By Father Thomas Hopko
Jesus, Himself, is the very Lord from whose face the light and the glory of God shines. So the only people and creatures who experience hell, Gehenna, are those who experience the face of the Lord and hate it, and do not want it, and try to reject it, and try to flee from it. Then that face with that fire and that light becomes agony, and there is no way that Jesus experienced that agony. In fact, He is the cause of the agony. You might even say, according to the Scripture, the fire and the cause of the torment of the wicked is the very presence of Christ, Himself. That is the teaching.
So there is a sense in which you can say, there is no everlasting Gehenna until the resurrection of Christ and the judgment of the world. Until that comes, people are caught by death, they are in the condition of being dead. The righteous in anticipation are in the hands of God, somehow anticipating the glory to come, and the evil are in the pit, also in the hands of God, but they are experiencing torment from those hands, and torment from their hatred of God. Then when the Christ enters into the realm of the dead and smashes the gates of hell and raises everybody up, He raises up the whole of humanity, not just the righteous, He raises up the evil, too.
St. John says this in the fourth chapter of his Gospel. Those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. The Lord even says, “Of Myself I can do nothing. As I see, I judge.” Sometimes it says, “As I hear I judge, and My judgment is just, because I am not seeking My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me.”
So we determine whether we are in hell or not by our own belief or unbelief, by our love of love, and our love of light, and our love of truth, and our love of glory, or by our hatred of it. That has nothing to do with Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, who died for us. When He descended into Sheol and Hades, it means simply that He died, and through death, trampled down death and raised the dead, all the dead, there is no one left in the tomb, as it says. In St. John Chrysostom’s sermon on Paschal night, he said, “No one is left in the tomb. Christ is risen and life reigns.” But if you hate that life, it is hell. If you love it, it is Paradise.
So we should not say that Jesus descended into hell. We should say, accurately, that He entered into the realm of death, which in the Bible symbolism is called Sheol, or Hades, the Greek term, the realm of the dead, the condition of being dead. What the paschal icon shows us is that Jesus entered into the condition of being dead, but being the Son of God, the perfect human being, totally in communion with the Father and the divine Son, Himself, in human form, when He enters into the realm of death, death is trampled on. Death is destroyed, the gates of hell are smashed, and everyone is raised from the power of death—those who have done good, to the resurrection of everlasting life, and those who have done evil and cling to their evil without repentance, unto everlasting hell, Gehenna, being cast out by God because they desire to be cast out. They think they deserve to be in Paradise, but they will not enter through repentance, and therefore the presence of the risen Christ torments them.
This is what we believe, this is what we understand, this is what we see when we contemplate the Paschal icon. This is what we believe, that it has not to do with hell. Hell comes at the end. Hell comes in the rejection of the risen Christ. That is what it is. The evil reject Him in anticipation, while the righteous love Him in anticipation. So the resurrection of Christ for those who keep the commandments, or try to, and repent when they do not, is the gift of everlasting life. Those who reject it get what they, themselves, desire.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
