God’s time

All Saints’, Dorval

Great Vigil of Easter, Year B

March 30, 2024

The altar of repose in the chapel, Maundy Thursday 2024

Two nights ago, in the chapel where we began this service, a group of about fifteen youth and young adults from half a dozen parishes on the island of Montreal, along with their many adult supporters, kept watch before the altar of repose, where Jesus rested in the form of the bread and wine that had been consecrated at the Maundy Thursday service. Most of us slept – or at least tried to sleep – in the hall downstairs, while every hour a small group stayed awake with Jesus, in an attempt to do at least a little better than the actual disciples did in the garden of Gethsemane.

We gathered at 7:30 in the morning, yawning, unwashed, and discombobulated, to reflect on our experience before driving over the Christ Church Beaurepaire for the Good Friday breakfast there.

As I invited the group to share the thoughts and feelings that had come to them during the night, I led off the discussion by mentioning that during my own shift before the altar from 4 to 5 am, I had been afraid that time would drag terribly and I would be fighting sleep for what seemed like forever, but that actually, the minutes had seemed to fly by. And this perception was echoed by almost the whole group.

Time is weird during Holy Week. If we are active church people involved in multiple services and activities, we are probably rushing around with a long to-do list. And yet this is also a week where, sometimes almost in spite of ourselves, we are brought up short, before a cross or an icon or an altar, and suddenly find ourselves with no option but to plunge deeply into the moment, to open ourselves to meditation, to experience emotions that we may perhaps be able to ignore in our regular lives; to slip sideways into another time entirely, one in which our incarnate God is engaged in a cosmic battle that spans eternity.

My colleague Kristin Saylor, the rector of St. Lawrence’s Episcopal Church in Libertyville, Illinois, is if anything an even bigger Easter Vigil nerd than I am (something you might not have thought possible). In a Facebook post early in Lent, anticipating the adult education series she was doing in her parish, she wrote, “Holy Week does CRAZY COOL things with time. And the Exsultet is the focal point of liturgical time basically exploding with redemptive power and it is the coolest thing ever.”

As you noticed when I chanted it earlier, the Exsultet (the chant over the candle near the beginning of the service) begins with repeated exhortations to “rejoice now” and goes on to insist, over and over, that “this is the night” that the children of Israel came out of Egypt and Christ broke the bonds of death and hell. All the greatest saving acts of God in history are brought together in this night, in this chant. It ends with a prayer to keep the Paschal candle burning forever in the honour of the “Morning Star who knows no setting”.

The Exsultet offers – to quote another great theologian, my mom – “staggering promises, blazing hopes – but it is too early yet to realize them.” We need to go all the way back, back to the very beginning of time, to God’s first defining act, the creation of everything that is. We need to tell all the old stories, sing all the old songs, before we are ready to cope with all the time-warping astonishment of this night.

If you have ever given birth or been present when someone else has, you know that time also gets very weird in a birthing room; hours can pass without being noticed, while moments can stretch out to infinity. And the Passion and Resurrection of Christ are nothing if not a birth; the people of God emerging from the darkness and the birth waters, fighting through the perilous bottleneck of death, and emerging into the light of our new life.

And so we renew our baptismal vows, another moment when time stands still and we join hands with the faithful of all times past and future. And then we go forth, and simply walking out the back door and across the parking lot feels like traversing time and space, crossing the Red Sea, following Jesus up from the tomb. And we stand before the wide-open doors, and we hear:

All who have labored from the first hour, let them today receive their just reward. 

Those who have come at the third hour, with thanksgiving let them keep the feast. 

Those who have arrived at the sixth hour, let them have no misgivings; for they shall suffer no loss. 

Those who have delayed until the ninth hour, let them draw near without hesitation. 

Those who have arrived even at the eleventh hour, let them not fear on account of their delay.

Once again, time is topsy-turvy, both sprinting ahead with those who cannot wait to greet their risen Lord, and offering infinite grace to those who need time to catch up.

In just a few minutes we will collapse time in yet another way, harking back just a couple of days (but also two thousand years) to that Maundy Thursday watch in the garden of Gethsemane and before the reserved sacrament. That sacrament was, of course, all consumed at the Good Friday service, so the church has been empty of the presence of Christ in the bread and wine for the last thirty-four or so hours. But we will gather once again to create together the body and blood of our risen Lord, restoring the physical presence of God to this sanctuary, and joining – as we say every time we celebrate this sacrament – the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, who rejoice eternally before the throne of heaven.

Our God is the God of all times, and in his Passover on this night he has decisively taken our time-bound human lives and brought them outside time and into eternity. Christ’s victory over death is also his victory over the tyranny of time. In God, we are present to all times and all times are present to us; thanks to our risen Lord, we have enough and more than enough time, for all time.

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

Amen.