Vigils Reading

A reading from

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

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The Church lives in an incomprehensible place between earth and

heaven, between death and eternal life, between the old world that is passing

away and the new and incorruptible world. The Christian has died with Christ in

baptism but has also (as St Paul assures him) risen up with Christ and ascended

with him into heaven, and he lives in time on the basis of eternal life and

oriented toward eternal life. As he follows Christ, he goes toward suffering and

death, and yet he lives out of the real power of the risen Christ.

Thus Christian existence embraces the span between penitence and

feast. We are reminded of this by the Church year with its seasons of Advent and

Lent and yet with its unbroken succession of feasts great and small. This

sequence gives us a symbol of something that, on a deeper level, is a mutual

compenetration, a third paradox of our Christian existence. But just as heaven is

victorious over earth, and resurrection over death, so for the Christian must

even penitence, suffering, and death be lived out of a disposition of the

celebration of a feast: the feast of the wedding of God with his redeemed world.

It is well known that the solemnities of the Old Testament all grew out of

thanksgiving feasts for harvest. Where the earth bears fruit and holds feast, man

holds a feast with it in thankfulness… Everywhere the joy at harvest shimmers

through the Mazzoth feast of unleavened bread, the Pentecost feast of the

firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of booths in the plucking of fruit

and grapes, when people slept in booths in the open fields and beside the

vineyard: and perhaps no one even today can celebrate a religious feast with

such a natural joy and cheerfulness as the Jews.

There are prayers, but there are also songs and dances as a means of

giving thanks to God. Has this cheerfulness remained anywhere on the faces of

the Christians who celebrate a feast? It is true that the mystery that they

celebrate lies on a deeper level – but is it not also greater? Ought not the joy too

be a much deeper joy? What are religious harvest thanksgiving festivals, even

indeed when they are concerned with the rescuing of Israel, compared with the

unforeseeable harvest of bread and wine in the New and eternal Covenant? The

whole earth is now bread and wine. Must not the genuinely human joy be

permitted to break through at this point? Would not a song by thousands of

voices…be the expression of what the Apostle says: “Rejoice in the Lord always;

again I say rejoice…”

It is not a worldly enthusiasm that we are to draw forth from the feast but

a strength that comes from the insight into the essence of God’s love. And it is

not herself that the Church celebrates; she is not enthusiastic about herself but

only about her Head and Lord. It is not the emotional atmosphere that is

important but the matter itself. And this is God, who becomes man among us in

order to die for us…

The object of our celebration is Jesus Christ in his love that goes until the

end, in his power to lay down his life and to take it up again, in his creative might

to make the gift of himself to us in the forms of bread and wine, in order to be

inconceivably one with humanity.