When I first visited the Catacombs in Rome many years ago, I was struck by something I had never realized looking at pictures of them: how colorful they are. I had to remind myself that these are, after all, burial grounds, cemeteries. Modern cemetery art looks so gray and solemn, so dignified. Not this. This art was bold, lively, joyful.

The explanation is very simple. The early Christians (what I like to call the First Church) simply did not think of a burial place as having to do with death. It had to do with life.

Because Christianity is about the Resurrection. Now of course in a sense the Church has always “known” that. We have always pointed our Church buildings east, toward the rising sun. But somehow we have lost our Resurrection edge. So our burial grounds seem to say, “keep still and maintain a respectful silence in the presence of the dead.” The Catacombs seem to say, “your loved ones are not here. They are risen. As promised.”

The early Christians were always proclaiming Easter. Its primary teaching was not about Jesus sacrifice on the Cross; it was about Christ’s Victory over sin, death, and the Devil. In the writings left behind by the First Church, there is much less about Jesus dying for our sins. There is quite a bit about Jesus rising in triumph and taking us with him.

Easter was the theme and the conviction of the First Church. And the single most powerful, most practical, and most vivid way they proclaimed their Easter faith was through the Great Vigil. It was the font and source of all worship throughout the year. Baptism wasn’t something you rang up your parish and arranged for some Saturday or Sunday. It was something that happened at the Great Vigil–and no other time. That made perfect sense: Baptism and the Great Vigil were about the same thing.

Imagining the first Easter vigils
Imagine yourself a Christian anywhere around the year 400. You have been preparing for weeks–studying, fasting in solidarity with those preparing for Baptism. In your daily morning and evening prayers you have been reading in the prophets, and winding toward the end of one of Gospels.

Then you have gone through the shattering mysteries of Holy Week. It began last Lord’s Day, with the Procession of the Palms, through the streets of your city. Then the Triduum, the most solemn Three Days, began Thursday evening with the footwashing and the watch through the night, as you challenged yourself to be unlike Peter and the other disciples.

It continued through the stark service of Good Friday and the strange mix of hope and horror that is Holy Saturday. You have experienced it all in “real time”– three days of prayer without ceasing.

So you have had little sleep, and very little to eat or drink, since Thursday sunset. But you aren’t feeling worn out. More like “emptied.” Spiritually, it means your defenses are long gone and you are ravenous for resurrection. Comes Saturday dusk, sunset. You make your way into a church space that is already dark–so dark, you cannot see your hand before your face, so you use it to grope. You sense the presence of your brothers and sisters in the faith–who are more than your biological brothers and sisters now, you actually feel that–but you hear nothing, for the church is as silent as it is dark.

Then, the sound of the steel and the flint and the rustle of the kindling as the bishop lights the fire, and begins to chant the Blessing of the New Fire.
The deacon starts the painfully beautiful chant, the Exsultet, praising light itself, the first thing God ever created, the best symbol of divinity in this world, the reality Christ brought into this dark world. Just like tonight.

Time seems somehow suspended. You lounge on the floor for what must be hours of Holy Scripture – from Torah to Revelation, read, and you savor every lesson, you chant and you cheer in response to every one. You keep absolute silence again as you let the weight of glory from each lesson sink into your famished consciousness.

And then it happens–the Gospel. That is, THE Gospel–the good news of good news, the best news ever delivered. Alleluia–all praise be to God, the Anointed One is risen, Alleluia–and all heaven breaks loose.

The deacon reads the words of the Angel, “I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here...”

The bishop explains this mystery. This sermon takes the threads of all those readings you heard and weaves them together into a glorious and colorful tapestry of triumph.

The Baptismal candidates are brought naked into the Baptismal font, and brought up from the waters to share in that resurrection. And then, as the dawn began to light up the world, you, along with angels and archangels and thrones, dominions, powers, seraphim, and cherubim, and those newly Baptized members, offer the Great Thanksgiving–the Thanksgiving that thanks God for everything. For the gift of life–which we receive twice. For every blessing you counted over the past year. For every little resurrection you have known in the course of your life thus far. And through this you bless God for what God certainly will do in the year to come–and in the great Eighth Day when years will cease to be.

And when the deacon dismissed you, it had just begun: the great season of Easter, Paschaltide, the original “month of Sundays. Fifty days of continual celebration where kneeling was forbidden and joy ruled.

That was the Vigil. And I haven’t exaggerated a thing: it was if anything more vivid and dramatic.

We have a good deal in common with the First Church. We, like the first Christians, live in a multicultural world, a world with bewildering religious options. A world of enormous cultural and ethnic diversity, yet a monolithic imperial culture. A world of head-spinning technological advance, moral relativism, sensual gratification, drugs and drink, sexual adventure, and visual stimuli. In short, a world very, very like the Roman Empire.
The First Church rose to that occasion (wordplay deliberate). It transcended culture, epitomized religion, incorporated technology, proclaimed a truly new morality, and gratified mind, body, and soul in ways that went much deeper than mechanical sensuality. And as the Roman Empire declined, the Church grew.

Since their world really was so much like ours, perhaps their strategies for triumph in such a world should be ours as well. And central to these is the Resurrection. And nothing in 2000 years has expressed that as well as the Great Vigil.