Happy Easter!

This year I went to one of South London’s larger churches for the Easter Vigil Mass.  It was the night before the clocks went forward, so there in the last dark evening we stood, numbering at least six hundred I should think, outside the unlit church — without temple or tabernacle, like the wandering tribes of Israel.  Up from the foot of the hill drifted the grimy surf of traffic-noise; more distinct was the high whine of the trains on the main line and their percussion over points; while the Crystal Palace and Croydon transmitters glimmered silent and sentinel on their far hill.  Before the west door of the church a brazier stood ready, like the one by which Peter had warmed himself and hotly denied his Lord, except that over this brazier quite different words were about to be said:

“Christ yesterday and today; 

the Beginning and the End; 

the Alpha and the Omega.  

All time belongs to him, 

and all the ages.  

To him be glory and power 

Through every age and for ever.  Amen.”

So proclaimed Fr. David, his voice thinned but strangely clarified by the outside air, while into the Paschal Candle he carved the Cross, the letters Alpha and Omega, and the digits of the year of our (risen!) Lord 2024.  Then from the brazier the candle was lit – the first light – and we heard the first call, the first music: “Lumen Christi”.  “Deo Gratias,” we answered.  No verb; only nouns and names – but indicative, subjunctive and imperative were all implicit in that single candle-flame.  This was a good light — a light by which, if we drew near it, we should find our hope.  This was our signal to follow the candle as it was carried into the cavernous church, and so, slowly, slowly, we shuffled back through the west door.  Passing through the porch we were plunged into such complete darkness that I was reminded of the beginning of Genesis, of the words which in fact we would hear again shortly afterwards – of the formless void and the darkness covering the earth.  But there, straight ahead at the east end of the church, the head of the procession had reached the altar: from the light from the Paschal candle a host of other waiting candles had been lit, so that the whole apse was now aglow.  “Oh my goodness,” whispered a girl behind me, “This is so beautiful.”  The first day — and God saw that it was good.

For at Easter the world really is recreated.  As the Paschal flame is passed from pew to pew and candle to candle, as this most dramatic of all the Church’s liturgies unfolds, everything grows gradually richer and fuller and brighter.  By the light spreading and strengthening through the church we saw, as in the first chapter of Genesis, new creations appearing verse by verse: the vaults above, the flowers proliferating where on Good Friday there had been only bare stone — and the human face, in six hundred lovingly-crafted permutations, illuminated and transfigured by the new fire.  Then, at the Gloria, as if on the seventh day, came the loudest and most exuberant possible noise – all bells jangling, all pipes blasting.  It was the steady but emphatic banishment of darkness and death. 

“I sometimes think we Catholics are better at Lent than at Easter,” observed Fr. David in his homily. “We have had fasting; now it is time for feasting.  This is the beginning of the season of guzzling!”  But no shallow or self-deceiving merriment, this.  It follows naturally from a conclusion drawn in the light of reasonable faith, albeit faith in an extraordinary, even outrageous proposition.  If Christ is God made man, if He took human flesh, and if, having been put to death, He is now, somehow, unaccountably but incontrovertibly alive, then we too are completely changed.  And nothing and nobody good and rightly cherished or pleasing to God has ever been, or ever will be, lost to Him.  Even death is not the end of us.

We have not forgotten the desolation of Good Friday, nor the fears and hardships of our own lives.  Evil and death and all its schemes and attempts at reinvention have not yet been driven out.  But they have been dealt a mortal blow.  A mortal blow if Christ, wearing our flesh and our nature, standing for us and in our place, can undergo the worst that evil and death can deal out, can indeed be annihilated, but can yet rise bodily from the dead and walk free from his own tomb.  If it is possible for His human body, then it is possible (through Him) for our human bodies.  The forces of death and of evil can flail as wildly as they please, for a season, but the final plug is already pulled on them; the clock is ticking for them.  We, meanwhile, are homeward bound.

The choir of Hereford Cathedral sing ‘Good Christians all, Rejoice and Sing’ to Melchior Vulpius’s tune ‘Gelobet sei Gott’ (1609).