Day: April 20, 2019

“What mean ye by this service?”

We can only know it retroactively, after the fact, as it were. The Resurrection is the great new creation, God’s redemptive act that restores and renews our humanity and the world. The Passion and the Resurrection are cosmic events, we might say, arguing for a much more intimate and closer relationship between our humanity and the natural world than what we currently experience in our disordered world. Like creation, we can only know the Resurrection after the fact and yet that only leads to a whole new way of thinking that means seeing everything before it in a new light. In a way, the Easter Vigil is about that whole new way of thinking and seeing things. It is about a recapitulation of the past seen now in the light of the Resurrection.

The ceremonies of the Vigil are traditionally long (three hours or more!), intense, symbolic, and fully participatory. Our country vigil, as I like to call it, is a concentrated version of the Great Vigil of Easter but contains most of the same elements except for the blessing of the Font and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Like the traditional Vigils of Easter, there is the lighting of the new fire in the darkness; the blessing and lighting of the Paschal (Easter) Candle; the singing of the Exultet or Paschal Praeconium, the great proclamation of the Resurrection parts of which derive from Ambrose; the reading of some (though not all) of the ‘prophecies’ – there are up to twelve!; the renewal of our baptismal vows; and, finally, the lauds of Easter morn. All rather simple but profound.

What does it mean? It means our participation in the fruit of the Passion, the Resurrection. We re-enact sacramentally the meaning of the Resurrection as God’s great re-creative and redemptive act. Life triumphs over death; light over darkness. It cannot be the extinguishing of the past but the past now as seen in a new light, in the light of the Resurrection. The Vigil imaginatively and scripturally celebrates the passover from death to life, from darkness to light, representing the whole history of salvation. The renewal of our baptismal vows – or in the case of Bronwyn, the rehearsal of the vows she will make tomorrow morning – reminds us that the great Vigil of Easter was precisely that time when converts to the Faith, young and old, individually and by family, were baptized and confirmed by the officiating bishop. In other words, we participate and recall our incorporation into the Body of Christ.

It is precisely in the wonder and joy of the Resurrection that we have journeyed with Christ in his Passion. The Resurrection shows us the underlying principle and power at work in the Passion of Christ; it is the compassion of God and the power of the divine life which recreates and renews even out of the nothingness of our sin and evil. Yet the Vigil, too, is about our joyous participation in that work of redemption at once sacramentally through the rituals of remembrance and by sacrificial service in our life and ministry together as priest and people. The Easter Vigil is, as Augustine remarks, “the mother of all vigils” and in a double sense as being the greatest of all vigils and as bringing to birth like a mother our faith. New birth. New life. Such is the Resurrection. It is all joy. All alleluias! “Rise heart! Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise always.”

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2019

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“What mean ye by this service?”

We gather at the grave of Christ in silence. It is the quietest of times, the most peaceful day of the year in a way. All is done. “It is finished.” To be sure. All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man is accomplished on the Cross. Today marks the peace of Paradise, as it were.

And yet the readings for Holy Saturday suggest something more that belongs to the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice, to the radical nature of God’s desire to be reconciled with our humanity and world. Holy Saturday marks the creedal mystery of the Descent into Hell. What does that mean? It means the fullest possible extent of God’s desire to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity.

Drawing upon imagery from Zechariah, our readings from 1st Peter this morning point to the idea of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, in the darkness of Sheol. The work of human redemption extends far beyond our assurances about ourselves, far beyond the narrow limits of our world-view. The great icons of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy envision for us something of the great mystery of this day. Christ is depicted as drawing Adam and Eve and a train of others out of the grave, out of the pit of darkness. Such is reconciliation writ large, we might say.

At the very least, our gathering at the grave of Christ allows for the possibilities of something more. Of hope. Ultimately the reconciling grace of Christ for the whole of the world, for the whole of our humanity – such after all is its universal scope without which it is nothing – moves us to watch and wait expectantly.  It will lead us to the vigil of Easter and to the radical outcome of that reconciling love in the Resurrection. Already in John’s Gospel we are made aware of that idea and the plans taken by the Chief Priests and the Pharisees who petition Pilate for a watch and a stone. Such is the fearfulness of our humanity in the limitations of our imagination and our reason. Such too is our folly in thinking that we can ultimately contain and restrict the will and actions of God. Already in the quiet mystery of Holy Saturday, Christ, the Word and Son of the Father, shows us that his reconciling sacrifice on the Cross is always something active and alive, and something, too, which speaks to the whole of our humanity. There is, we might say, the constant doing of what is done.

We watch and wait at the borrowed tomb of Christ, the tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea. We watch and wait upon the Christ who “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius), our death. That changes everything.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2019
Matins & Ante-Communion

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