By Father Thomas Hopko
We Christians believe, Orthodox Christians believe, that Christ is that Messianic King who frees us, and He frees us by dying. He liberates us. He ransoms us by the power of hell. He gave Himself, a ransom, to death, by which we were held captive, in order to release us, and that is what trampling down death by death means. So the icon of the so-called Descent into Sheol shows that Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, really died, and He entered into the condition and experienced the condition of being dead, but by experiencing the condition of being dead, being life Himself, He destroys death. He tramples down death, He annihilates death. He liberates and ransoms and frees and buys back the people who are held captive by death, captive by the power of death that has come from sin. And so, the descent of Christ into Sheol means that He really died, but being life Himself, when life dies, He destroys death, and that is what the teaching is, and that is what the Paschal message, the good news of the Gospel, is.
If anyone would say, and honestly, I do think some Christians do claim this, some pretty big-name theologians, I believe, actually teach this, but I am afraid, speaking the truth in love, we try to do that, we would have to say that they are wrong if they claim that when Jesus died He experienced the torments of hell. He did not experience any torments of any hell when He died, and in some sense there even was not any hell. First of all, hell is the torment from the presence of the glory and the beauty and the truth of God for people who do not want it.
How could He who is life and truth and glory, Himself, suffer torment? Was He being tormented by the presence of Himself? It is completely senseless. It does not make any sense whatsoever, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could suffer the torments of hell. No. But He could die. He could enter into the realm of the dead in order to destroy it. But even the righteous dead, like the prophets and Moses and John the Baptist, were not being tormented in Sheol. They were caught by death, but they were not being tormented. There was no punishment to them, there was no torment, no agony, because the torment and the agony of Gehenna, of hell, is the torment of clinging to evils and loving death more than life, and loving evil more than good, and loving darkness more than light. That is what torments you.
And that is why, I believe, we Orthodox Christians would claim that Christ’s presence, His Parousia, in the realm of the dead when He is crucified, and then at His coming at the end of the age in glory, when all the tombs will be opened, and by the way in the Gospel the claim is that when Jesus enters into the realm of the dead and dies and tramples down death by death, the righteous already somehow experience the resurrection. In Matthew’s Gospel it says very clearly that on the Pascha morning, the first day of the week, the day of the Lord’s resurrection, many of the saints arose and they were seen walking around the holy city of Jerusalem. This was in St. Matthew’s Gospel.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades
