Dr. Tom Williams

There are two things.

Thank you, Steve.

And it's good to be with you on this very, very holy day.

There are two traditions that go way back.

One that goes back furthest is the one you just mentioned, the idea of Christ's descent into hell.

It's a hell that's a little different than the way we understand hell today in the sense that he went to

lead out the souls of the just who had died before his coming.

It's a basic Christian belief that up till Christ redeemed the world, up to the time of his suffering on the cross, all those good and holy prophets, men and women of God who had lived since the time of Adam, since the fall of Adam and Eve,

They had not been able to go to heaven.

Heaven had not been opened to them.

A savior was needed.

And the traditional understanding of that was that they were in hell, hell not as in condemned for all time, the way we think of hell as having been judged and found unworthy.

But hell, more like our understanding of limbo, the old traditional sense of kind of in a waiting place or in a place of the dead, a Gehenna-like place.

And that Jesus goes, and there's a beautiful homily from the second century, one of the earliest Christian texts we possess outside of biblical texts, where the author describes Jesus talking to Adam,

and his conversation with him, because he is the new Adam, and inviting him to stand up and to take his rightful place.

And then all these crowds, the multitude of the just who lived in times before Christ, rejoicing in the salvation that has finally come to them, that they are now able to enter heaven.

Well, unfortunately, Steve, I think you know that answer better than I do.

It's this kind of sunny, feel-good form of Christianity and Catholicism that is so prevalent in our day.

We only want to talk about the nice, fuzzy-feeling kind of stories and the parables and the sheep and the things that make us feel good.

It's not only Jesus' descent into hell that we don't talk about on Holy Saturday.