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The Great Vigil of Easter

"Huddled and Waiting: Not Without Us"

Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

Suppose that you have just wandered in from outside, with no idea as to what may be about to happen. You saw other people going into a large, darkened building and, on a chance impulse and with nothing much else to do, you joined them. You were handed a candle which you couldn’t light and a program which, in the gloom, you couldn’t read. You were aware of people not quite at ease, shifting in their pews, sometimes whispering, mostly in silence; aware also that, comforting as it was not to be in the big, dark building alone, this was not quite a comfortable situation. Perhaps it would have been a relief had the pews been a bit more crowded, had there been a more palpable huddling together, during a period of waiting in darkness, for possibly (as far as you knew) a very long time.

It may of course be true that one or more of you has had this experience, has come here tonight out of a sort of random curiosity. Whether that is the case or you have been to Easter Vigils too many to count, you will all – we will all – have experienced at least a bit of what I’ve just described. For that it is indeed where and how we are at the start of this service: huddled together, and waiting. Huddled together and waiting, as it might have been, with that small band of family members huddled together in the Ark, wondering whether the rain would stop while life could still be sustained. Huddled and waiting, as it might also have been, during the night when we, having escaped the Egyptian oppressors, learn that their powerful troops, horses and chariots and all, are in close pursuit. Huddled and waiting, centuries later, in the misery of captivity and exile: “by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept/ When we remembered thee, O Zion.” Huddled, or rather heaped, and waiting, in a valley full of dry bones.

The striking thing about those bones is that, as well as being very dry, they were very many in number. You have just heard what happened to them in Ezekiel’s vision: the noise of the rattling as the vivified bones came clacking together, bone upon bone; the sinews and flesh and skin knitting up and covering the bones; the animating of them through the breath, the spirit, which was the final step in their coming to life. But not just as a feat of individual resuscitation; instead, as the breath came into them, “they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.” Not a single figure – as it were, Lazarus – but, indeed, “the whole house of Israel.”

That story may seem to you thrilling, or terrifying, or just wacky – or all three. Its climax expresses in two sentences why we’re here tonight. “Thus says the LORD God: Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you home into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD when I open your graves, O my people” [Ezek. 37:12-13].

In a few minutes we shall baptize two children, and in the course of reciting the baptismal, otherwise known as the Apostles’, creed, we will repeat ancient words about Jesus which run, in our common modern translation, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead.” That latter clause expresses succinctly what tradition has called the Descent of Christ or, more vividly, the Harrowing of Hell. This is rooted biblically in one passage in the First Epistle of Peter, where the writer states the basic message of the gospel in this way:

On this basis Christian imagination has amplified and particularized. Specific worthies must, it insisted, have been made alive in that “preaching to the spirits in prison”: most obviously, those to whom God’s promises had been explicit – Abraham and Moses and David and a host of others. And of course our first parents. Possibly the most unforgettable depiction of Christ’s deliverance of the saved is the fresco in the Church of Christ in Chora, in what is now Istanbul, where it is known as Kariye Djami. In a small mortuary chapel attached to the church, the apse of the east end is filled with the scene of the risen Lord, his body full of dynamic energy, pulling out of their graves Adam and Eve, while saints and patriarchs stand on either side of the scene. Beneath Christ’s feet are what looks to be a jumble of locks and chains and hardware of various kinds: the hardware of the gates of hell – just as a few minutes ago we were reminded by the ancient Exsultet chant, “This is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell.”

Our father Adam and our mother Eve, standing for all of humankind, delivered from the bonds of death. All of humankind. Can we think of the hellish hardware beneath the Lord’s feet as including the handgun that effected the death on March 5th of another Eve, Eve Carson? The deliverance of that Eve from the bonds of death by the power of the merciful Redeemer can scarcely be doubted. But what about the two young men, Demario and Lawrence? They are, of course, still alive. We cannot believe that the power of Christ’s mercy stops short of them, and we must pray that they too will some day be among the multitudes, multitudes without number, who by that mercy are also delivered from every kind of bondage, ending with the bondage of death.

Multitudes without number, indeed; at least, it is none of our business to attempt to number them, still less to specify those who might not be included in that number. But we have every reason for confidence about who are so included, confidence that among those multitudes are not only the figures on the Kariye Djami fresco but also those whose love has shaped us and whose examples have inspirited us. So it is in faith, not in mere sentimentality, that we expect Christ’s victory over death to bring about the deliverance of those who are most deeply human to us: whether grandparents or teachers or heroes from the remote past (for me still, as it has been for decades, my Granny Soergel and J.S. Bach).

Yet, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us in some of the most sublime words in the entire Bible, “All of these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen better things for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” [Heb. 10:39-40] – or, as it could equally well be rendered, apart from us their number (whatever it is) should not be complete. We too are, then, integral to those who are this night delivered from the bonds of death. Those so delivered are not just the distant figures of the pre-Christian era, nor just Peter and Paul and the apostles and martyrs, nor even just those who, known only to God, have gone before us in the faith, but we ourselves.

You, Isaac and Ben [the children to be baptized], are now to become part of “the whole house of Israel.” The story of the coming to life of the dried bones of the distant dead, bone joining upon bone, and the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, breathing vitality into the rejoined bones – that is your story, and ours, just as much as it is the story of the noble dead who share in Christ’s resurrection through the harrowing of hell. “Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people,” says the LORD God. “And you shall know that I am the LORD when I open your graves, O my people.”

So as the Exsultet, the great proclamation at the start of this service, begins, “Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels,/ and let your trumpets shout salvation,/ for the victory of our mighty king.” And we, thus bidden to rejoice in this victory, had better begin to do so. I’m not quite suggesting that after you leave here you get in your cars and drive around your neighborhoods for a couple of hours honking your horns, still less that you busy yourselves with papering Franklin Street’s cherished trees. But, given how great the cause is for rejoicing – nothing less than our salvation –, it only fitting that you put some energy into it. Let the Exsultet provide the final words: “Rejoice and be glad now, Mother church,/ and let your holy courts, in radiant light,/ resound with the praises of your people” – resounding praises that begin with the resounding word AMEN.

© 2008: Chapel of the Cross