From catholicity and covenant today:
When he died, he did not wake from a bad dream, and find he was God. He went lower yet; descended into hell, says our creed. That is, he died, and he was dead. For hell, in this formula of words, means simply this: whatever is the condition of the dead, when they have died.
And what condition is that? What is it to have died, and to be dead? If resurrection is unimaginable, how much more unimaginably unimaginable is death? Resurrection will refashion us in the stuff of glory. We shall not be flesh and blood, but we shall be ourselves, we shall be. But death, what is death? What is the tenuous thread which spans the abyss of not-being, to join our being what we were with what we shall become? This stretch, this nakedness, what is it? I do not know, but Christ knows; for he descended into hell.
From Austin's Farrer's sermon "Gates to the City" in A Celebration of Faith.
(The painting is Georges Rouault De Profundis, 1948.)
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