“What’s that all about?” she asked, incredulously. Embarrassed by his wife’s reaction, the minister glanced at me nervously, and then back at his wife, and said, “Why yes, dear. You know about that, of course. It’s mentioned in one of the Epistles of Peter.”
Ah! If looks could kill, the minister would have been charged with homicide! Talk about awkward moments. It became obvious that the teaching about our Saviour’s descent to Sheol, the place of the dead, is not a prominent feature in Protestant Sunday schools. Yet it is clearly cited in the New Testament:
For Christ also hath once suffered for our sins. He, the just, suffered for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. In the body, He was put to death; in the spirit, He was brought to life. And in the spirit He went and preached to the spirits that were imprisoned, who formerly had not obeyed…. (I Peter 3:18-20)
Furthermore, this event is also clearly prophesied in the Old Testament. In the Church’s services, one prominent element is the “Polyeleos” of Matins. One portion of the Polyeleos is a selection of verses from the Psalms of the Prophet David appropriate for each major feast. For the Feast of Thomas Sunday, the Resurrection of Christ is the major event being celebrated, of course, and these are some of the Psalmic verses that we hear in the Polyeleos:
As for them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
Fettered with beggary and iron.
They cried unto the Lord in their affliction.
And out of their distresses He saved them.
And He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death.
For He shattered the gates of brass.
And brake the bars of iron.
And He delivered them from their corruption.
And their bonds He brake asunder.
To hear the groaning of them that be in fetters.
To loose the sons of the slain.
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