Earthly life ends
with the death of the body. The soul preserves its existence after bodily death
also, but its condition after death, according to the word of God and the
teaching of the Holy Fathers of the Church, is diverse. Until the coming to
earth of the Son of God, and until His Resurrection from the dead, the souls of
the dead were in a condition of rejection, being far away from God, in
darkness, in hell, in the underworld (the Hebrew "Sheol," Genesis
37:35), Septuagint). To be in hell was like spiritual death, as is expressed in
the words of the Old Testament Psalm, "In hades who will confess
Thee?" (Psalm 6:6).
In hell there were imprisoned also the souls of the
Old Testament righteous ones. These righteous ones lived on earth with faith in
the coming Savior, as the Apostle Paul explains in the eleventh chapter of his
Epistle to the Hebrews, and after death they languished in expectation of their
redemption and deliverance. Thus it continued until the Resurrection of Christ,
until the coming of the New Testament: "And these all, having obtained a
good report through faith, received not the promise, God having provided some
better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect"
(Hebrews 11:39-40). Our deliverance was also their deliverance.
Christ, after His
death on the Cross, descended in His soul and in His Divinity into hell, at the
same time that His body remained in the grave. He preached salvation to the
captives of hell and brought up from there all the Old Testament righteous ones
into the bright mansions of the Kingdom of Heaven. Concerning this raising up
of the righteous ones from hell, we read in the Epistle of St. Peter: "For
Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might
bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit;
by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison" (I Peter
3:18-19). And in the same place we read further: "For this cause was the
Gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according
to men in flesh, but live according to God in the spirit" (I Peter 4:6).
Saint Paul speaks of the same thing: quoting the verse of the Psalm, "When
He ascended up on high, He lead captivity captive, and gave gifts unto
men," the Apostle continues: "Now that He ascended, what is it but
that He also descended firs into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended
is the same also that ascended up far above all the heavens, that He might fill
all things" (Ephesians 4:8-10).
To use the words
of Saint John Chrysostom, "Hell was taken captive by the Lord Who
descended into it. It was laid waste, it was mocked, it was put to death, it
was overthrown, it was bound" (Homily on Pascha).
With the
destruction of the bolts of hell, that is, the inescapability of hell, the
power of death also was annihilated. First of all, death for righteous men
became only a transition from the world below to the world above, to a better
life, to life in the light of the Kingdom of God; secondly, bodily death itself
became only a temporary phenomenon, for by the Resurrection of Christ the way
to the General Resurrection was opened to us.
"Now is
Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that
slept" (I Corinthians 15:20). The Resurrection of Christ is the pledge of
our resurrection: "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive; but every man in his own order: Christ the first-fruits: afterward
they that are in Christ's at His coming" (I Corinthians 15:22-23). After
this, death will be utterly annihilated. "The last enemy that shall be
destroyed is death" (I Corinthians 15:26).
The troparion
(hymn) of Holy Pascha proclaims to us with special joy the victory over hell
and death: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
and on those in the tombs bestowing life, "Christ ascended up far above
all heavens, that He might fill all things" (Ephesians 4:10).
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου