Day: April 4, 2026

Easter Vigil: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”

The quiet silence of Holy Saturday morning gives place to the Alleluias of great rejoicing on the Eve of Easter. “This is the night, wherein heaven and earth are joined, and mankind partaketh with the Godhead,” as the Paschal Praeconium sings. We rejoice in the making known of what is hidden in the Passion, simply the life and love of God who renews and restores our broken and sinful humanity. We rejoice in the felix culpa, the blessed fault of the original sin of Adam and Eve which belongs to all the sins of our humanity and yet a blessing because it does not cancel God’s deeper will and purpose for our humanity, namely, our being partakers of his divinity. It does not mean the loss of our humanity but rather its true being as found in the all-embracing love of God who alone makes something not just out of nothing but out of the nothing of our sin and evil.

The signal note is one of joy and praise at God’s restoring the dignity of our humanity to its purpose as found in his will. Redemption is just that, our being brought back to the truth of our being. That story of human redemption is recalled in the Easter Proclamation and in the Old Testament lessons, psalms and canticles that bring us to the renewal of our baptismal vows, to our identity in Christ through his Death and Resurrection, the very story which has been re-presented to us in the symphony of the Passion that culminates in the Resurrection of Christ.

Our little country vigil, as I like to style it, highlights some of the essential features of the ancient Easter Vigil: the blessing of the Paschal candle marking the transition from the darkness of sin and death to the light and life of Christ, the singing of the Paschal Praeconium, the prophecies or lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures that belong to the Easter Mystery, the renewal of our baptismal vows as the annual rebirth of our souls in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection, and the lauds of Easter Morning. Tomorrow we will participate in the sacrament of the Altar which is always a recollection and re-presentation of Holy Week and Easter.

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Holy Saturday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The quiet and silence of Holy Saturday is in marked contrast to the noise and confusion of the Passion of Christ on the previous days of Holy Week, especially Good Friday. We have had our way in the folly of sin and evil, thinking that we could kill God. All the forces of sin and evil have spent their force. All is done.

Not just by us, but in Christ. What remains is what belongs to the special quality of Holy Saturday. That is the further and deeper contemplation of sin and love which has been our Holy Week theme. What belongs to this morning is a profound awakening to the credal doctrine of The Descent into Hell as the final chord in the Symphony of the Passion. We have done all that sin and evil can do but God is not done. Already we have seen that eternal life flows out of the side of Christ crucified and dead.

The fullest sense of that life is seen in the lessons for Holy Saturday morning that highlights the universality and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice. It is for all. His suffering gathers into itself all the forms of human suffering, past, present, and future. His death gathers all our deaths into himself. Holy Saturday recalls the peace of Paradise but in another register. It is the peace, not as the world gives, but only as God gives, a peace that comes out of all our discord and disarray, out of all our evil and what it means in terms of suffering and death. Death is our way yet God makes life out of death, out of our folly and pretense of thinking that we can control and remake the very world of which we are a part, the folly of presuming that we are God.

Holy Saturday bids us wait at the tomb of Christ and contemplate the fury and rage of ourselves and its consequences. All is done and we are left empty. All our rage and spite is past and gone but can’t simply be ignored or forgotten. But 1 Peter recalling Zechariah – yet again, for John ended his account of the Passion with Zechariah’s words about our looking upon him whom we pierced – indicates something more that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It is universal so much so that Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison, in Sheol or Hades or Hell understood not as the image of punishment but as an image of the place of the dead. He preaches to them in order to bring them to himself.

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