Holy Saturday • Great Vigil of Easter

['preached' on the internet]

Most congregations skip from Good Friday to the Great Vigil without pausing in the morning on Holy Saturday to remember the in-between time that Jesus spent in the tomb. For those of us who do linger in that space, we find not sadness, but seeds of hope. Yes, the office is based on a combition of Morning Prayer and the Burial Rite, and we hear from the Gospel according to Matthew of how Joseph of Arimathea cared for the dead teacher. Yet….

For years, every Holy Saturday, I have read these words from an ancient homily on the holy and great Sabbath. The homily refers to the harrowing of hell when God first seeks out Adam and then turns to redeem the rest of humanity:

'Something strange is happening — there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began….

'I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth… all who are sleeping to arise.… Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.…

'Rise, let us leave this place…. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.' (1)

We, too, have spent time in great silence and stillness as we moved through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, this morning to now, the Great Vigil of Easter. We have lit the first fire of Easter, blessed the Paschal candle that will accompany the fifty days of Easter, heard the great and ancient words of the Exsultet, and remembered the story of our salvation. We have told the ancient stories, touched upon our very roots. And we have proclaimed the truth that holds it all together: Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed.

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How do we really grasp this truth? One of the ways I arrive there lies in the last sentence of that ancient homily: ‘The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.’ Put in other words, God has loved us from before all time and goes to the depths of the sea and the heights of heaven to love us (Psalm 139). God waits for us, all the while beckoning us to accept this unconditional, immeasurable and inexhaustible love.

We stand in a liminal place right now between heaven and earth. As the Exsultet says, ‘How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and we are reconciled to God.’ We will not find ourselves in quite the same place until we gather on All Saints’ Night, another time when the air becomes thin and we stand between heaven and earth. We can dare to stand in such an awesome spot because of God’s love for us, because of the fact that ‘Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.’

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The other day I bumped into a former parishioner who has long cared for the homebound and now has moved on to provide hospice care. She and I reflected on how relatively few people are comfortable being around the dying and would just assume avoid it all together, despite death being an immutable reality of life. I told her the story I heard when I trained for hospice of the clergyman who was so afraid to get near the dead that he stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted prayers upstairs to the family who were surrounding the deathbed of their parent. And I recalled how the last thing I did for a young parishioner after she died was to wrap her up in her favourite shawl and afghan someone had knit for her, help place her on the gurney and carry her out to the van that would take her body to the undertaker’s.

If it were not for my heart belief in the resurrection, I could not enter into those places of pain, sorrow and despair. Yet I know in my heart that ultimately, you and I will rise, just as Christ arose. By entering into that liminal place, understanding that few others will, I hope to carry some of the burden of those who mourn… as well as convey the Christian hope of life after death, whatever it is and however that works.

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That is well and good and probably too self aggrandising, so what about right now? Where are the resurrections in our lives?

If we stop and allow our soul to catch up with our madly running bodies, we will perceive large and small resurrections all around us…

— the obvious signs for us in the northeast — spring is well underway. The birch buds are already casting a pinkish hue to the landscape. The robins are back in force pecking at the ground. And I picked my first two daffodils yesterday, easily three weeks ahead of schedule.

— the assurance that God still loves us despite the broken relationships in our lives. We may not have been able to reconcile with the other person involved, sometimes to do so is impossible, but if we turn our hearts and even if we don’t all the way, God still loves us.

— this bright flame of the Paschal candle that can light up an entire room, that reminds us that nothing can overtake the love of God, and that that love will overcome ultimately any and all forces of sin and evil.

— our outstretched hands as we come forward week after week to receive Holy Communion, where we find Jesus again and again.

— the examples of women and men around us who take a chance on God, who do not fall into the pessimism of the world and who remind us that there are better ways to live, engage with one another and ourselves.

As we notice and pay attention to these small resurrections, we can then practise resurrection in our daily life by saying YES to God’s wonderful project of re-creation. For as Jesus Christ is the New Creation, so we are newly created, as God’s beloved daughters and sons. We have already been set free; let us find ways to live into that freedom and proclaim it to others, to say with our whole heart, soul and mind that God loves everyone, no exceptions and on this most holy night that

Alleluia, alleluia, Christ has risen.The Lord has risen indeed, alleluia, alleluia.


END NOTE

(1) The Prayer Book Office, compiled and edited by Howard Galley (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 735-37.