went and preached to the imprisoned spirits.
The Greek word used here is equeren, who comes from Kerux, the herald. In the Greek and Roman world, the Kerux It was the officer who announced loudly the decrees of the king or the emperor. He was not a preacher in the sense modern, someone who persuades or exhorts. He was an official proclaimer, someone who carried a message authority and declared it publicly.
The difference is not a detail minor linguistic, is the difference between a conversation and a proclamation, between an invitation and a decree. When you combine this with the letter to Colossians, chapter 2, verse 15, “And spoiling the principalities and the powers, he exhibited them publicly, triumphing over them in the cross The image that emerges is not the of a Jesus who descends to the place of the dead in defeat and has to open step by step.
It is the image of someone who enters that place like victor, publicly proclaims what has happened and he leaves carrying with him what that he came to look for. But there is a third dimension that appears in the first Peter’s letter immediately after of the passage we have already examined and which Most readers do not connect with him because there is a chapter change in the middle. First Peter 4:6.
Because this has also been preached the gospel to the dead, so that they may be judged in the flesh according to men, but live in spirit according to God. The gospel preached to the dead, not the living, those who already They had crossed the threshold before the gospel existed as a message articulated in history.
Peter is saying that the proclamation of relegation was not a second chance generic for all the dead of the history. It was specifically for those who had not had access to message that the death and resurrection of Jesus now made it possible. all this converges in what the theologians of the patristic period they called Halloween of Hell, literally the destruction of hell, the image of someone who enters a place of captivity, breaks down from within and comes out carrying to free captives.
An image that appears in Saturday’s anonymous homily saint, one of the most liturgical texts ancients of Eastern Christianity, which This is how he describes the moment of descent. What has happened? A great silence reigns on earth today. A great silence and a great solitude. A great silence because the king sleeps. The earth shook and did not move because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and has woken up those who had been sleeping before of the centuries.
This text, whose author is unknown, but whose antiquity dates back at least to the 4th century, is possibly the most powerful description that exists of the Saturday between death and resurrection. It does not speak of a body at rest. Speak of a king who has entered the dream of the dead with a purpose and when he wakes up he will wake up with him those who had been waiting for centuries.
The question that this text raises and that no theological answer exhausts completely it is this. What does it mean for those of us who live now that that descent occurred? What changes in concrete terms and not only abstract the fact that who has the keys to death and Hades has them precisely because he came down up there and took them? That question does not have an answer fit in a paragraph, but can’t be left unposed.
But there is a detail in the story of the burial the other gospels do not mention and that Matthew includes and that opens a window to the mental state of those who believed they had cattle. The day after the death of Jesus, on Saturday, the chief priests and The Pharisees met with Pilate and they told him something that results in retrospective extraordinarily revealing.
Lord, we remember that that deceiver said, “Still living, after three days I will rise again. Command, then, that the tomb be secured until the third day. lest they come his disciples at night and steal him and tell the people, he rose from among the dead. Matthew 27 63 to 64. There is something fascinating about this request.
The disciples were not thinking about the resurrection. They were locked up fear. The women were waiting for will spend Saturday to go anoint a body that was left for dead definitely. No one in Jesus’ close circle I was planning nothing that required a guard at the tomb. And yet, the who had asked for his death They remembered his words.
They remembered the promise of the third day and they were enough afraid of her like to ask for a Roman guard, no just a stamp. Pilate granted them the guard and the tomb was sealed with the seal of the Roman Empire, which meant that anyone who broke that seal could expect capital punishment consequence.
The most powerful seal of the world, most powerful of the time, placed on a stone that weighed enough for several men strong could not move it. Guarded by professional soldiers who knew exactly what would happen to them if they They fell asleep on guard. And still, when the women came at dawn on Sunday, they found the stone already removed.
They found no soldiers in their positions. They found an angel sitting on the stone as if resting on a garden bench, with the expression of someone for whom everything ended If it happened it was perfectly normal. Matthew 28 2 to 4. And the soldiers who according to Mateo himself trembled with fear and They were like dead, they ran to the city to report what had happened.
Not to Pilate, to the principals priests, that they bribed him to say that the disciples had stolen the body while they were sleeping. Matthew 28 11 to 13. It is notable that the alternative explanation that the authorities fabricated admitted implicitly the fact that they were looking for deny. The tomb was empty.
No They discussed that, they discussed the cause. and that admission put into the mouths of those They had every interest in the body was still where they had been left, is perhaps the most testimony involuntary and irrefutable of all surrounding the events of that weekend week. No.
