For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him. (1 Peter 3:18-22)

Dear Friends,

If this passage gives you vertigo—me, too. But I keep returning to the idea that in Christ, the boundaries that define our sense of the world—boundaries between past and present, material and spiritual, personal and cosmic—seem to dissolve.

The sacrament of water somehow reflects, refracts, and fulfills the deliverance of humanity from global cataclysm. The death and resurrection of Jesus mocks imperial power in first-century Palestine, while beyond time and space, the crucified Christ casts down the gates of hell. The son of man sits enthroned at God’s right hand with all the heavenly powers made subject to him…

What do we do with this?

"It's a metaphor!" I've said.

"It's a myth!" I've said.

"It might not have 'really happened', but it's 'true'," I've said with a wink and more than a whiff of desperation (as though God’s Truth were somehow divisible from His Being).

What an etiolated and deeply unsatisfying faith.

What is not unsatisfying and what I think Peter suggests is a world where Christ is the immovable center, the fullness of Being, all things created through him and for him. Christ—not a symbol of some other thing, but the very thing itself--the sure foundation, the Alpha and Omega, the Word that will not return empty.

So back in the 1990s when I was still watching DuckTales after school and eating all the Fruit Roll-ups, a guy named Peter Howson went to Bosnia. He saw things there that nobody should see, started drinking, became a prisoner of addiction and depression, and was lost—until Christ found him.

Then he created a series of artworks on “The Harrowing of Hell.” This subject is common enough in Christian art, but Howson's paintings are a paradox.

On the one hand, they seem so clearly personal. They testify to something real inside him, something only Christ could free him from.

And yet, when I see these paintings, even though I’ve never been to war, even though I’ve never struggled with addiction or depression, I can't help but get it. However dimly, I know that place too, and I shudder.

But Christ has been there! Praise be to God! Beyond the limits of our understanding, Christ is there. He ministers to the dead.

In Christ,

—Douglas

Douglas Hickey