By Father Thomas Hopko
The Paschal icon, the icon of the victory of Christ, God’s Messiah, over death, the last enemy, in the Orthodox Church is an icon of the live, glorious Christ, in the realm of the dead, smashing the gates of Sheol, or of Hades, and releasing, and freeing, and pulling from the tombs, the whole of humanity, symbolized in the persons of Adam and Eve. In that icon, of course, there are the righteous of the Old Testament there in Sheol, those who were dead, who are delivered from the power of death by the dead Christ. When Christ tramples down death by death, He gives life to all of those in the tombs, all those who are among the dead.
There is some confusion among Christian believers, and even in some very technical, theological writings, even in recent years, about the significance, the meaning of what we would call the descent of Christ into Sheol, into Hades, into the realm of the dead. The confusion and the debate, the disputation, is about how is that to be understood? What does that really mean? What is being said there? What is happening? Of course, the Nicene Creed insists about the fact that Jesus was crucified and died and was buried. It said, “Who for us men and for our salvation came from heaven, and He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered.” That means He really suffered, it wasn’t fantasy, it wasn’t just a show, He didn’t just appear to be suffering, He really suffered. And He was buried. He was put into that sepulcher, which means He was really dead, and the Gospels are very clear about saying that He was really dead, that He was wrapped in the grave clothes, anointed by Joseph and Nicodemus.
In John’s Gospel, the women come to anoint the dead corpse. In John’s Gospel the point is really flaunted, the theological Gospel, whether or not He was dead. It speaks about breaking the legs of people to make sure they were dead, and then when they saw that He was really dead, they did not break His legs, to fulfill the prophecy that not a bone of His body shall be broken, but then they speared him, they take the spear and stick it in His side, from which comes forth the blood and the water that symbolizes the baptism and the Eucharist and the very life of the Church itself, the new Eve that is fashioned from the side of the new Adam when He is dead, hanging on the cross in the ecstasy of death.
So Christ really dies, and that is what the meaning of the icon is, and that is what the meaning of the expression, “descent into Sheol or Hades” means. Hades is the Greek term for the Hebrew word, Sheol, which simply means the realm of the dead. It means, not even realm, it means the condition of being dead. It is a way of speaking about the fact that the person is really dead. That is what it means. That is the meaning of it. It is sometimes put in terms of a place, and so even in the Paschal hymns we will sing, “In heaven and on earth and under the earth,” or the regions under the earth. The place of the dead was considered to be under the earth because they returned back to dust, they returned back to earth. They are taken from the earth, and their body corrupts, and they go back to earth.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
