The King's Tomb

Please read Mark 15:42–47
 
The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is very much the forgotten day of Holy Week. In Christian tradition it is usually called either "Holy Saturday," "Easter Eve," or sometimes "Black Saturday." It is the day when the body of Jesus lay in the tomb after his burial late on the Friday afternoon and the earth-shattering events of the Sunday morning.

The Gospels tell us the tomb where Jesus was buried belonged to a wealthy and influential citizen of Jerusalem called Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. He had been a secret disciple of Jesus, yet after Jesus had died, when the other disciples fled, it is Joseph of Arimathea who "comes out" as one of Jesus' followers and he went to Pontius Pilate to take custody of the dead body. Joseph then used the tomb he had presumably purchased for his own use when the time came and laid Jesus to rest in it instead. This in itself is an extraordinary act of service and love that Joseph showed to his Saviour.

The question often asked is what happened to Jesus in between his death and resurrection while his body was in the tomb. What was going on when his body lay in the tomb? The traditional version of the Apostles' Creed says that after being "crucified, dead and buried, He descended into hell." There is no real biblical evidence for this credal statement however. Modern versions of the Creed sometimes change this to "He descended to the dead" or "to the realm of the dead" which ties in with the idea of Hades as simply the place where the dead go, rather than a place where they go to be punished as Hell (or Gehenna) suggests.

This raises the whole question of what theologians call "the intermediate state" between death and resurrection for all of us. It is too big a subject to go into in any detail here, but I think the correct view is that for us when a Christian dies their soul goes at once to a part of heaven and they are consciously in the presence of Jesus. When non-Christians die their souls go to a place usually called Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek. It is not "Hell" as we think of it, but a sort of shadowy waiting place where their souls dwell until the last judgment. Hell, whatever it is, is only entered into after the judgment at the end of time.

But what about Jesus when he died? One biblical piece of evidence is that on the cross, Jesus said the thief, "Today, you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). This would suggest that Jesus went to "Paradise" after he died. So what is Paradise? Well if we look at 2 Corinthians 12 we see that Paul calls the same place "heaven" and "paradise" so it would seem that Paradise is another word for heaven or at least a part of heaven. So after he died, Christ both in a part of heaven and in the realm of the dead, but not hell according to Scripture.

My own view, tentatively held, is that all the dead go to Hades, but part of Hades somehow overlaps with and is touched by heaven and is this place is called Paradise. Only those who are right with God can go there and they are in God's presence there. The word "paradise" comes from the Persian language and means a "walled garden" - which could mean it is both in Hades, but separated from the main part of Hades. If this is the case, then it is possible to affirm both that Christ was in Paradise while he was dead, but also that he descended to the realm of the dead or descended to Hades. He may even have been able to visit all parts of Hades, not just Paradise as 1 Peter 4:6 suggests.

But all this is not something I would be at all dogmatic about!

The important point is that Jesus was really dead, really buried, and really went to the realm where the dead go to show it. But only until the third day came...