Easter Vigil, 2010

 “Dear friends in Christ, on this most holy night...” That is how the celebrant begins this Vigil. I must confess that, after the words, “This is my body which will be given for you...This is the cup of my blood”, they are among the most thrilling words that, as a priest, I am privileged to say.
 “Dear friends in Christ, on this most holy night...”
 In the Jewish rite of Passover, the youngest present puts the famous question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Yes, why is this night, “most holy”? Why does the Exsultet address this night as if it were a person? Why does it call it a “blessed night” (O vere beata nox)?  Why five times say, “This is the night”? Why did the early Christians fast entirely for two whole days before it? Why is there Holy Week and the 40 days to Lent to prepare for it? Why did the early Christian writer Tertullian say that this night was a good reason for thinking twice about mixed marriages: what pagan husband would allow his Christian wife out at night for such an assembly?
 “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
 Of course, we know the answer. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. And if we didn’t, the liturgy itself would speak. It’s the homilist’s task simply to remind. When, at Passover, the head of the household replies to the question of the child, he says inter alia, “the more one tells of the departure from Egypt, the more he is to be praised.” This is our departure from Egypt. This is the Passover of the Lord. This is “the most holy night when our Lord Jesus Christ passed from death to life.” This is our Exodus, when the God-man himself strides through the Red Sea of death, descends to the world of shadows, smashes open the prison doors and rises in glory, dispelling the darkness of our minds and hearts. This is our Exodus, when tonight all over the world catechumens are going down into the water of baptism, share Christ’s death and burial, and rise as children of God. This is our Exodus, when we, already baptised, recall and reaffirm our baptismal faith, and take it again and more, we hope, as the light of our life.

 But let’s, like a child, keep asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
 Perhaps, paradoxically, one starting-point would be the night itself, would be the rubric of the Missal: that the Paschal Vigil mustn’t begin before dark, and must end before dawn; that the whole of it must be kept at night. Night, tonight, is obviously important.
 So perhaps, one could reflect on night itself. One could recall the darkness over the face of the deep of Genesis 1, that darkness, that night before the creation of light, from which everything comes. One could think of the nights of lovers, mystics, artists, thinkers, creative nights. One could think of night’s healing gift of sleep, which quietens even “that monster of unrest” that we are, and recreates us. We could think of everything dark and dire in our experience of night, the doubt and uncertainty, or heightened loneliness and fear, when suffering acquires a particular intensity; that privileged time for extravagance, debauchery, cruelty, violence, exploitation; that chosen time for sin. Recently, a Cistercian abbot sent round pictures of what had happened, one night last month, to the murdered and mutilated inhabitants of three Christian villages in northern Nigeria near Jos. Frankly, I would hesitate to look at them again. One could dwell on the present “night” of the Church, felt in some countries especially, but felt by all of us surely. One could speak of the sufferings of Christians in many countries, or of the dark nights of  purification  of which St John of the Cross speaks.
 “O my beautiful night, I created you first,” God says in a poem. Created you first perhaps as a symbol of what the creation narrative puts last: ourselves. Night a symbol of us. It may seem a strange one, but I think there’s something to it. If night is pregnant with mysterious potential, aren’t we? Couldn’t a beautiful world come out of us, out of each new generation, as it came out of that first night in Genesis? And yet how often it turns into a night of tears, even terror.
 Why is this night then different from all other nights?
 Because tonight we become a setting for something other than unresolved ambivalence, than constant oscillation: hope and disappointment, joy and sorrow, life and death  - so wearying! Someone has entered humanity’s night. He has known the beauties of it: asleep in his mother’s arms, in conversation with friends, in prayer to the Father. He has known the horrors: the night of Gethsemane, and the tramp of boots come to arrest him, the night of Good Friday, and a judicially murdered blood-soaked body rushed to a tomb. Someone has entered human life, and known its joys and its sorrows, its ambivalence and the only resolution there seems to be, namely death. And suddenly tonight, in this Someone, with this Someone, we are different. He is risen! Someone has passed from death to life. Someone has entered a different world. Someone has opened another horizon. Someone has changed the ending of the sentence. Someone has altered the formula. Someone has filled the night of time with  Eternal light.
 As long as each of us lives, as long as this world continues, the oscillations and ambivalence will go on, and each of us will die. But at the same time everything is changed.  Christ is risen! And in baptism we rise with him. It is the definitive Exodus, freedom. Neither joys nor sorrows, life or death, need tyrannise us anymore. This Night puts all our other nights and days, all our experiences, into perspective. Tonight we become capable of everlasting Day, definitive Joy. Tonight we become bearers of Christ. “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph 5:14).
 Someone once gave me a text. I’ve no idea where it’s from. It’s only one sentence. “The soul of the monk is like the paschal night,” it begins. Let’s change that and say, the soul of any believer. So, “the soul of any believer is like the paschal night, because it sees Christ rising from the dead.”
 Why is this night different from every other night? Because it sees Christ rising from the dead. Why is this night different? Because as it turned into dawn, Peter looked into an empty tomb, “and went back home amazed at what had happened.” Different himself.
 It’s a happy chance that this year the Christians of East and West are keeping Easter on the same day. The Russians especially, fed von the luxuries of the Byzantine liturgy, seem to have a gift for realising this night. Let me end with a paragraph of Fr Sergius Bulgakov: “Christ is risen! During the Paschal night, when the procession..., having circled the church, stops before the closed doors, our souls experience an instant - imperceptible in time, but spiritually significant - of doubting, questioning silence: ‘Who shall roll the stone away for us...?’ And will the sepulchre be empty because Christ has risen? And when the doors are opened...and we enter the flame-glittering church accompanied by the singing of the exultant Paschal hymn, our hearts are flooded with joy, for Christ has risen from the dead. And then the Paschal miracle is accomplished in our souls. For we ‘see Christ’s Resurrection.’ ‘Our senses having been purified,’ we see ‘the shining Christ’ and ‘approach Christ who is rising from the grave like a bridegroom.’ We are then no longer conscious of where we are; time stops and we go out of ourselves... Earthly colours fade in the shining of the white Paschal light, and the soul sees only ‘the unapproachable light of the Resurrection’... The language of our world does not have words with which to express the revelation of the Paschal night, for this night is a mystery of the future age whose only expression is silence” (Churchly Joy, pp. 111-112) - “this most holy night, when Jesus Christ our Lord passed from death to life.”  May we pass too! Amen.
 
Fr Hugh O.S.B.