The Empty Tomb

This morning is Easter, the most solemn and the critical celebration of the Christian year. In the church, everything was decked with silver and gold raiment, and everything that can make music was employed after a silence imposed since Good Friday: guitar, drum, organ, bells. And voices. Everywhere, people, people and more people. And children, whose delight in the celebrations around them was so wholesome and unalloyed. Looking at them, you think that no one can experience the joy of the day as immediately and intimately as a child, even if the child may not fully understand the reason for the joy.

And then, after the homily, the Sequence is recited: a dramatic poem origniating from the 11th century. Drawing on its rich traditions, the church today unites itself with the spirit of celebrants and congregations from ages past by invoking the very words they used. In this way, ritual helps the church overcome the barriers of space and time, so that all may be united in this celebration of an unchanging fact. And inasmuch as the structures and trappings of a religion can help to amplify and augment one's faith, there are few things as moving as speaking words that have survived despite passing through vast gulfs of time and the human fluctuations that fill that gap.

Christians, to the Paschal Victim
Offer sacrifice and praise.

The sheep are ransomed by the Lamb;
And Christ, the Undefiled,
Hath sinners
To His Father reconciled.

Death with Life contended:
Combat strangely ended!
Life's own Champion, slain,
Yet lives to reign.

Tell us, Mary:
Say what thou didst see upon the way.

The tomb the living did enclose;
I saw Christ's glory as He rose!

The angels there attesting;
Shroud with grave-clothes resting.

Christ, my hope, has risen;
He goes before you into Galilee.

That Christ is truly risen
from the dead we know.
Victorious King, Thy mercy show!
Amen. Alleluia.