The Victory of Hope

If you were asked to picture Easter morning, what would you see?

For many of us, the image is familiar: a single figure – Christ – rising from the tomb. Perhaps he holds a banner, perhaps light breaks behind him, perhaps the guards fall away in astonishment (think of Piero della Francesca’s famous depiction of this in San Sepolcro in Umbria). It is a powerful image and it has shaped Western Christian imagination for centuries.

But it is not the only way of seeing Easter. In fact, across much of the Christian world, it is not even the primary one.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Easter is almost never depicted as a solitary moment. Instead, the traditional image is known as the Anastasis – the ‘Rising Up.’ And what we see there is something quite different.

Christ stands not beside an open tomb, but over the broken gates of Hades – the realm of the dead. Beneath his feet lie shattered doors and scattered chains, symbols of death undone. And Christ is not alone. He is surrounded by a great company: kings, prophets, and the faithful of Israel. Most strikingly of all, he is often seen grasping two figures by the wrists – Adam and Eve – and pulling them up out of their graves.

It is a dramatic and deeply moving image. Easter, here, is not simply about Jesus rising. It is about humanity being raised in him.

This difference is not just artistic; it is theological. The Eastern tradition holds fast to an ancient conviction: that in his death, Christ descends to the dead – not to suffer, but to liberate. The New Testament hints at this mystery when it speaks of Christ preaching ‘to the spirits in prison’ (1 Peter 3:19). The early Church proclaimed it boldly: that Christ has broken open the gates of death and led humanity out into life.

That is why the Orthodox Easter liturgy can sound almost defiant: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

It also helps us recover a distinction we have often lost. The ancient word used in the Creed is not quite “hell” as we might imagine it – a place of eternal punishment – but Hades: the shadowy realm of the dead, where all went, righteous and unrighteous alike. When we say that Christ “descended into hell” in the Apostle’s Creed we are really saying that there is no depth of human lostness, no place of abandonment, into which he has not gone.

And more than that: no place from which he cannot bring us out.

Perhaps, then, the Eastern image offers us a gentle correction. We are used to thinking of salvation in rather individual terms – my faith, my redemption, my relationship with God. But Easter, in this vision, is irreducibly communal. Christ does not rise alone. He takes Adam and Eve – representing all humanity – with him. His victory is not private, but shared.

There is something profoundly hopeful in that.

It means that Easter is not simply about what happens to Jesus, nor even only about what might happen to us one day. It is about what has already begun for the whole human race. The doors of death have been broken. The grave is no longer a sealed place. Christ has gone ahead of us not to leave us behind, but to take us with him.

So perhaps this Easter, alongside the familiar image of the risen Christ, we might hold onto this one as well: Christ standing in the darkness, reaching out his hands, drawing a broken and violent humanity into the light.

And in that gesture, we might recognise something of our own story, not least when we feel we are walking in the ‘valley of the shadow’ – held, lifted, and never alone.

Fr Daniel