Easter vigil.
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.
SERMON 220
AT THE EASTER VIGIL
Date: uncertain1
The solemnity renews the event by celebrating it regularly
We know, brothers and sisters, that Christ died once for us;2 the Just One for sinners,3 the Lord for slaves, the free man for captives, the doctor for the sick, the blessed for the wretched, the wealthy for the needy, the seeker for the lost, the redeemer for those that had been sold, the shepherd for the flock, and what is more astonishing than all that, the creator for the creature; preserving, all the same, what he always is, handing over to death what he has become; God unnoticed, man manifest; giving life by his strength, dying in his weakness; unchanging in god¬ head, subject to suffering in the flesh; as the apostle puts it, who was handed over for our misdeeds, and rose again for our justification (Rom 4:25).
That this happened once, you know very well. And yet this solemnity repeats it as the years go round, as though it happened more often, though the truth cries out with so many voices from scripture that it happened only once. You see, the truth shows that in actual fact it happened once, but the solemnity renews it for loving hearts by celebrating it regularly. The truth opens up to us what happened, as it happened; while the solemnity, by celebrating past events, not by enacting them, does not permit them to pass away. *
In a word, Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7). He, of course, was slain once, and does not die any more, death no longer lords it over him (Rom 6:9). Accordingly, in the language of literal truth we say that Easter, that passover, happened once, and won't come round again; but in the language of the solemnity we say that Easter, that passover, is going to come round every year. I reckon that that is how we have to understand what is written in the psalm,
The thought of man will confess to you, and the residue of thought will celebrate a solemn day to you (Ps 76:10). Unless, you see, thought committed to memory what is said about things taking place in time, it wouldn't find any residue after the time had passed. That's why the thought of man, contemplating the actual reality, confesses to the Lord; while the residue of thought which is in the memory, knowing about past times, does not cease to celebrate solemn anniver¬ saries, in case thought should be condemned as ungrateful.