Day: March 30, 2024

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

The Paschal Praeconium is an exultant proclamation of the Easter mystery of Christ’s Resurrection, a treatise on the radical meaning of Holy Week and Easter, a commentary on “the passover of the Lord.” Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. He is the passover, the Lamb of God who redeems our humanity precisely through his sacrifice and death. His sacrifice and death are the means of the making known of the eternal life of God.

Our shortened ‘country’ Vigil service celebrates the triumph of life over death by concentrating the elaborate forms of the traditional Easter Vigil into its essential moments: the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle symbolic of light overcoming darkness and life over death; the Paschal Praeconium with its tremendous reflection upon the dynamics of Christian salvation in its rehearsal of some of the dramatic moments that bring us to this mystery, a few of the Scriptural prophecies that illuminate like the Paschal Candle our understanding of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows that connect us to the radical meaning of the Resurrection alive in us in our profession of faith, and the Lauds or praises of Easter morning in exultant praise of the Risen Christ. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Eucharist.

We wait in hope upon the motions of God’s love and life coming to us in the overcoming of sin and death. Here is the proclamation of the death of death and the negation of the negation; the triumph of life over death but only through the realities of sin and death. The theology of the Praeconium is clear: O felix culpa, O blessed fault. God and God alone makes out of nothing even out of the nothingness of sin and evil. For they presuppose what they then deny: God and his creation without which we are nothing and worth nothing. But God is more and seeks our good in his everlasting love and life. This is the radical meaning of the Vigil and the occasion of all our joy. It sets before us the vision of our humanity and the whole of creation as grounded in the eternal life of God which conquers all sin and evil.

The Vigil for us signals the renewal and rebirth of our lives in Christ. This is part of the meaning of Christ drawing everyone and everything to himself. The Resurrection is not some magical conjuring act but the testament to the true life which is greater than sin and death and makes out of our sin and death the means of our way and our being with God in Christ. The Paschal Praeconium concentrates the meaning of this mystery for us in our lives in the body of Christ, the true meaning of the Church universal. For us in the renewal of our baptismal vows we are recalled to the pattern of death and resurrection in us, dying daily unto sin and living to God and for one another that we may live “with him evermore in the glory of his endless life.” Christ is Risen and that changes everything for everything has been drawn back to him.

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me”

It might seem to be the exact opposite of being lifted up. Christ lies in the grave, a borrowed grave at that, it seems, (but as Alan Carmichael quips, he is only borrowing it for the weekend!). Yet, not only does the Son of man have no place to lie his head, he has no place of his own to lie his body. This is the theological counter to the tendency to collapse God into the categories and assumptions of our world and agenda. Joseph Arimathea begs the body of Jesus from Pilate and “wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb” and secured it with a rock. Done and sealed, it might seem. But what about us on this Holy Saturday? Where are we? We are to be like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waiting at the grave of Christ in mourning. Waiting for we quite don’t know what. Are we like closed tombs, dead in the face of death?

But Matthew also tells us about the fears of the chief priests and Pharisees that “his disciples might come by night and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead.” In other words, a conspiracy theory to which the Gospel already alludes and counters. It is the idea of the spiriting away of his body in order to claim the miracle of resurrection. It leads to securing the tomb and setting a watch.

But these forces set in motion for good and for ill conceal the greater motion that belongs to the quiet and peace of Holy Saturday morning. It has to do with the credal teaching of the Descent into Hell. Hidden from view and necessarily so, this is alluded to in the readings from Zechariah and from 1st Peter appointed for Mattins and Ante-Communion; today and Good Friday are the only two times when the Eucharist is not celebrated.

What is the meaning of the Descent into Hell? “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us the Epistle reading, and alludes to the story of Noah and the flood as symbolic of baptism; hence, death and life. Zechariah, too, reminds us of the covenant theme of Israel’s mission: “I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image perhaps of the Hebrew Sheol, the place of the dead. The lesson at Mattins from 1st Peter reminds us of how Christ in his suffering for us has provided us with an example but also that “by his wounds [we] have been healed and have been returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of [our] souls.”

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