FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth

 

Good Friday

March 21, 2008

 

THE APOSTLES’ CREED:

I BELIEVE HE DESCENDED INTO HELL

 

Scripture:  Mark 8:31-36; 15:6-39

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Some years ago, at the beginning of Holy Week, the priest in charge of a Catholic church in Myrtle Beach placed his usual array of crosses, draped in black for Good Friday, out on the front lawn.

 

It wasn’t long before Father Ed received a phone call from the Better Business Bureau:  “Look preacher, we’ve been getting complaints about those crosses in your church yard.  Now, inside the church, who cares?  But out front, where everybody can see them, they are offensive.

 

The retired people don’t like them – they find them distressing, and the tourists won’t like it either.  It will be bad for business.  People come down here for vacation to get happy, not depressed.”  (From “Have a Happy Day” by William H. Willimon, The Christian Century, March 19, 1986)

 

I

 

That true story, told by Dr. Will Willimon, the former chaplain at Duke University, expresses the sentiments of many people in our contemporary society.  For them, the cross is a symbol of failure, a sign that Jesus went down in defeat and that the forces of evil beat the forces for good on that dark and desolate hill called Golgatha outside Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago.

 

Even so, it might appear that we Christians are saying the same thing when we stand to recite The Apostles’ Creed with the phrase that is the focus of our sermon today: “I believe He descended into hell.”

 

In fact, one Presbyterian I knew in a church which I served up in Pittsburgh  was so disturbed by those words, that she let me know about it going out the door after worship on a Sunday morning.  She said, “It is impossible for me to conceive that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could ever go to hell.  Jesus in hell?  I don’t know why we say it in the creed, or where it came from.  But I don’t like it, I don’t believe it, and I will never repeat it.”

 

Now, as many of you know, the Methodist Church removed those words from their version of the Creed some time ago.  And every now and then, I can see when we say the Creed that more than just a few of you delete it also.

 

Which leads us to the question: “How can we as Presbyterians who believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the world, even imagine it might be true?  How could it be that He descended into the hell of eternal damnation and separation from God?

 

Well, it’s going to take some imagination and investigation today to sort this question out.  So turn with me in your hymnals to page 14 of the aids to worship section at the beginning, and notice please that there are two versions of The Apostles’ Creed.  The first is called “traditional,” the one we use, and sure enough, it says toward the end of the third line: “was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell.”

 

Now, look at the creed below, which is called “ecumenical,” and see what it says, again toward the end of the third line: “was crucified, dead and buried; (but then it says) He descended to the dead,” which is different, isn’t it?

 

And here’s why.  The ancient Hebrew people understood the word “Sheol” to describe “the place of the dead.”  In the 139th Psalm we read:

 

          Where can I go from your Spirit?

          Or where can I flee from your presence?

          If I ascend to heaven, you are there.

          If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

                                                (Psalm 139:7-8)

 

You see, the Hebrews believed that the Spirit of God was present, not only in heaven and on earth, but also in “Sheol,” the place of the dead where everybody went when they died.  And according to the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, which is the standard commentary for our Protestant and Reformed Church, “Nowhere in the Old Testament is the abode of the dead regarded as a place of punishment or torment. The concept of an infernal hell was developed later, during the Hellenistic Period.”  (Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, page 788, “Abode of the Dead”)

 

Now that is a significant piece of information, because when The Apostles’ Creed was put together during the first five centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection, one of the many heresies which invaded the church was called Gnosticism.  “The Gnostics denied the true humanity of Christ.  They said that Jesus Christ only seemed to have a human body.” (From “A Short History of Christianity” by Martin E. Marty, page 78).  They said He lived and looked like a man, but was never flesh and blood like a man – more like a spirit or a ghost, masquerading in human form.

 

So the heretics said, when it appeared that Jesus died on the cross, it was only an apparition.  He didn’t really die.  He simply slipped away into the spiritual world from which He had come.  God only knows how those Gnostics strayed so far away from the truth, but they said that Jesus Christ was not really dead.

 

Do you see the problem?  No physical body, no real death.  No real death, no resurrection.  No resurrection, no Christian faith.  No Christian faith, no Christian Church!  And that heresy spread like a wildfire across the early church, until finally and deliberately, the church leaders wrote down what they believed in the form of creeds.

 

And when they wrote “He was crucified, dead and buried.  He descended into hell,” they were making it clear, from the original meaning of the word “Sheol,” that Jesus went to the place of the dead.  Jesus Christ, who was really human, really died.  But don’t just take the Creed’s word for it.  It’s in the Bible.

 

Three times in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus told His disciples it was going to happen.  And in our text today from Mark, chapter 8, He said The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

 

You see, Jesus knew that He was going to die, He told them so, and that is exactly what happened a long time ago on that first Good Friday.  But what difference does that make to you and to me as we confess what we believe through The Apostles’ Creed all these years later in the twenty-first century?

 

II

 

My friends, it makes all the difference in this world and in the next.  It means that Jesus Christ has been where we are and has gone where we are going.  In our joy and in our sorrow, in our laughter and in our crying, in our struggle and in our suffering, in our living and in our dying, Jesus has been there before us.  He knows what it’s like to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, because He has been there too.

 

In the Gospel of Mark, these last words are recorded from the cross as He cried out My God!  My God!  Why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34).  In that moment He identified with our suffering, pain and fear of death as we too ask the question “Why?”  But as He died, He whispered (according to the Gospel of Luke), Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit (Luke 23:46), and in that moment He showed us the way to eternal life.

 

Do you see the difference that makes in our lives today?  When those two beautiful young women from Georgia, both of them college students, were killed in Auburn and Chapel Hill by random acts of violence, all of us asked together with everyone who loved them, “Why?” “How could this happen?”  And although we may never know or find an adequate answer to those questions this side of heaven, we can know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God’s heart broke too, for He lost a Son who died so young and descended into the hell – the place of the dead.  But the peace and power of His Holy Spirit is already at work, surrounding those family members and friends with the healing and hope they need to go on instead of giving up.

 

So it was last Friday, as a tornado ripped through downtown Atlanta, destroying millions of dollars of property, dislocating the lives of thousands of people and taking the lives of a man and a woman in northwest Georgia who didn’t see it coming.

 

Gayle White, our church member and an elder here, wrote the front page article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and as all of America watched on CNN, I heard one reporter use the phrase that defies description: “An act of God.”

 

Well, that may still be the way insurance companies describe natural disasters.  But the God in whom we believe does not cause bad things to happen to people.  The Apostle Paul declared just the opposite to be true in his letter to the Romans, affirming that In everything, God works together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).

 

And we who believe that is so can know for certain that when the storms of life strike and threaten to knock us down or blow us away, God’s Son, our Savior Jesus, has promised through His Holy Spirit to walk beside us and to guide us, come what may.  Lo, I will be with you always, He said, and in the good times and in the hard times, that is a promise He will keep, even as we pray Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

 

Do you believe that today?  Mary Ann Bernard believes it, and she wrote about it with these words of faith that I discovered many years ago when I walked through the valley of the shadow of depression, and discovered, as did she and as we all can discover, that we do not walk alone.  The title of this poem for Good Friday points us toward Easter.  It’s called “Resurrection.”  Please listen:

 

“Long, long, long ago;

Way before this winter’s snow

First fell upon these weathered fields;

I used to sit and watch and feel

And dream of how the spring would be,

When through the winter’s stormy sea

She’d raise her green and growing head,

Her warmth would resurrect the dead.

 

Long before this winter’s snow

I dreamt of this day’s sunny glow

And thought somehow my pain would pass

With winter’s pain, and peace like grass

Would simply grow.  (But) The pain’s not gone.

It’s still as cold and hard and long

As lonely pain has ever been,

It cuts so deep and fear within.

 

Long before this winter’s snow

I ran from pain, looked high and low

For some fast way to get around its hurt and cold.  I’d have found,

If I had looked at what was there,

That things don’t follow fast or fair.

That life goes on, and times do change,

And grass does grow despite life’s pains.

 

Long before this winter’s snow

I thought that this day’s sunny glow,

The smiling children and growing things

And flowers bright were brought by spring.

Now, I know the sun does shine,

That children smile, and from the dark, cold, grime

A flower comes.  It groans, yet sings,

And through its pain, its peace begins.

 

-         “Resurrection” by Mary Ann Bernard

 

On this Good Friday 2008, we can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:28).  He died on the cross to save us from sin, and He descended into hell – the place of the dead.  But that is not how the story ends.  For we believe as Christians that “The worst things are never the last things” (From Dr. John Claypool), and that In everything, God works together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.  It’s Friday now…but the difference is – we know that Sunday’s coming!

 

So let’s stand up and confess what we believe as we say together The Apostles’ Creed.

 

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ His only son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.  Amen!