secondarily the church building, the great basilica in which the vigil was being celebrated.
SERMON 219 199 does not permit this one to sleep, iniquity that one; Christian vitality this one, diabolical jealousy that one.
So our very enemies are unwittingly reminding us how we ought to keep watch for our own sake, if even those who are envious of us can keep watch on our account. The fact is, of those who have never in any way been sealed with the name of Christ, many give up sleep this night out of annoyance, many out of shame; some even, who are getting close to the faith, already out of the fear of God. They are excited by this solemnity for a variety of reasons. With what joy then ought the friends of Christ to keep awake, when their enemies are keeping awake out of sheer bad temper? How eager, how ardent to keep watch on this glorious triumph of Christ should the Christian be, when even the pagan is ashamed to sleep? How right and proper it is that those who have already entered this great household1 2 3 4 5 should keep vigil on this greatest of its feasts, when those who are just thinking of entering are already keeping vigil?
Let us then watch and pray,6 and thus celebrate this vigil both outwardly and inwardly. Let God speak to us in the readings, let us speak to God in our prayers. If we listen obediently to his words, then the one we pray to is dwelling in us.
NOTES
1. Clearly preached in his own church at Hippo Regius; clearly also, from the concluding words, before the main vigil service really began; it is a kind of introduction to the liturgy—a somewhat polemical one, we might think, urging his team to put on a good performance against the rivals. To introduce a service like this seems to me to be the sort of thing a presbyter would do, rather than the bishop; so I would tentatively put this short exhortation before 396.
2. In this passage Paul is not in fact urging us to imitate him; he does that in 1 Cor 4:16 and 11:1. Here he is, reluctantly, "boasting." And one of the things he boasts about is, not celebrating liturgical vigils, but often having to spend sleepless nights, either because his anxieties for the churches robbed him of sleep, or because he kept working late into the night.
3. With all the churches (Donatist ones too) in the city ablaze with light, and the singing and the bustle going on, it seems the poor wicked pagans couldn't sleep, and so made the best of it and had their parties too—like poor benighted Sassenachs stranded in Aberdeen, say, on New Year's Eve.
4. Et qui vident in Domino, et qui invident Domino, a play on words not reproducible in English. Clearly he doesn't mean that those who are rivals of the sheep and envious of the Lord (here I think he does also have the Donatists in mind) are now light in the Lord. But for them too the night is lit up like the day.
5. Hanc domum magnam, meaning primarily the Catholic Church, the household of faith; but secondarily the church building, the great basilica in which the vigil was being celebrated.
6. See Mk 14:38. The watching and praying called for in Gethsemane is being transferred to the Easter vigil.