Why Did Jesus Have to Go to Hell for the Three Days After His Death?

There is a line in the confession of faith more ancient Christianity that most of believers recite by heart without stop and think about what really is stating. The Apostles’ Creed a text that in its essential form dates from the second century of our era, memorized by hundreds of millions of believers over 2,000 years.

Born of the Virgin Mary, he suffered under power of Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, and then before the resurrection, four words that most churches today either jump completely or explain as metaphor or treat as if were a theological discomfort that is Best not to examine too closely. He descended into hell.

We have to be precise here because the Historical honesty demands it. This phrase does not appear in the older versions ancient creed from the second century. We found her for the first time documented in The Aquileia Creed, included by the theologian Rufino around of the year 390 of our era and it is not generalized in most versions of the creed up to the century seventh, which does not make it a late invention, but in the articulation written of something that the Church believed and transmitted orally long before,

as we will see. Not as a figure of speech, not as poetic description of the suffering of the cross, as a declaration of something what happened, something that happened in the three days between death on Friday in the afternoon and the empty tomb of the Sunday morning. Something that early writers of the Church since Ignatius of Antioch in the 2nd century treated as part of the core of the faith received.

 Why did Jesus have to go to the hell? What was he doing there? And why does that matter in a way that completely changes the way Do we understand the resurrection? Those are the questions that this episode It is built to respond and responses when examining texts that have been in plain sight for 2000 years are more specific, more extraordinary and most significant what most sermons Holy Week dares to develop.

Before getting into what happened in those three days, there is something you need be established precisely, because the confusion between two very concepts different is the root of almost all theological chaos surrounding this topic. The place to which Jesus descended is not the same as the New Testament calls.

The jejena is the Greek transliteration from the Hebrew words Hei Ginom, the Ginom Valley. a real geographical place located just outside the walls of Jerusalem in the ancient period Testament. It was the scene of some of the most horrendous idolatrous practices of Israel’s history, including child sacrifices to the god Molech.

 For the time of Jesus, tradition Later I would describe it as a place of waste and continuous fire, an area of permanent decomposition and destruction, Although archaeologists debate whether perpetual fires that tradition describes existed literally in the first century, or if they were already an image consolidated from its history like a cursed place.

 What is clear is that when Jesus used the word hejena in his teachings, was evoking an image that audience in 3rd century Jerusalem I understood a place with absolute clarity associated with death, destruction and to the absence of return. I was describing something permanent, terminal, defined by the absence of any possibility of restoration.

 That’s not it the place to which Jesus descended. The place to which he descended is called Hebrew Sheol and Greek Hades, and the distinction matters enormously. The word sheol appears 65 times in the Hebrew Old Testament and describes consistently as the place of the dead, of all the dead, no only from the wicked. The patriarch Jacob assumed that he would go to Sheol when he died. Genesis 37:35.

The psalmist describes Sheol as a place where God himself is present. Psalm 139:8. The book of Ecclesiastes treats it as the universal destiny of all being living without exception. The prophet Samuel was called from Sheol to speak to Saul through the medium of Endor and appeared as a real, conscious, identifiable person.

First Samuel 28:15. Sheol was not a place of fire and torment, it was a place of shadows and wait, a place where existence continued, but in a diminished way, like a flame that is still burning, but with much less oxygen. a place where the relationship between dead and the living God was dimmed, not completely cut off, but reduced to something far below what the living experienced.

This is the place referred to by apostles creed when it says that He descended into hell, descended to Hades, to the place of the dead, to the territory that all being human who had lived and died before of him had dwelt. And he didn’t enter that place in the same way. way in which they had entered. Everyone else had crossed that threshold because the force of death had taken there.

 They had arrived at Sheol because that was the destiny of the dead and the dead had no decision to make in this regard. Jesus crossed that threshold voluntary, with a specific purpose, with a specific mission, and left the another side holding something that never before it had been in human hands. as stated in one of the most verses extraordinary from the book of Apocalypse, the keys of death and Hades.

Revelation 1:18. Keys, not a metaphor for authority abstract theological. Yaes, the symbol that in the ancient world It meant exactly one thing, control over who enters and who leaves. To understand what I was doing Jesus in those three days, it is necessary understand what the theological world believed Jew of the 3rd century what happened to them the just dead.

This is not a minor doctrinal question, It is the foundation without which the descent it doesn’t make sense. The predominant view In Second Temple Judaism, the period spanning from approximately the 6th century BC until the destruction of the temple in the year 70 our era and that encompasses all period of the New Testament, was that the righteous dead were in a state of expectant waiting, not in punishment, not in the fullness of the final prize, in wait, an intermediate state between death and judgment. final and the

resurrection that most forms of Jewish thought awaited the end of time This expectation is present everywhere in the literature of the period, much of the which was written in the same decades that the documents of the New Testament, Dead Sea scrolls discovered in the Cumran caves in 1947 and dated precisely in the period between approximately the year 250 BC Christ and 68 of our era contain a fragment known as 4Q521, that articulates this expectation with a specificity that is difficult to read without feeling the weight of what

implies. The text speaks of the Messiah who He comes and says this about what he will do. He will heal the wounded, he will resurrect the dead and will announce good news to the poor. The vocabulary is almost identical the one Jesus used when the disciples of John the Baptist came to ask him if he was the one to come. Matthew 11:5.

The Kumran community, writing their expectations before Jesus was born, described a messianic mission that included raising the dead, not as a secondary miracle, like a function central to the work of the Messiah. what What this means is that the idea that the Messiah would do something about the dead, that their arrival would have consequences not only for the living, but also for those who had died waiting for the promises, I was present in Jewish thought before birth of Jesus.

 It was not invented by the apostles to explain the resurrection. It was an expectation that existed and that the resurrection came to fulfill in a way that even who were waiting for her, they had not imagined completely. Abraham had received the promise of a land and a descendants as numerous as the stars.

 died without having seen any of the two completely fulfilled. Moses had received the law and had taken to the town to the edge of the promised land, but had not entered. David had received the promise of a son who would reign forever in a eternal throne. Isaiah had described a servant who would be wounded by the transgressions of the people, ground by their sins, whose punishment would bring their peace and whose wounds would bring his healing.

Isaiah 53. These were promises made throughout 1000 years of history and the people those who had been made had died with the promises still pending compliance. Where were they? The New Testament Answer distributed in several texts that They are rarely read together because they were in Sheol, in Hades, in the place of the dead, waiting, aware, knowing the promises, but still without receiving compliance.

And towards that wait, one afternoon Friday in Jerusalem, in approximately In the year 33 of our era, something came without precedents. The primary biblical text for decline is the one that has generated the most theological debate and more genuine confusion than almost any other passage in the letters from the New Testament.

 First letter of Peter, chapter 3, verses 18 to 20. Because Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the 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 spirits imprisoned, those who once disobeyed. three sentences and they are some of the most prayers dense throughout the New Testament.

The phrase quickened in spirit is crucial. The original Greek is zoooeteis of pneumati, made alive or quickened in spirit. This is not a reference to the bodily resurrection that would come Sunday. It is describing something that occurred between death and resurrection. A form of active existence and aware that Jesus maintained while his physical body remained in the tomb.

No, passive waiting, active existence. and from that state of existence spiritually active was traveled, came to somewhere and made a proclamation. The word that translates as preached It is equer in Greek. It doesn’t mean preach in the sense of uttering a persuasive sermon to convince people people to change their position.

The quer in the Greek and Roman world was the official herald, the person who He stopped in the public square and read aloud discharges the decrees of the emperor or the king Geraldo didn’t invite you to consider the decree. He announced it. The announcement was authoritative. He didn’t require your agreement to be pale.

It was a declaration of what was now true, regardless of your response. Jesus did not go to offer wings to the people a second chance salvation. He went to make a proclamation, an announcement, a declaration of something had just changed in the structure of the reality. And what had changed was this. Death had been defeated.

The power that had held back every being human who had ever lived I was now broke. The ransom had been paid. The transaction was completed. The door that had always been closed was open. The fourth chapter of the same letter of Pedro adds a dimension that almost never is read in connection with the third chapter, although they are part of the same argument. First Peter 4:6.

For this reason it has also been preached 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 was preached to the dead, not the living who were becoming dead, not as a metaphor for people who were spiritually dead, to people who had already died in past tense.

 People who in moment when Peter wrote this letter They were among the dead. The gospel was proclaimed to them. When? The connection with the previous chapter is direct. When Jesus went and preached to the imprisoned spirits. That was the moment. The three days between death and resurrection were not a parenthesis in the history of the salvation.

 It was at the time when the reach of the gospel spread to back through all history human, towards each person there was lived and died before the event that made that proclamation possible. This is what theological tradition called the descensus adferos. There is a text in the Gospel of Matthew that the majority of readers of the New Testament they read without stopping because they don’t They completely know what to do with it.

 It is too brief to be studied in depth and too extraordinary to be comfortably ignored. Matthew 27 52 to 53. And the tombs were opened and many bodies of saints who had asleep they got up. And leaving the tombs, after the resurrection of him, they entered the holy city and They appeared to many. Two verses. and If taken seriously, they describe something that has no parallel anywhere else of all sacred literature.

 The tombs were opened on Friday at the time of Jesus’ death, when the veil of the temple was torn up and down, when the earth shook and the rocks were split, the tombs were also opened and many bodies of Saints who had slept rose. But they didn’t come out on Friday. Matthew specifies after the resurrection of him.

After Sunday morning, the tombs were opened on Friday, but The bodies did not emerge until Sunday. There is a two day interval between opening and emergence. Two days during which, according to structure of Matthew’s story, something was happening, something that prepared the way for those bodies to leave the tombs and enter the holy city and they appeared to many.

What was happening in that interval? Matthew does not say it, but when it is read next to Peter’s letter, next to the image of the proclamation made to the imprisoned spirits, next to the declaration of the Apocalypse on the keys of death and Hades, the interval is no longer mysterious. It is the duration of the mission.

The three days in which Jesus came down, proclaimed and prepared for lead the first wave of the resurrection that Paul would describe more late as the harvest from which Jesus It was the first fruits. The first fruits. That first word Corinthians 15 is not decorative language. In Israel’s agricultural economy, firstfruits were the first portion of the harvest offered to God before the rest could be collected.

It was a consecration of the whole to through the part. The gesture of bringing the first fruits to the temple did not simply mean gratitude for this first fruit. It meant that the entire harvest would come after it was already from God. It was a forward-looking statement based on evidence of the present. Paul is saying that the resurrection of Jesus on Sunday morning was not an isolated event that occurred only once once in history and would never be repeated.

It was the first of a series, the beginning of something that has not yet finished. And the saints who came out of their graves on Sunday and appeared in Jerusalem They were the first visible manifestation of that the series had begun. The Greek philosopher Celsus, one of the smartest critics of early Christianity, wrote in second century a text known as The true speech, in which he attacked Christian beliefs with arguments rational.

 Celsus knew the doctrines Christians with enough detail as to attack them with precision. and between the things he pointed out were exactly the teaching about the descent to Hades. His argument was this: If Jesus had the power to rise from the dead, why did you wait three days? Why didn’t you leave the grave immediately? What were you doing during that time? Origen of Alexandria, answered Aelsus in the third century with one of the more extensive defenses and more intellectually rigorous primitive Christianity that we possess.

 and his answer to Celso’s question About three days it was direct. Jesus I wasn’t waiting at the grave, I was in Hades proclaiming victory to those who had been waiting for centuries fulfillment of divine promises. The three days were not a delay, they were the time the mission took in the world of the dead.

 The origins response It was not treated as speculation. staff, was received as the articulation of something that Christians they already knew and believed from the beginning, but what origins did the capacity have? intellectual to express more precision against the arguments of a philosopher trained in the Greek tradition. And there is something else that Origen points out in his answer, which is theologically significant and rarely appears modern sermons on resurrection.

The descent into Hades is not only the fulfillment of a mission towards dead from the past, is also the validation of the entire system promises on which rests Old Testament. If God made promises to Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and if those people died without seeing the full fulfillment of promises, then the credibility of God as promise maker depended on those promises were kept.

 Even after the death of those who they received. The descent of Jesús Alades is, among other things, God’s response to oldest and most persistent question of human religious experience. what It happens to those who believed and died before the promise was fulfilled? The answer that descent provides is that God does not abandon his promises when its recipients die.

 that the divine fidelity has no date expiration. That the fulfillment of promised arrives, even if it arrives from the other side of the threshold of death. The Eastern Christian tradition has preserved understanding of descent with an iconographic clarity that the Christian West lost greatly measured from the reform.

 The image central to Easter in Christianity Eastern Orthodox is not the empty tomb. It is not the resurrected Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden. It is the icon of the Anastasis, which is the word Greek for resurrection. and the icon the Anastasis does not show a man coming out of a tomb, shows a man standing on broken doors of Hades, extending both hands towards down, pulling Adam and Eve to take them out of the ground.

 at your feet The padlocks are destroyed and the chains that previously held those doors closed. The hinges have been torn from the walls. The doors They lie broken. And around him, in ordered rows, the dead wait righteous of the Old Testament. David with his harp, Moses with the tablets of the law, John the Baptist with his hand raised in the gesture of pointing towards another, as he did in life, all of them waiting their turn to be lifted.

This image has its roots iconographic at least in the 4th century. Its theological bases are in the writings of early theologians Christians who wrote in Greek and who They read the New Testament in their language original with the precision of people for whom Greek was a language alive, not an academic exercise.

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 from Jesus to Hades as a fact established of the Christian faith, something that belonged to the core of what the professed believers, not an addition speculative. was close enough to the apostolic generation to have had personal contact with people who knew the disciples originals.

 Irenaeus of León, writing In the second century, he described the descent as the extension of the work salvation of Christ to all dimensions of existence, not only the living, but also the who had died before his coming. He cited both Peter’s letter and letter to the ephesians. which in turn quotes Psalm 68 and its image of the victor who He ascends and takes captives in his procession.

The language of the warrior who returns from the battle with the freed prisoners marching behind him. Tertullian at the end of the second century included the decline in what he described like the faith received from the Church, the things that didn’t need to be argued, but simply declared, because they were what the Christians had always believed.

The point is not that the authority of these ancient writers solve definitely every theological question related to descent. The point is that the idea that Jesus descended to Hades and did something there was not a medieval invention nor a development late theological. was the interpretation immediate of the first Christians who They read the same texts that we have us in the original language within the living memory of the events themselves.

There is a text in the letter to the Ephesians that introduces an image that the world ancient understood with clarity that us, with all our distance cultural, we need to rebuild. Ephesians 4:8 quotes Psalm 68:18 in this way: “Climbing on high, led captivity captive.” This image comes from the Roman ritual of triumph.

 When a Roman general returned to Rome after a campaign successful military, had the right to celebrate a triumph under certain conditions. The victory should have extended the territory of Rome. They should have died a minimum of 5,000 enemies in battle and the war should have been ended definitely. If these conditions were met, the general returned in a solemn parade that walked the streets of Rome, from the triumphal gate to the Capitol.

Behind him marched his troops and Behind the troops marched the prisoners captured, chained, displayed as visual evidence of the victory. The triumph was not simply a celebration, it was a declaration public and official that the enemy had been defeated, that those who had been captured were now under the authority of the victor, that the order that had existed before the battle no longer there was more.

 Paul applies exactly that image to what happened when Jesus ascended after the resurrection. He went up, taking captivity captive with the prisoners freed from Hades marching behind him, not as slaves of the victor in the Roman sense, but as liberated by the victor in the completely reversed sense that gospel logic produces. And the letter to the Ephesians adds a precision that makes the image even more specific.

 What does that mean that ascended, but there was also descended to the lowest parts of the land? Ephesians 4:9. The one who ascended is the same as descended. Ascension cannot be understood correctly without descent. They are the two movements of the same mission. Jesus went down to the deepest place low that exists in the cosmology of New Testament, the place of the dead.

 And then he ascended to the highest place high, at the right hand of the Father, carrying I get what I came for. There is something in this story that deserves stop carefully because it’s time directly something that anyone who has lost someone dear to him sense. The women who went to grave on sunday morning no They were waiting for the resurrection.

They went with myrrh and spices to anoint a dead body Their minds at that moment were busy with the question completely practice of who would remove the stone at the entrance to the tomb. Mark 16:3. They weren’t thinking about angels, no They were thinking about resurrection, They were thinking about how to fulfill the last duty of love that they could offer to someone they loved and who already I wasn’t there.

 And while they walked towards the grave in the cold of Sunday dawn, carrying his spices worried about the stone, what they would find was the result of three days during which something had occurred in a dimension of the completely inaccessible existence for any human witness. the grave empty was not the beginning of something, it was the sign that something was over.

The angel who sat on the removed stone said something that in a at first it may seem unnecessary, since the empty tomb was visible to anyone would approach. However, he said it, “It’s not here.” Matthew 286. Two words in Spanish, four in Greek. Oak Stein Hode. Those four words are the announcement of the end of something that had started on Friday afternoon.

 The end of the three days, the end of the descent, the end of the proclamation, the end of the interval in which tombs were open, but the bodies had not yet emerged. It is not here because it had already been completed what I had come to do and why coming out of the grave was not the return of someone who had been locked up waiting to be released.

 It was the return of someone who had entered voluntarily under the most pressure depth of human existence. there was finished his work inside her and He came out with the keys in his hand. The Apocalypse finishes articulating everything this with an amazing economy in a single statement that John records as part of the vision he received in the island of Patmos.

Jesus appears to John in an image of glory that makes him fall at his feet like dead And what Jesus says in that moment is this. Don’t be afraid. I am the first and the last and the one who I live and I was dead. And here I live forever and ever. Amen. and I have the keys to death and Hades. Revelation 1 to 18.

I was dead. He doesn’t say it to remember a trauma, he says it to explain how He got what he has now. The keys of death and Hades obtained them because entered that territory, did what came to do and left with authority that that work gave him. in the world old, the keys were not just a symbol of access, they were the symbol of authority over access.

 The one who had the keys to a city decided when its doors opened and when they closed The one who had the keys to a palace decided who could enter and who doesn’t He didn’t ask anyone’s permission. He didn’t negotiate with anyone. had the authority because he had the keys. Jesus has the keys to death and of Hades.

 He did not borrow them, obtained in three days. and the direct consequence of having them is that the ultimate affirmation of the power of death on any human being is now provisional, not definitive, subject to the authority of someone who already showed that this power can be defeated. Paul expressed it with a irony that only makes sense if something The real thing happened in those three days.

At the end of his argument about resurrection in First Corinthians 15, after building the theological case more extensive and more precise of the New Testament on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, concludes with a question addressed directly to the death itself. Where is, oh death, your stinger? Where, or grave, is your victory? First Corinthians 15:55.

This is not an empty rhetorical question. spoken from the comfort of someone who has never had to face death up close. Paul was stoned and left for dead. Shipwrecked three times. He spent nights in prisons Romans that looked nothing like the modern prisons. knew the proximity of death a way that most Believers today have not experienced.

And yet, he questioned him like this, because something had happened in those three days that changed the rules forever of the game. There is one final question that this plant route inevitably and that no doctrinal answer exhausts completely. And Jesus descended into Hades and proclaimed there his victory over death.

 what does that mean to people who They lived and died before the cross and who never had access to the gospel in the historical sense of the word? Peter’s letter does not give an answer systematically to that question, gives a statement. The gospel was preached to the dead. and leaves open the question of what happened with each one in response to that proclamation, because that is a question that belongs to the sovereignty of God, not to competence of human theology.

What it does say with a clarity that no reasonable interpretation can soften, is that the three days in the grave were not a period of inactivity, that the death of Jesus was not simply the end of a life, but the event that made something possible that no previous death had occurred, that the empty tomb of Sunday morning tomorrow was the result of what It happened in an inaccessible dimension.

for any human witness between the Friday afternoon and dawn Sunday. The perfectly folded shroud that John found in the tomb was not evidence that someone had escaped hastily. It was evidence that someone had finished what I had to do and I had left everything in order before go away and what led him to leave, what made the grave unable to hold him, It was not simply the divine power of resurrection operating in isolation, was the fact that he had completed the mission for which he had descended, who had proclaimed what he had to

proclaim, that he had obtained what he I had come to search, the keys of death and had. and When he left he brought them with him. But there’s something else that needs to be said about these three days and it is something that rational criticism of Christianity primitive could not explain satisfactorily then and that nor has he been able to explain in the 20 centuries that have passed since then.

The disciples did not expect the resurrection. This is the most counterintuitive of the entire narrative of Easter and is the one that most directly challenges any theory that propose that the resurrection was a later invention, a story made by people who wanted perpetuate the memory of a teacher that they loved.

 The people who make resurrection stories are built on expectations that already exist. they do that what happened coincides with what people expected it to happen. The disciples of Jesus in the days when followed the crucifixion they did not have no expectation of resurrection. They had exactly the opposite. Peter I was hiding out of fear.

 The two of Emmaus were moving away from Jerusalem, not approaching. Mary Magdalene went to tomb with spices for a body that He was considered dead for good. Thomas rejected the report of the others disciples with the firmness of someone who he no longer wanted to expose himself to hope frustrated If the disciples had manufactured the history of the resurrection, they would have also manufactured his own prior expectation.

 They would have built a narrative in which They were waiting for Jesus to resurrect. They would have made everything fit. what we find in the texts is exactly the opposite, a community that does not I expected what happened to him, that received with disbelief, with fear, with specific confusion of people who are faced with something that They didn’t have categories to process.

and that went from that confusion to proclaiming the resurrection in Jerusalem, in the same city where it had happened. in front of the same authorities that They had ordered the crucifixion within 50 days, 50 days between death and speech Pentecost of Peter before 3,000 people. 50 days among the man who was hiding out of fear and the man who preached in public than the one they had crucified was alive.

The only coherent explanation of that transformation that the texts offer is that the disciples had seen something that changed the frame of reference, within of which all other questions They made sense. They had not reached a conclusion intellectual, they had had a meeting, or more precisely multiple encounters with someone who had been dead and that he was now alive, that he wore the marks of the crucifixion on the hands and on the side, who ate roasted fish by the lake of Galilee, who entered rooms with closed doors,

that appeared and disappeared without following the normal rules of space and time, and that he had taught them for 40 days what his own death and resurrection meant in the light of all the Hebrew scriptures that they They had known each other since childhood, but that they had never been able to read like a unified story, pointing towards a same point.

The road to Emmaus is the most revealing of those 40 days, precisely because it describes that process of understanding from within. two disciples who walked with the weight of frustrated hope, which described Jesus in the past tense, who could not recognize it when they had it in front of them. And three hours of teaching later, starting from Moses and going all the prophets, something changed in them in a way they couldn’t articulate fully, but they could feel.

Did not our hearts burn within us while he was talking to us on the way? Luke 24:32. The heart burning, not the head convinced, heart burning. That difference between the conviction intellectual and the recognition that It comes from something deeper than argumentation is exactly the difference between know the doctrine of descent into Hades and understand what that descent means to anyone who have you ever been held back by something that he felt stronger than her.

 The fear, guilt. the weight of the accumulated years, the conviction that what one is cannot be changed because it is already too much fixed, too established, too old Jesus’ descent into Hades is not only the mission to the dead of the past. It is the most radical demonstration that there is no place enough deep, no level of existence low enough, none dark enough condition to where the one who has the keys Death and Hades cannot come.

reached the lowest level that exists and He came out with the keys. And that is true, if it describes something that really happened in those three days, it has no consequences only for the saints of the Old Testament that they expected in Hades. has consequences for anyone who at this moment feel like you are on your own level more low and wondering if anyone can get to where she is.

 The answer that the three days give to that question is the oldest answer and more specific to the New Testament. It has already arrived, it has already been in the lowest place and he didn’t go out alone. Origins of Alexandria, writing in the third century, in response to the philosopher’s criticism pagan Celsus, articulated something about the descent than any of his predecessors had formulated with such precision.

Celso had asked with logic coldness of a philosopher trained in Greek tradition, why did Jesus wait three days to resurrect? If you had the power to defeat death, why wait? What justified the interval? The original answer was this. The Three days were not a wait. They were the time it took to complete a mission It was as important as the cross itself.

And that mission could not have been accomplished without the death that preceded it, because the Access to Hades required crossing the threshold of death. Jesus could not descend to the place of the dead without die first. Death was not only price of salvation, was also the necessary passage to the place where the The next part of that salvation was be completed.

This observation of origins reframes completely the relationship between death and resurrection of Jesus. No They are two separate events where the first is the problem and the second is the solution. They are two movements of one single mission. Death opens the door to Hades.

 The mission in Hades completes it that death began. and the resurrection It is the victorious return of who He completed what he came to do. Within that framework, the shroud perfectly rolled up in the grave empty, it is not simply evidence coroner that the body was not stolen. It is the gesture of someone who finished the work, left everything in order and left because there was no longer any reason to stay The anonymous homily of Holy Saturday.

 one of the oldest liturgical texts of Eastern Christianity, whose antiquity dates back to at least the century IV. Describe that Saturday between death and the resurrection with an image that does not has an equivalent in literature Western Christian. 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 king sleeps. No the Lord has been defeated. No the Savior is dead. The King sleeps. The dream of the warrior who has gone out do what no one else could do. The dream that has the form of death. But it is not death. because who he sleeps like this he will wake up carrying with him what he went looking for.

 The homily continues imagining the words of Jesus to Adam, the first man who waited in the Hades from the beginning of history human. Wake up you who sleep and get up among the dead and Christ will enlighten you. I am your God, who became for you your son, for you and for those who love you born. Now I tell this world chained, In my name, arise, you who were sleeping.

This text is not canonical scripture, but it’s not speculation either irresponsible. It is the articulation of what the Church of the 4th century believed that it had occurred in those three days, expressed in the liturgical language that was read every holy Saturday before the vigil of the resurrection. And it is consistent, point by point, with what that Peter writes in his letter, with what that Pablo develops in First Corinthians 15, with what Matthew records in the two verses about the saints who came out of their graves on Sunday and

with what Juan includes in the statement of the Apocalypse on the keys of the death and Hades. It is not a doctrine that appears in a just text and it disappears. It is a thread that traverses the entire New Testament that the first writers of the Church sufficiently recognized clarity to include it in the creed and that the most liturgical traditions ancients of Christianity preserved carefully enough to read it every year on the quietest night of the Christian calendar.

Saturday between Friday crucifixion and Sunday resurrection, the day the king slept and in the silence of that dream did what no one else more could do. There is one last thing that this tour left open and it turns out the most honest of all we have examined. The descent of Jesus Alades is not described from the inside in no text of the New Testament.

There is no gospel of the Sabbath. there is no a first-person narration of What Jesus saw, said or did in the place of the dead. What we have are statements about the fact, references to the proclamation, implications derived from texts that describe its consequences. But the scene itself, what happened in those hours, was not witnessed by no living human being and, therefore, It was not narrated by anyone.

That silence is part of the story. Not all of God’s work in history human has been witnessed by witnesses humans. The creation of the world did not have witnesses. The moment when God formed man of the dust of the earth he had no observers. The deep sleep that fell on Adam Before the creation of Eve there was narrated by no one who was I wake up to see it.

 and the mission of Jesus in Hades for three days It was not narrated by anyone who was in a position to do so. What we have is the result. The empty tomb, the open tombs, the saints who appeared in Jerusalem, the keys of death and Hades in hands of the one who had died and was alive. and he group of people who had been locked up for fear on Friday and They were preaching in public on Sunday of Pentecost.

These results are visible, they are historical, are the kind of evidence that history can examine, question and weigh. And the question they leave open is not question what exactly happened Hades during the three days, because that question does not have an answer available to any human being in this life. The question they leave open is, what do with the statement that the one has the keys to death and Hades got them because he went down to the lowest place of existence and came back? And that question is not answered

with theology, it is answered like all questions of that depth with the life.