Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday

Easter Vigil & Sunday
30 & 31 March 2024

   At Easter we return to our familiar singing of “alleluia”.  That word originates from the Hebrew and means “Praise the Lord” or “God be praised.”  One of the distinctive liturgical features of Lent is that the alleluia has been suppressed these past many weeks.  We are accustomed to the alleluia before the Gospel, but we use a different Gospel acclamation throughout Lent.  In some religious communities and in some parishes there is the practice as Lent gets started of marking that suppression of the alleluia by taking a banner that reads “Alleluia” and burying it in the ground.  So, when today “Alleluia” rings out again in our churches and from Christian mouths, there is supposed to be great joy in such a happy proclamation.  So, why would we be so joyful in that acclamation?  Why would that acclamation now return and what has prepared us to have joy as we again proclaim “alleluia”?

In part, it is because we have first observed Lent where we have been deprived of that familiar word of praise of the Lord.  But, of course, it is deeper because our observation of Lent is about more than just the absence of “alleluia”.  Rather, it is about walking the journey and the opportunity of that holy season to take note of what reduces our joy, what stifles or limits our joy.  What stifles our joy is sin, and/or being a glutton about good things in our life such that we give those things more focus than we dedicate to the spiritual life.  They become actual idols.  In Lent, we pass through the desert of recognizing sin and seeking to dismiss it from our lives in order that we live in greater freedom as God’s sons and daughters.  And as we grow in fidelity to that work of uprooting sin and growing in holiness by the fostering of virtue, well, then, we experience greater joy in Christ.

Yes, our Christian Lenten practice of the absence of that word alleluia is geared to making us now more fond of proclaiming “Praise the Lord”!  When something is missing, when I don’t get to experience it or enjoy it over an absence, I am enabled to be more aware of the blessing of that thing when I can experience it again.  Of course, we mean only good things here.  For, we ought not enjoy bad things or sins, and we ought not return to them once we get rid of them.  That’s why a true Lenten sacrifice, something you give up as part of your Lent, is about giving up a good, a legitimate thing that you are able to enjoy, but which you voluntarily relinquish.  You do this to make more time for God, to fill the absence (of that thing you have given up) with greater attention to prayer, discipline, and work on the virtues.

What has the absence of “alleluia” taught us such that we return to its use today?  By our working to uproot sin, by our willing sacrifice of good things in our life, by our struggles, by our weakness in our resolve, by having to recognize how inconsistent I can be at spiritual work and doing something for God, by all this we enter into a time of desert wandering.  We mark salvation history in our own living.  Like God’s people in Egypt we have to confront by the absence of our alleluia that we are very much trapped in sinful patterns and that our “egypts” – our sins – have quite a hold on us.  We are attached to slavery in Egypt and we need a savior.

If we have first done this self-reflective work in Lent.  If we have recognized the ways in which we need the Lord to save us, and if we take stock of just how desperate we are in our sinfulness, then we have noticed in the dryness of the missing “alleluia” that we have been given much by the Lord Jesus who has worked such marvels for us.  We likely do not take anywhere near enough stock that by our sins we deserve condemnation.  We are helpless and hopeless.  We would have no cause to dare think, much less say, Alleluia, were it not for the Lord!  That, friends, is what Christians actually believe about the seriousness of sin and the seriousness of the offer of salvation in God’s generous love.  In the dryness of Lent’s missing alleluia we have the opportunity to confront our Egypt and to learn to let it go.  We have the opportunity to pass through the desert, to follow – and yes, to wander (hopefully not for 40 years!) – where the Lord leads trusting that the slowness of our hoped-for growth in holiness is not due to anything lacking from Jesus, but from our own resolve.  And so, time and time again, we must be trained in the absence of our acclaiming “Praise the Lord” of just why we have such cause to praise him!  Missing the alleluia these many weeks, if we become convinced of our need for salvation, our need for Jesus, then our “Alleluia” returns now with deep joy!

In the absence of praise these long weeks, hopefully we return to that familiar acclamation with renewed gratitude for how salvation history has worked in us, how it is working, and how – by God’s continued generous love – it will continue to work into our future.  We praise the Lord now for God the Son has come to save us.  We praise the Lord now for God’s Kingdom has been inaugurated and we are called to inherit it.  We praise the Lord now because by baptism and faith and continued striving, salvation history is not only a story of the past but is very much here and now working in you and in me.  Our sins take us to the grave and eternal death.  But the Lord Jesus has gone there on our behalf.  The voracious appetite of death once greedily took his flesh.  But in so doing death got a surprise in that it swallowed up a power greater than itself: God almighty.  Jesus has tangled with death and left it ruined.  And by rising from the dead the Lord has opened the path for all who believe and who conform their lives to him.  Taking note of all of this divine work as a deeply personal history for me and for you, and not just a story from the past, we can say once again, “alleluia!”  Praise the Lord!