The Ultimate Sacrifice
1 Peter 3:18-4:6
July 6, 2014
Last week we had the joy of Christmas. This week we move into the agony of Good
Friday. Many people at one time or another myself included, have asked, "Why is it called
Good Friday?" Thinking about the agony that Jesus endured that day hardly seems "good."
The day, of course, is Good Friday, because of what it means for us. It means our sins
are washed away and we are forgiven. That is very good indeed. But the events of that day
themselves are anything but good. The Apostles' Creed sums up those events like this: He
"suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell."
I know, I know, our hymnal doesn't say "hell." The version we've been reciting each
week, 882, says, "he descended to the dead." The version most of us who were raised
Methodist are familiar with, 881, leaves that line out entirely. But efforts to gloss over the
ugliness present in the Creed serve only to mute the import and impact of the lengths and
depths to which Christ went in order to save humankind. The Apostles' Creed, in its
traditional form, tells us that upon being buried and before being raised, Jesus Christ
descended into hell.
The article of the Creed we're looking at this week is sort of unique. I said at the
beginning of this series that the Apostles' Creed is made up of 12 articles of faith. When you
read the Creed in the hymnal there are certainly more than 12 lines. Somewhere along the
line the church divided the Creed into 12 lines in order to line it up with the 12 apostles. To
do that, though, a couple of lines had to be joined together into one article. That's the case
with our focus for today.
"Crucified, died, and was buried" is one thing; "descended into hell" is another. The
two have been joined together because they both have to do with the events of Good Friday
and Holy Saturday, and they both have to do with the sacrifice and saving work of Jesus
Christ. And yet, these two events that happened so closely together and are so closely
related are quite different when it comes to what we can know about them and how we can
understand them.
The statement that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was
buried" is the most historically reliable statement of the entire Creed. Even from a strictly
secular, historical perspective, it is beyond doubt that this actually happened. We don't just
have the earliest Christians telling us this happened, we have non-Christian writers of the
first century telling us this happened.
A Jewish historian of the first century named Josephus wrote a history of the Jewish
people for the Romans. In it, he included the fact that a Jewish man named Jesus was
crucified while Pontius Pilate was governor of the region. Other ancient authors, such as
Tacitus and Lucian of Samosata, likewise wrote about the crucifixion of Jesus. From a
strictly historical perspective, this is the one line of the Creed that actually be proven. Jesus
"suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried."
Now, what that means for us? If it means anything for us? That is a matter of faith.
History can't answer those questions; only faith can. The New Testament provides all kinds
of guidance as to how we might understand these historical events in relation to our faith.
The Apostle Paul writes that on the cross, Christ "became a curse for us" (Galatians
3:13), and that "for our sake the one who did not know sin became sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Note in those verses the words "for us" and "for our sake."
1
Before all of this went down, Jesus had told his disciples what would happen. They
either didn't believe him or didn't understand what it was he was saying. After all, how
could the holy one, the chosen one, the Son of God, the Messiah, how could he be defeated
and killed? When it actually happened, though, they couldn't bury their heads in the sand
any longer. They had to deal with the reality that Jesus, who they believed to be the Messiah
and the son of God, had in fact been crucified, died and was buried. They had to figure out
what this reality meant.
As they reflected upon these events, and remembered what Jesus had taught them
beforehand, and revisited the prophesies of scripture which they now saw in a whole new
light, they all came to the same conclusion - these things had happened for them. These
things happened for us.
Deuteronomy 21:23 says, "Cursed is everyone who hangs upon a tree." The book of
Deuteronomy was written centuries before the horrors of crucifixion were dreamed up. But
when crucifixion did enter the world - nailing criminals to crossbeams of wood, leaving
their bodies which had usually been beaten and bloodied already, hanging naked, exposed to
the elements, until they became so dehydrated and weak that they finally collapsed and
suffocated to death - the Jewish people realized the truth of Deuteronomy 21:23. How could
anyone possibly be more accursed than to be tortures and tormented in so cruel a manner as
crucifixion? In the Jewish mind of the day, anyone who was crucified was truly cursed by
God.
Perhaps Jesus himself felt cursed by God as he hung there, dying. "My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?" he called out from the cross. Last week we saw how being
both fully human and fully divine, in Jesus God experienced everything that we humans
experience. Today we see that, hanging on the cross, God even experienced what it feels
like to be God-forsaken.
But Jesus had done nothing to deserve this. Why would Jesus, who had been perfectly
faithful all his life, receive the death of a criminal? Why would Jesus, who had never sinned,
suffer the consequences and punishment of sin? Why would Jesus, who never turned away
from God, have to experience what it is like to have God turn from him?
The answer to all of these questions is that he did it for us. He took all of human
experience, even the result of all our sins which is death and separation from God, upon
himself. Christ "became a curse for us." "For our sake the one who did not sin became sin."
Jesus became the sacrifice necessary to take away our death and restore us to life.
The Old Testament scriptures are filled with all kinds of sacrifices - sin offerings, guilt
offerings, offerings of well-being -bulls, rams, lambs, goats, birds. Atonement is a bloody
business. A little too bloody for some of us. The point of all the sacrifices is that the result
of sin is death, but that God, in spite of our sin, desires for us to have life. So God made
provision for our atonement - for the result of our sin to be wiped away and for us to be
reconciled with God.
What the first followers of Jesus realized upon his death - granted, they didn't realize it
until after the resurrection, but we're not quite there yet - they realized that the sacrifices
commanded of them in the scriptures were simply a foreshadowing of the one perfect
sacrifice that would be made by God himself.
Remember the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, but then
provided a ram for the sacrifice instead? Jesus is both the Son and the ram in the thicket.
2
Remember the blood of the lamb spread on the doors of the Hebrews in Egypt so that
the angel of death would pass over their homes? Jesus is the Paschal lamb whose blood
covers us from eternal death.
Remember the bronze serpent Moses raised in the wilderness so that the Hebrew
people who had been bitten by poisonous snakes would see it and be healed? Jesus said,
"And as Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted
up, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:14-15)
All of the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament were brought to an end in Jesus.
Those animal sacrifices had a temporary and fleeting effect. The sacrifice of Christ has an
eternal effect. When he gave up his life, the curtain in the Temple that blocked off the holy
of holies was torn in two. There is no more division between God and God's people. The
ultimate sacrifice has been made. Atonement has been accomplished once and for all.
But our faith doesn't stop there. "He descended into hell," the Apostles' Creed tells us.
The crucifixion of Jesus is the most historically verifiable line in the Creed. The descent into
hell is the most mysterious and confusing. So mysterious and confusing that some versions
of the Creed, like our 881, leave it out altogether. After all, atonement has already been
made on the cross. Why not just skip for there right to the resurrection? But the Apostles'
Creed tells us there is more to the story than what can be historically verified about Good
Friday and what the apostles witnessed on Easter Sunday. In between those two events,
Jesus "descended into hell."
What does that mean? The word used by the Creed is inferna, which means "that
which is below." Some early texts of the Creed use instead the word inferos, which means
"of the lower world."
Some have suggested that what the Creed is saying is that Jesus really and truly was
dead. When his body was placed in the grave, he was, in a sense, enclosed in the earth.
Descending to "that which is below" could be a symbolic way of referring to burial. But if
that's the case, then there really wasn't any point in adding this line to the Creed. There must
be some purpose to this line more than just coming up with another way to say that Jesus
was buried.
The purpose is to say what was going on with Jesus in that intervening time in
between the burial and the resurrection. He died and was buried, sure, but that just tells us
what happened to his body. What about his Spirit? Where did his Spirit go? There is
scriptural grounds for the claim that his Spirit did not just hover around the grave for the
weekend waiting for Sunday to come.
"Christ was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit. and it was by the
Spirit that he went to preach to the spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:18-19). "Indeed, this is the
reason the good news was also preached to the dead" (1 Peter 4:6). When the Apostles'
Creed says Jesus descended to that which is below, or to the lower world, or to the place of
the dead, it's saying more than that his body was buried. It's saying that he descended into
hell.
Now we need to recognize that we are dealing with mythological language here. I
don't mean that it's not real or true, but that the language used is mythological. Mythological
language seeks to describe spiritual realities in worldly terms. The idea of three-tiered
world, in which we live in the middle tier on a flat earth, with heaven up above us and hell
down below the ground - that mythological language. Heaven is real but it's not somewhere
up in the clouds such that if we built a tower tall enough or a rocket ship fast enough we
3
could somehow find our way there. Hell is real too, but it's not somewhere under the ground
such that if you just dug deeply enough in the right place you would eventually come across
a red creature with pointy ears, a spiked tail and a pitchfork standing in a lake of fire filled
with all the horrible people who have ever lived.
The language is mythological, but it is pointing to spiritual realities. It is "by the
Spirit" that Peter says Jesus went wherever it is he went that day. And wherever it is he went
that day, it is the place that everybody went after death.
The Old Testament most often uses the term Sheol for this realm. Sheol was
understood as a sort of nothingness, except that the spirits of the departed didn't cease to
exist. They just went into this vague, undefined nothingness where they awaited the day of
resurrection. In Greek of Jesus' day, Sheol was translated into Hades, a word that the New
Testament also uses for the realm of the dead. Hades was pictured as a dark, lower world
where the spirits of the dead lingered as shadows of their former selves, cut off from the
living and from God. Another word used by the New Testament is Gehenna. Gehenna was
originally an actual geographical place - the Valley of Hinnom - a ravine south of Jerusalem
where fiery human sacrifices had been offered in the past and which was considered cursed.
In Jesus' day, there was a garbage dump in Gehenna where fires were always kept going to
burn up the refuse that was always piling up there. When Jesus referred to the fires of
Gehenna as the destiny of the unrighteous, he was using metaphorical language that the
people of his day would have recognized to say what it will be like for those who are
eternally separated from God.
All of these - Sheol, Hades, Gehenna - are translated by the word hell. It's not a
physical place that you can find by looking in the right spot under the earth. But it is a
spiritual reality that is the consequence of sin. It is the depth of separation from God and all
the agony that goes along with that. The Bible, and the Apostles' Creed, tell us that Jesus
went even there in order to save all who would receive the Gospel.
You may have heard of the medieval doctrine known as "the harrowing of hell." A
harrow is a farm implement, similar to a rake. It's dragged through a field to pick up stones
and clods of earth and sweep a field clean. The harrowing of hell was the idea, based on the
teachings of Thomas Aquinas, that Jesus swept through hell, picking up the souls of the
righteous departed who had lived and died prior to his earthly life, people like Noah,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and David and the prophets of old. Jesus, like a harrow,
swept up all the righteous out of hell and left all of the ungodly to their eternal punishment.
That is not the picture presented by Peter in the Bible. Peter says that Jesus "went to
preach to the spirits in prison" and then he goes on to talk about those who were disobedient
in the days of Noah. They were washed away in the flood, but Christ went to present the
Gospel to them. Even for those who were so wicked that God once thought them worthy of
destruction, the atonement of the cross was offered even to them!
If that is the case - and the Bible and the Apostles' Creed both seem to say that it is then is there anyone that we can truly say is beyond the hope of God's redemption in Jesus
Christ? You can take this doctrine as literally or as metaphorically as you want to. The
important point is this - Jesus Christ doesn't give up on anyone, and there isn't any length or
depth to which Christ would not go, in this life or beyond this life, in order to bring you
back safely to God.
Christ would even go all the way to hell so that you don't have to. As a matter of fact,
he already has. Thanks be to God. Amen.
4