Easter Sunday
Have you ever been to an Easter Vigil? It’s a beautiful Mass the night before Easter, with lots of liturgical “extras” beyond a normal Mass – more readings, more prayers, more songs, more candles, more of everything really. Sometimes these liturgies last over 3 hours! This is also the Mass at which adults who are becoming Catholic are Baptized, Confirmed, and receive the Eucharist for the first time. So, it’s exciting to say the least!
The liturgy starts off in darkness, and each person holds a small candle. At a certain point the Paschal Candle is lit (the giant candle you see at Baptisms, funerals, and during the Easter season), and from it all of the smaller candles are lit. There is also a long beautiful chant called the Exsultet. Let’s take a look! Here are a few lines from it:
“This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld. Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed. O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son! O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”
Whoa. Powerful stuff. To fully appreciate all the imagery here, it helps for us to make it personal. Not only did Christ break the prison-bars of death, but we have to remember that WE were held by those prison-bars in our sin. Our birth would have been no gain – as amazing as this world is, as amazing as human life is, it still pales in comparison with what we have gained through the new life we receive through Jesus’ Resurrection. He has opened the gates of heaven for us, and we enter it as heirs! Not just as some sort of golden ticket winners who get a tour like the children get of the Wonka factory – or rather if we are, we are Charlie who indeed inherits the factory in the end! (Spoilers? My bad. The book came out 60 years ago, so…)
And you may have heard the idea before of the “happy fault” and “truly necessary sin of Adam” – what a strange yet beautiful way to phrase that. If it weren’t for the Fall, if it weren’t for our sins, we wouldn’t have had the experience of receiving God’s mercy and becoming adopted sons and daughters because of our great Redeemer. Perfect union with God before Adam and Eve sinned was God’s “Plan A” for us. Anyone who has ever listened to the news for 5 minutes can tell you that clearly we are living in God’s “Plan B” – but the thing is, Plan B has a better ending!
The Resurrection is so inexhaustible a thing to reflect on that the Church gives us an entire season for doing it (and remember it’s actually longer than Lent!) So, while you’re at Mass the new few weeks, pay close attention to the prayers during the Easter season. They’re jam-packed with beautiful lines to pray with and reflect on. May this Easter season be a blessed time for us, as we reflect on how God is so amazing, he was able to pull off the most successful Plan B of all time.
