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Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment of a series on the Apostles’ Creed. Rev. Campbell Markham is a Presbyterian minister in Perth, Australia.
Les Misérables is Victor Hugo’s unforgettable portrait of the agony of life in mid-nineteenth-century France. It is just about my favorite novel.
Hugo’s saddest character is Fantine. Seduced, pregnant, and then abandoned to care for her daughter Cosette alone, her destitution proceeds through five awful stages.
First, she is fired from her work at the glass factory, her income gone. Next, she is forced to shear her long auburn hair, sold to a wigmaker. When those funds run dry, she sells her two front teeth to a cruel mountebank. Then comes the utter degradation of street prostitution. Finally, knocked down and left lying in the snow, her lungs fail.
Fantine gives up her hair, her beautiful visage, her dignity, and her life for the sake of her daughter. In her sacrifice she echoes, faintly, recognizably, Jesus Christ:
Article Four: “[Jesus] suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell.”
Having established Jesus on heaven’s highest throne as God’s only begotten Son, our Lord and God, having established his divine conception and birth of the virgin Mary, the Creed recounts his suffering in five devastating phrases:
He suffered under Pontius Pilate. Though Jesus gave his Father perfect honor and obedience, he was falsely accused of blasphemy in a kangaroo court before Pilate, Roman governor of Jerusalem. And though Pilate found Jesus innocent, in a cowardly capitulation to the Pharisees’ demands he had him scourged and condemned him to death (Matt. 27:11-26).
He was crucified. Crucifixion was the most agonizing, protracted, and shameful form of execution in the Roman Empire. Hence the Latin excruciare (ex + crux, “from the cross”). Moreover, Scripture taught that a crucified man was under the Lord’s curse: “For a hanged man is cursed by God” (Deut. 21:23). Jesus bore God’s curse upon creation because of humanity’s sin (Genesis 3:16-19).
He died. On Good Friday, at three in the afternoon, after crying out with a loud voice, “Jesus yielded up his spirit” (Matt. 27:50). The white-hot flame of the human nature of the Creator of light and life was extinguished. A spear was plunged into his heart to make sure of it. Death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). Jesus received these wages in full.
He was buried. The burial of a human body, the consignment of what was once warm, vigorous, and breathing to cold and lonely decomposition under the soil is the final distressing consequence of sin: “They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them” (Job 21:26). Burial is true humiliation which means, literally, “to be joined to the humus,” the soil.
Finally, he descended to the dead. The agony of crucifixion, the torture of every breath wrenched from a body suspended by iron nails through hands and feet, was the least of Jesus’ suffering. Far, far worse was separation from his Father, from the source of light, life, love, riches, and joy. Hear his torment in his final words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
In five descending steps, each a horror, Jesus Christ drank the cup of human suffering to its last bitter dregs.
We should weep for shame that glory and innocence and Love Himself suffered thus.
And we should weep tears of relief and joy, for he died, was buried, and suffered the pains of hell in our stead. He drank the bitter cup that we deserved to drink.
As the great prophet Isaiah foresaw,
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed. (Isa. 53:5)
Whoever says, “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was crucified and cursed, who died, who was buried and humiliated, and who descended into hell and so suffered the hell that I deserved to suffer,” will be saved from the grave and hell to enjoy life forever and ever with him.
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I Believe in Jesus Christ, His Only Begotten Son, Our Lord — The Apostles' Creed, Article of Faith 2
Campbell Markham has been a pastor in the Australian Presbyterian Church for over twenty-two years and lives in Perth, Western Australia. He blogs at Campbell Markham: Thoughts and Letters.
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