You Should Go to the Easter Vigil
We have records from as early as the 2nd century of Christians gathering in the night before their major feasts. They would read Scripture and sing hymns and pray quietly, sometimes clear into the morning. They were preparing their souls for the next day’s feast. These services were known as “vigils” since, in Latin, vigilia is “a night watch.” We still have vigils ― our Saturday evening Masses are vigils ― though they are no longer held through the night.
And yet our upcoming Easter Vigil is unique. In fact, it’s not quite accurate to call it a vigil at all. Typically, vigils anticipate or bring the community into a Sunday feast or into a solemnity. The Easter Vigil is different because it is the feast.
This may come as a surprise. Our cultural imagination highlights Easter morning, with sunrise Masses and flowers and pastel colors. But in Christianity’s earliest years, Easter was always celebrated in the night ― spilling from Saturday into Sunday. Jesus’s Resurrection took place during the night, even if the empty tomb was discovered in the morning. Even just practically, Easter marks the triumph of light over darkness, and so the Vigil’s many images of light (the Paschal Candle, the Blessing of the Fire, etc.) are most effective in a nighttime setting.
Over a gradual period of time, though, and for a variety of reasons, the Vigil rite was moved from the middle of the night to early in the morning on Saturday ― not Sunday.1 This was a strange divergence from the tradition and, for the most part, from the 16th century clear into the 1950s, very few people ever attended the Vigil. As one historian has commented, in those days, the Easter Vigil was “a quasi-private, morning execution which satisfied canon law requirements.”2
In 1951, Pope Pius XII restored the Easter Vigil to its nighttime slot and it regained its central place.3 Even still, there remain a large number of Catholics who have never attended the Easter Vigil. It’s true that there are often legitimate reasons: “we are traveling that night”; “the kids will never last that long.” And, of course, the Sunday morning Masses are still Easter celebrations that fulfill one’s obligation. But the Vigil is not something Catholics should go through life never having attended.
We sometimes think of attending the Vigil as a big ask simply because it’s long ― sometimes up to three hours. There are seven readings; there are baptisms, confirmations, and first communions; there’s a whole additional liturgy called the Lucernarium or the “Service of Light.” But these additions are precisely what make the Vigil the centerpiece of the Church’s worship.
In a sense, the Vigil’s unique rituals gather together the entire history of Christian worship and put us in communion with Christians from up and down the centuries. The Blessing of the Fire and the cutting of the Paschal Candle date from the 8th century. The Exultet hymn, sung by the deacon, was written by Saint Ambrose in the 300s. Even the rites by which our candidates and catechumens become Catholic have been handed down from 4th and 5th century Fathers like John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Theodore of Mopsuestia.
But it’s more than just the history. The Easter Vigil plays into the whole rhythm of Catholic spirituality. To take just one example, at the Vigil, the whole congregation will renew their baptismal vows. This is not a random add-on. On the contrary, it’s meant to bring our Lenten practices to fulfillment. Lent’s purpose is to examine ourselves and recommit to the Christian life. Like Jesus in the desert, after our own forty days, we will renounce Satan at the Vigil and (re)commit ourselves to the faith. There’s a sense in which the entirety of Lent is for this moment of renewal at the Vigil.4
Above all, though, the Vigil is the highpoint of the Church’s worship because of what is happening underneath it all. At Mass ― every Mass, not just the Easter Vigil ― something extraordinary happens. In some mysterious way, Jesus’s death and resurrection are not merely remembered ― they happen now.
That may seem strange, but that is precisely what our tradition holds about the Mass.5 It makes present not just Jesus himself in the Eucharist, but also the events of his life, especially his death and resurrection. It’s not that, at Mass, Jesus dies and is resurrected again. Rather, we are mysteriously made contemporaries with those one-time events from 2,000 years ago. In a fifth-century homily, Saint Leo the Great said that the events of Jesus’s life, especially his death and resurrection, have been “changed into a sacramental presence.”6 It is precisely this “sacramental presence” that we encounter at each Mass.
But if each and every Mass re-presents Jesus’s death and resurrection, what makes the Easter Vigil so special?
The Easter Triduum, unlike the rest of the Church year, is when we enter into Jesus’s death and resurrection most explicitly. The readings, the prayers, the rites ― everything is focused on the heart of the faith. Of course, at every other Mass, Jesus’s death and resurrection are present as the Mass’s essential background and purpose. But during Holy Week, and at the Easter Vigil especially, our worship is most vividly channeled toward these events.
This means that, as the Vigil begins, the darkness that covers the church is more than just a symbol of Jesus’s death. It’s far more mystical than that. Indeed, we are actually in the tomb. The events are made present again ― not just figuratively, but really. Sacramentally. Indeed, as St. Leo said, Jesus’s death and resurrection have been changed into a “sacramental presence.” And that sacramental presence is indeed a real presence.
Every Mass is extraordinary. Every Mass re-presents the death and resurrection of Jesus. At the Vigil, though, what happens at every Mass is unpacked and re-presented in such a way that we are put in the most vivid contact possible with these events. In fact, every other Mass across the year is rooted in what happens at the Vigil. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it the “source of light” for all the Church’s year-long celebrations. Indeed, the rest of the liturgical year simply unveils the various mysteries that take place during the Vigil. Even the Easter Sunday Masses, those held the morning after the Vigil, are best understood as echoes of what has happened in the night. They are not themselves “the Feast of feasts.”7
In short, you should go to the Easter Vigil. It is the moment for Christians. The Roman Missal ― the red book on the altar ― calls it the “greatest and most noble of all solemnities.” In the 4th century, Saint Augustine called it “the mother of all holy vigils.”8 It is the feast that courses through every other feast, through every other moment. It is the fullness and the limit, the beginning and the end. It is the center and anchor of your life as a worshiping Christian.
See William J. O’Shea, New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (2003), s.v. “Easter Vigil,” 14-15.
See Katherine E. Harmon, “Awaiting the ‘Mother of All Vigils’: The 1951 Provisional Restoration of the Easter Vigil in the United States,” in Worship 91 (March 2017), 131-148, at 134-135. Quote at 140.
See the Congregation for Sacred Rites decree entitled De Solemni Vigilia Paschali Instauranda.
See O’Shea, “Easter Vigil,” 17.
See Catechism of the Catholic Church: “In the liturgy of the Church, it is principally his own Paschal mystery [his death and resurrection] that Christ signifies and makes present…. His Paschal mystery is a real event that occurred in our history, but it is unique: all other historical events happen once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. The Paschal mystery of Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past, because … all that Christ is ― all that he did and suffered for all men ― participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all” (§1085).
Leo the Great, Sermon 74: “On the Lord’s Ascension,” 74.2.
See CCC §1168-1171.
Augustine, Sermon 219, 38:1088.