Day: April 3, 2021

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Our text has carried us throughout Holy Week and brings us to this moment, to the wonder and mystery of the great Vigil of Easter. The Praeconium in its words and music captures the mystery of Easter. “This is the night.” This ancient prayer and hymn gathers up the rich imagery of the Exodus and the Passover and focuses it on the meaning of Christ’s Passion. What is that meaning? It is actually Resurrection.

The new fire, the blessing of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Praeconium, the readings of the prophecies of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows, all of these things belong to the sense of joy and life. Christ is Risen, we proclaim. Life is all alleluia.

It is not an add-on to the dismal drudge and trudge of Holy Week. It is its underlying truth. We can only contemplate the Passion through the Resurrection. And yet the Resurrection is meaningless without our contemplation of the Passion. The Vigil service is powerfully moving even in this simplified country service, shortened yet comprehensive of all of the elements  except communion that belong to the Easter Vigil in its more elaborate forms.

God is life essential. Easter is about our life with God in and through all and every trial and circumstance of human experience. The great meaning of Easter is the radical nature of God’s life made our life in its fullness. “I am come,” Jesus says, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” That more abundant life is the meaning of the Resurrection.

The great joy and wonder of the Vigil is the dynamic of that new and abundant life arising out of the forms of death and darkness. It is dramatic but the drama is the drama of dogma, the drama of redemption in the ways in which God gathers us to himself in his abundant life. The sacrifices of God turn out to be more than a broken spirit. That something more is the abundant life of God accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice and the way in which that life lives in us. Easter is about joy in the midst of sorrow even as Holy Week was about sorrow in the midst of joy. The two are interrelated and intrinsic to each other as the essential form of our participation in the endless life of God.

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia. The Lord is risen, indeed.

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2021

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

There is a sombre and holy quiet to Holy Saturday, a sense of peace and calm after the storms and chaos of the Passion. And yet we are and must be broken-hearted. Such will be the deep meaning of all of the comings of the disciples and, especially Mary Magdalene, to the tomb of Christ. We meet in the sombre quiet of Holy Saturday as mourners, meeting at the tomb of Christ.

All is done and finished. Consummatum est, as John has Christ say on the Cross. It is completed and finished. What is? All that belongs to human redemption. So then what is the meaning of this day? The readings for Matins and Ante-Communion make the theological point clear. Holy Saturday celebrates the fullest possible meaning of the concept of redemption. It highlights the idea of the radical redemption of all creation, of God drawing back to himself the whole of our broken-hearted humanity. Such is the meaning of the credal doctrine of Christ’s descending into hell, into the place of the dead; the Greek Hades, the Jewish Sheol, the Christian Hell.

This, too, reminds us of what belongs to the truth of human agency. Christ goes and preaches to the souls in prison. Our humanity is essentially rational. We are not utterly passive in the matters of redemption. We are meant to be engaged with Christ in the work of human redemption. It happens, after all, in his humanity, in what “he has now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us,” as Hooker puts it (Lawes, V. LI.3). What is on view this day are the deeper mysteries of human redemption. It is captured best in the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy which depict Christ drawing Adam and Eve out of the grave. This symbolizes the radical nature of redemption. God seeks to be reconciled with the whole of sinful humanity, past, present, and future.

The quiet peacefulness of Holy Saturday has a paradisal quality to it but it marks only a moment, a transition to something greater than paradise. The Garden of Eden was only a starting point not the endpoint of creation. We meet as mourners but in the awareness of something greater in Christ’s descent into Hell. Our meeting as mourners will then turn to waiting and watching for something even greater, the greater mystery of undying divine life which makes resurrection out of our deaths. We will watch and wait.

In a way, this is the truth of human agency. It is about our watching and waiting upon God. That is the highest activity of our humanity, the activity of contemplation. It means to contemplate the extraordinary goodness of God. We do so as the broken-hearted on this quiet morning. There is a sense of peace, the peace that passes human knowing, the peace of God which reconciles all things to himself. Such is the radical peace of God, the peace which passeth all understanding. Such is the peace which speaks to the broken-hearted.

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2021

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