Hope is a wonderful thing. It sustains us through disaster, grief and disappointment. It inspires change and enables faith to survive through the most appalling circumstances. The three greatest virtues says the apostle Paul are faith, hope and love. And his hope was very firmly based on the resurrection of Jesus. Paul was confident that because his life was inextricably interconnected with Christ's he too would share in a resurrection like Christ's. But that hope was not new to Paul (or Jesus). It was grounded in the ancient Hebrew bible, in passages in Daniel, Ezekiel and Isaiah, where the prophets offered hope to an exiled and oppressed people familiar with death and destruction, that God would, in the end, conquer death and lead them and all the righteous who had died to new life. God came to be seen not only as the God who blessed the righteous in the present, in this life, but as the God who could (and would) revive even the dead, saving bodies as well as minds and hearts and communities. In this post I examine the hope expressed in the remarkable passage sometimes referred to as the Little Apocalypse of Isaiah, where the prophet offers a profound understanding of God's victory over death and where we read one of the most powerful affirmations of resurrection hope in the bible. The reason a belief in resurrection is so important (as distinct from a belief in the immortality of the soul) is that without it, death remains the powerful constant of human life. To emphasise our escape from our bodies into a disembodied state of bliss "in heaven" is to say that death has the final word on bodily life. We have escaped, but we haven't triumphed over death. Death finally got to us - it stopped our lungs from taking in air, our hearts beating and our brains functioning and our eyes seeing etc etc. But we somehow "got away" in some reduced form, to a place where none of those things (hearts, lungs, brains, eyes) matter anymore. If we believe, as Plato did, that the body is a source of trouble and pain, then we might well feel content that death takes away embodied life, as long as it leaves us with our "souls". But if, as the people who put together the Hebrew bible believed (who had no notion of a 'soul'), without the body there is no meaningful human life, then death's continuing power over human bodily existence very much matters. For them, for God to fulfill his great promise to give "life" to his people, meant that at some point, God would have to destroy death itself.
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In Matthew 16.18 Jesus tells Peter that "the gates of hell will not prevail" against the rock that is the church. Many of us imagine that what Jesus meant was that the forces of hell (i.e. the devil and his demonic hordes) will never be able to overcome the church. The devil and his demons will try but the rock-like church will withstand their onslaught. The problem with this interpretation is that the word translated as 'hell' in the King James Version is the greek word Hades, which meant simply the land of the dead. In this light his statement seems rather odd. Is Jesus saying that the dead will not be able to destroy the church? The statement makes more sense when we realise that usually gates don't move. They are normally to be found in a fixed spot keeping people out, or in. So, Jesus is saying that the gates of death's kingdom will not be able to withstand the onslaught of the church! Jesus is not painting a picture of his church under siege, but rather of the church triumphant, breaking down the doors of death and proclaiming the hope of resurrection to those within. However much the church might enjoy living under a siege mentality, the reality is that the church is invested with great power, the power of the gospel to utterly transform the landscape of human existence. If we can rid ourselves of the unbiblical and medieval notions of 'hell' and understand what Jesus really meant the church might reclaim it's confidence in the power of Christ's resurrection to overthrow the reign of death with all its terror, despair and hopelessness. "So, when people read or heard Jesus telling Peter that to him and the church has been given dominion over the gates of Hades, they would have had a clear understanding of what Jesus meant. Now, the eschatological fulfillment had arrived. These were the last days, the days of the defeat of death, the end of the darkness which had become the paramount enemy of God and of his purpose of life. It is not a text about Satan, the powers of evil or "spiritual conflict". It is not a text about a place called hell. It is a text about resurrection, triumph and the gates of death/Hades being burst open. It is a text about the hope for a world in which there is no more mourning and no more tears." |
Archives
April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
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