Easter Vigil 2019
It’s a shambles, isn’t it? The Easter Vigil I mean—a wonderful, exciting shambles. It was clearly designed by a committee: bits stick out at all angles. We keep hitting high points—the lighting of the candle, the proclamation of the light of Christ, and the Exsultet; the Gloria; the solemn Alleluia—yet after each of them we are brought back down to earth until the next high point. It is a sort of liturgical roller coaster, a joyful and magnificent shambles.
That is appropriate, because life is a shambles, and the world is a shambles, and the Church is a shambles, and you and I are a shambles. And it doesn’t matter, because, into the shambles comes a dead man walking, God who died and who rose from the dead. He enters the shambles, and He shows His wounds, the wounds which transform the shambles into glory, wounds which heal the shambles of the world, and of the Church, and of the lives of you and me.
Christ is risen, and the shambles is transformed. Darkness is changed into light, death into eternal life, and every shambles into a meeting point with Christ, who died and who is alive for ever.
