Opening the Gates

A little over a year ago, a prison chaplain was a guest minister at a church I attended. He gave his prison sermon, about the harrowing of Hell on Black Saturday, as Christ breaks open the gates, and leads out all the captive saints. They were prisoners, and the parallels with prison inmates, and the emotional appeal to them, were obvious. He used lines from the Psalms to animate his description of angels celebrating Jesus smashing open the Gates of Hell:

Psalms 24:7-10
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory.

When I first heard this sermon, I felt it it suffered from overstatement and hype. But in fact, his imagery was in the same tradition as the "cave" imagery of a previous post. Christian theology may in fact picture us all as "cave" prisoners in this world, with God as our only hope of escape. The Second Coming is all about the finalizing of that escape. This is the, "Patience and the faith of the Saints." The striking thing about Christianity is that it juxtaposes that hope of a return to Paradise over against the "primordial catastrophe" that separated us from God through the Fall. The imagery used by that minister was actually quite appropriate for a picture of the freeing of the souls of the faithful from this fallen world.