Day: April 19, 2025

Easter Vigil: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Our little country Vigil, as I like to think of it, is a very truncated and shortened form of the much more complex and dramatic service of the Easter Vigil. Our service consists of the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Exsultet or Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, that is centuries old and sometimes attributed to Augustine, a reading of some of the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Testament interspersed with Scriptural canticles, the renewal of Baptismal vows, and ends with the Lauds of Easter morn.

At the heart of the Exsultet is the theological concept of Felix Culpa, ‘O happy fault.’ It highlights the profound idea that redemption is the far greater act of God than even creation because it signals the renewal and rebirth of our humanity and our world as accomplished by Christ’s sacrifice. It proclaims the potent idea that God and God alone can make something good and wonderful out of our sin and evil; hence O felix culpa.

At the Vigil we wait upon the motions of God coming to us as life and light that overcomes the darkness of death and evil. The signal note is joy and exultation at the new creation of our world and of ourselves as restored to fellowship with God. The Vigil celebrates the new and radical idea of Resurrection which changes death from being an end or terminus to death as a means or way, a transitus, as the gate or door through which we pass to something more and greater, everlasting life. It is not a renunciation of the past of sin and sorrow, of evil and death, but its radical transformation into grace and life, the grace and life which God seeks for our humanity. And if the Resurrection changes death, it also changes how we think about everything, about life and suffering, about good and evil. In every way it is about new life. The past is not eclipsed but transformed and so too for ourselves. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” on the things of God made manifest in the pageant of the Passion that issues in the parade of joy at Easter.

The Vigil teaches us that the forgiveness for which Christ prays on the Cross belongs to the essential life of God upon which all our thinking and being depends. As Joseph says to his brothers who had sought his life: “you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” Forgiveness leads to joy and gladness in the greater knowledge of God’s knowing love for our humanity. It leads to the Alleluias of Easter.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry

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Holy Saturday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Christ’s first word from the Cross in Luke’s Account of the Passion and in what has become the classical ordering of the Seven Last Words of the Crucified has carried us throughout Holy Week. It brought us to the Cross and now carries us to the tomb of Christ.

There is a wonderful silence and a sense of peacefulness to Holy Saturday, especially after all of the confusion, noise, and chaos of Good Friday. It suggests a kind of purgation of all of the disorders of our passions. We have had our way with God in seeking to annihilate him from the very reality of our lives, not understanding that he is the reality. Truly, we know not what we do. The peace and silence of Holy Saturday belong to our reflections on the Passion and to a deeper understanding of the divine forgiveness of the Cross. It reveals something more than what we think we know about life and death.

The Scriptural readings are profound. They point us inescapably to the creedal doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell which is really but the further extension of the forgiveness of sins and to what belongs to human redemption. Christ, we are told by way of images from Zechariah and 1 Peter goes and preaches to the souls in prison. This suggests the importance of the idea of coming to know things more fully which were not fully known before. What the Descent into Hell signals is the furthest possible extent of the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity: past, present, and to come, we might say. As such we are being drawn more completely into the life of the Trinity, into the essential life of God which overcomes all death, all sin and all evil.

The doctrinal idea is captured in the Icon of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ as drawing Adam and Eve out of the tomb, out of the place of death, Sheol, Hades, Hell. That image along with the Scriptures speaks to the radical idea of our being restored to the image of God which is the truth of our being. The image of God, the image of Christ, the image of the Trinity are all the same in a way and speak to the ultimate end or purpose of our humanity as found in the life of God.

On Holy Saturday we come to the tomb of Jesus. We come to honour the dead, to pay our respects to those who have died but especially to honour the one who has died for us. But our waiting at the tomb in a spirit of respect and honour already signals that our humanity is about more than death. We are more than our bodies, though not less, and as such we are more than our deaths as well. From that perspective our waiting at the tomb on Holy Saturday morning segues into the Vigil of Easter Eve, our waiting upon God’s new creation, the Resurrection which is simply, if I can put it that way, testament to what we both know and do not know. “As dying, we live,” Paul says. We have yet to learn that life is greater than death and even arises out of death.

But such is the point of our text about the forgiveness of God in Christ’s Passion and Death. It ushers us into an understanding of things we do not fully comprehend. Forgiveness is infinite in its extent. It is life in the midst of death.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2025

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