‘Let this holy building shake with joy…’

The Easter Vigil Mass in my South London parish, 2008

Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,
Exult, let Angel ministers of God exult,
Let the trumpet of salvation
Sound aloud our mighty King’s triumph!

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
Ablaze with light from her eternal King,
Let all corners of the earth be glad,
Knowing an end to gloom and darkness.

Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
Arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
Let this holy building shake with joy,
Filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.

This is the opening (in English translation) of the Exsultet, the Church’s beautiful hymn for the Easter Vigil.  Beautiful it is in its images, its language and its theological underpinnings — which somehow make themselves felt even to those like me who do not understand every gesture or reference — and a poetic treat indeed after bitter Lent. 

It has occurred to me how full Holy Week is of paradoxes.  There is Palm Sunday and the divine, asisine entrance into Jerusalem.  There is the first Eucharist on Maundy Thursday followed by the year’s only Massless day, Good Friday.  Easter is itself, of course, the universe’s greatest paradox (life everlasting springing from where God had known death), but it encompasses other, smaller twin-truths.  At the Easter Vigil there is the candle-light which blazes all the more brightly for the darkness it has to dispel.  Thus, turning to the candle, we sing:

But now we know the praises of this pillar,
Which glowing fire ignites for God’s honour,
A fire into many flames divided,
Yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,
For it is fed by melting wax,
Drawn out by mother bees
To build a torch so precious.

It seems astonishing at first, the difference in scope between, on one hand, the praise of these bees in their tiny particularity (a passage brought back a few years ago by the new translation of the Missal) and, on the other, the praise of the massive and cosmic truth that is the burden of this prayer.   There, as the poet compasses the eternal, is the microscopic and prosaic in the same breath: another paradox for the list.  And we have already praised the ‘happy fault’, the ‘necessary sin of Adam’, ‘that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer’ (a mystery also mentioned in the fourteenth-century English carol ‘Adam lay ybounden’).

How, then, should these fine words sound when sung?  Here is a bracing Polish rendition of the Exsultet by Fr. Mateusz Łuksza, a Dominican priest of Jarosław:

Wishing a Happy Easter to one and all!