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Descended Into Hell

1 Peter 3:13-22, 4:1-6

May 10, 2026

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One year when we were a young married couple, Delight and I decided to go to a New Year’s party being held in an area restaurant — a party open to the public that was being heavily promoted by the radio station we listened to in those days. 

 

If I remember correctly, they were offering discounted food and beverages, a radio disk jockey playing the latest hit songs and drawings for lots of prizes, including an all-expense-paid trip to Florida for two people. That all sounded good to us, better than sitting at home and ringing in the new year by watching TV. 

 

It proved to be a fun night — good food, good music and then came the drawings for the prizes. One by one, the winning names were drawn and to no one’s surprise, neither of our names were among them. 

 

Then they came to the final prize of the night — the grand prize of a trip to Florida. They announced that there would be a special procedure to determine that winner. Two names would be drawn. Then each of those people would come forward and draw a card from a deck of playing cards. The one who cut the higher card would be the winner. 

 

Much to my shock I heard my name being called as one of the two finalists. The other person was a man who obviously was a close friend of the disk jockey since the two of them had been making jokes with each other the entire time we were there. So I wasn’t surprised to see him as a finalist. 

 

He was given the right to cut the cards first. He cut off two-thirds or more of the deck. Then, rather than than keeping the card he cut to and returning the rest, he held on to all of them. By doing so, he radically increased the odds in his favor since none of the cards he held onto were then available to me. 

 

It seemed obvious that he was trying to take an unfair advantage, so I assumed the disk jockey would tell him to return the not-chosen cards, but he didn’t do that. The disk jockey simply held out the small remainder of the deck for me to cut. I was about to object, but when I looked at the disk jockey and thought back on all their joking banter that night, it became clear that this was a rigged game. 

 

I wasn’t likely to win, so there was no point in raising an objection. I held my tongue, drew a card that proved to be lower than the other finalist’s card, and so that other finalist won. 

 

A rigged game of another kind came a few years later on a different New Year’s Eve. A Christian radio station that we were then listening to, sponsored an evening of glow-in-the-dark bowling. That event also had food, a disk jockey playing Contemporary Christian music and a dance contest. At that point, our kids were about five and two and we thought they might enjoy that. They really did, especially since the bowling alley put up bumpers in the gutters of our lane, so the kids couldn’t possibly have a gutter ball. For the record, that meant my score went up, too. 

 

In any case, when it came time for the dance contest, both of our kids took part very enthusiastically, moving with wild abandon and not a hint of self-consciousness. They were the only two non-adults in the contest and their antics were riddled with cuteness. 

 

So of course, they won. It, too, was a rigged contest, but this time it was rigged only by their ages and their lack of inhibitions. There was nothing pre-arranged about it. Their victory boiled down to their untamed naturalness in contrast to the somewhat circumscribed movements of everyone else. And it proved to be appropriate that the top prize was a stuffed animal. 

 

Today’s topic may seem like a strange one for a Mother’s Day sermon, but it comes from one of the Lectionary passages selected for this Sunday, plus it is one that regularly raises questions among Christians when they happen to come across it. 

 

We’re going to discuss 1 Peter’s assertion that Jesus “made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Although his meaning isn’t explicitly clear, the apparent implication is that in the time between Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection, he went to the realm of the dead and preached to them as well, so that they wouldn’t miss out on hearing the good news of his incarnation and his work to win us forgiveness for our sins merely due to those people having died before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. 

 

In church tradition, this account is known as the Harrowing of Hell. In modern usage, the word harrowing typically means something that is extremely distressing. But the original meaning of the word was simply a plow being used in farming to break up the soil. So the metaphorical meaning of the phrase is that Jesus was going to the dead to harvest additional souls. 

 

This passage — and an additional one in the next chapter of 1 Peter — are the source of the phrase “he descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed. When we think of the word “hell,” we think of a place of punishment for sinners after this life. Or we use it to describe terrible and painful conditions in this life. 

 

For example, we see an earthly hell when we turn on the news and watch the devastation created by the world’s latest war caused by diplomatic failures or runaway greed or self-aggrandizement written in blood and abandoned bodies and desperate refugees. Or we see the destruction caused by the latest tsunami or hurricane which leveled cities and dreams with equal demonic efficiency. 

 

Or we watch the fear rise in the eyes of an abused child when his or her tormentor comes home, only to wreak havoc in their warped little fiefdom. Many of the hells people experience in this life are like that — hidden or partially hidden — like the prisons created by addictions to alcohol or drugs or gambling or whatever. 

 

So some people believe that the phrase “he descended into hell” refers to Jesus taking upon himself the punishment that rightly belongs to each one of us for our sins. But that’s not what it really means. That misunderstanding arose due to an unfortunate translation for the Greek word used in the original Apostles’ Creed. 

 

That word actually referred to the realm of the dead, which was said to be a shadowy world where all people go after this life, regardless of whether they lived their lives as saints or sinners or the far more common mixture of the two. Examples may be seen in the Hades of ancient Greek myths or the Sheol of the Old Testament era Israel. So the main point that the authors of the Creed were trying to make with that word was the Jesus really did die on the cross. His death was not mere playacting as some people in that era were claiming. 

 

But even more than that, it means that Jesus’ triumph over death applies to all people. If Christ descended into the realm of the dead and preached there, there is literally no corner of the universe into which the message of God’s free-flowing forgiveness has not come. 

 

No one who ever lived is left without access to the story of Christ or without the offer of the salvation of God. Today’s passage is suggesting that even death can’t stop Jesus from trying to offer God’s grace to those who have died without having heard about it so that they too might live in the spirit just as Jesus does. 

 

In other words, life itself is a rigged game. You cannot possibly lose — with just one exception:  you can chose to do so. After all, God has given us all free will, so we have the right to make even outrageously bad choices like rejecting God’s forgiveness if we want to. But we can never claim that we hadn’t heard about God’s offer. 

 

As Nathan Nettleton puts it, “There is nowhere you can go, there is no hell you can descend into that is beyond the reach of the love of God in Jesus Christ. There is no pain you can know, no suffering that can afflict you that is beyond where Jesus Christ has been. There is no refugee road or sleazy alleyway that Jesus Christ will not enter to offer love and mercy and healing and freedom. That is the truth we celebrate […]”

 

In case you happen to think that that is some modern interpretation far removed from the reality of the biblical teachings, let me share a quote with you from Philo, an ancient Jewish philosopher and Bible scholar who lived in Egypt during the lifetime of Jesus. Philo wrote:   “When the righteous [person] searches for the nature of all things, he [or she] makes [their] own admirable discovery:  that everything is God’s grace. Every being in the world, and the world itself, manifests the blessings and generosity of God.”

 

To be sure, there are several places in the New Testament that talk about what the Bible calls, “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” But what exactly does that mean? Is it really a reference to a place of torment or is something else going on in that phrase? I can’t say for certain. It may mean what people think it does:  that it’s describing the agony of those who are being eternally punished. But there’s another strong possibility as well. 

 

Psalm 35:16 uses that same “gnashing of teeth” phrase, but it uses it in a totally different way than we typically think of when we read the New Testament. In the Psalm, the “gnashing of teeth” refers to the taunting and anger of the Psalmist’s enemies. Applying that idea to the New Testament, it could mean that the place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” mentioned in the New Testament phrase refers to the final destination of the enemies of God who have chosen to remove themselves from God’s eternal presence. 

 

If so, that phrase would refer to their anger and frustration at having gambled that there is no God, only to be proven wrong. If Christ successfully works to bring good news to even the dead, that is interpretation is quite possible. To quote Nathan Nettleton again, “Whatever hell is, I’m quite sure God didn’t create it. He wouldn’t have needed to. The human race has mastered the art of creating hell for itself.” That’s true in both this life and in the next. 

 

The truth is that hell is any place where people try to somehow exclude God — as if that were possible. Meanwhile, God’s forgiveness may be seen in the irresistible, transforming presence of God, which can bring new life even to our darkest human-created hells. 

 

First Peter tells us that nowhere is beyond the range of God’s life-giving touch and only those who absolutely refuse to leave can remain locked forever in their own private hell, eternally separated from God. 

 

For the rest of us, accepting God’s freely-offered forgiveness brings the joy of being wrapped eternally in the arms of the One who is love. It is finding your eternal home with the one in whose image you were created. And that’s really all we need to know. Amen. 

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Jim McCrea

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