Day: April 7, 2012

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Vigil of Easter is most emphatically “according to thy word,” the word of prophecy and hope, the word of prayer and praise, the word of expectant excitement, and, above all else, the word of renewal and re-creation. The Vigil is all about our waiting upon the divine word, like Mary pondering the words that were spoken about the child Christ. We wait at the grave but we wait expectantly, waiting upon the word which called all things into being and now recalls everything to its truth and principle. It is by all accounts a new creation.

What we await is not about a return to Paradise. There can be no going back. No. What we await is something more, paradise plus, perhaps, for the creation as renewed and restored cannot mean the forgetting of all the folly and wickedness of the human experience, past, present and future. Indeed, the Resurrection presents to us the radical nature of our disobedience in order for us to consider the greater power of divine love. In other words, we await God’s new creative act in a spirit of anticipation, in a mode of holy expectancy. Why and how? Because of God’s word to us. We wait just as Mary waited for her time to come. We are waiting upon God in the knowledge of God that has been revealed to us.

It is not presumption but holy waiting. It is an essentially Marian attitude of faith best captured in her word, “be it unto me according to thy word.” We await expectantly as based on the witness of Scripture and the hope in God that arises from the strength and glory of ancient Israel. We await the great something new that will be wonder and delight, peace and joy abounding unto glory. Our waiting must be like Mary, a waiting that is always “according to thy word.”

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2012

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The radical nature of Mary’s word in response to God appears not only in the terrible intensity of Good Friday but also in the quiet peace of Holy Saturday. Through her word we have endeavoured to consider the creedal elements of human redemption. The crucified Christ dies and is buried. Holy Saturday reflects on the grave and death of Christ. In way, everything is at peace since all that belongs to the overcoming of all that separates God and man has been accomplished on the Cross. “It is finished,” as Jesus says in John’s account of the Passion.

But there is one further creedal element that belongs to the Passion and which is a further consequence of Mary’s ‘yes’ to God. It is the Descent into Hell. The readings on Holy Saturday take us to the grave but they also present to us this arresting idea and image of Christ “[going] and preach[ing] unto the spirits in prison,” as the Epistle reading from 1 Peter 3 puts it, and of the radical nature of “the blood of the covenant” which “will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” bringing salvation to the “prisoners of hope,” as Zechariah suggests. And as the Mattins lesson from 1 Peter 2 suggests, not only are we healed by his wounds but we are “returned unto the shepherd and bishop of our souls.” The radical nature of that returned is represented to us on this day and in ways that relate directly to Mary’s ‘yes’.

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