The Creed tells us that after Jesus died and before His resurrection, He descended to the dead.
What do you think is meant by this?
"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" (1 Pt. 3:18-19).
Here it explains what is meant by that. Because we live in a temporal world, our actions are subject to that and so those who have died since Christ's redemptive sacrifice have their judgment at the time of their death, but those who died prior to that were maintained in the place of the dead which would be in Hebrew, Sheol and in Greek Hades which would later be understood, after the Resurrection, as Purgatory. This is the place where those who died waited for Christ to descend and proclaim the Gospel in order that they may believe. This is different than in some translations of the Creed which declare that Jesus descended into hell; that is not accurate. That is the place we hear of in Scripture referred to as Gehenna and Greek as Tartarus, which we know as hell, the place of the damned, those who have rejected the Gospel; rejected God.
This is also alluded to in the Gospel of Matthew at the death of Jesus: "And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs were also opened, and many of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many" (Mt. 27: 51-53). Here it says, "the saints who had fallen asleep" suggesting that the Gospel was indeed preached to the dead and received by those who were raised, who could be rightly called saints since their own resurrections showed that they were indeed sanctified.
Thanks for pointing out the verses in Matthew Steve. People, I believe, let their imagination run wild and made it look like those souls were walking around Jerusalem like zombies. In olden days, I believe, the Catholic Church believed this place to be "Limbo". That teaching has been changed I think. I am not sure if we can say the souls who passed before Jesus' coming were in Purgatory. That implies none of them were worthy of directly going to Heaven. Or Jesus, when He went and preached to the dead, were there only souls that deserved to be in Purgatory?
In any case, our take away is, when we die, there is going to be a particular judgement. Then, at the time of Jesus' second coming, there is going to be a general judgement. At the time, I believe we will be judged as communities. So, I believe, any sacrifices that we do to mold our communities towards Jesus will have benefits.
