Easter Vigil (2026) - Fr Christopher Dowd, OP

This evening, the Solemn Vigil of the Sunday of the Most Holy Resurrection of the Lord, we are at the very centre, the very heart of the faith, the prayer, and the life of the Church, the assembly of all those who by faith are incorporated into Christ. Easter Sunday is the feast of feasts.

The first Christian communities had only one annual feast, Easter Sunday, which was echoed in all of the other Sundays of the year – each Sunday is first and foremost a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

The other feasts and seasons grew up around Easter Sunday, Lent before and Eastertide afterwards. All of these other liturgical observances either look forward to Easter Sunday or look back to it. The liturgical calendar is like a giant set of concentric circles, with Easter Sunday at the centre. It is a bit like the solar system – with all of the planets and moons and asteroid belts and so on rotating around the life-giving and light-shedding sun of Easter Sunday. What Sunday is to the week, Easter Sunday is to the entire year of praise and worship.

For us as the people who seek to know, to love and to follow the Lord Jesus and have come to worship God, His Father and ours, here in this church of St Dominic at East Camberwell, there is no earthly place more sacred than this space right here and there is no earthly time more sacred than this time right now.

The resurrection of our beloved Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, is the turning point of all time and all space. It is the great pivot of the entire sweep of history and the cosmos. The new and glorious life of the risen Christ is the focal point and the summit of the whole of existence. It was for the sake of the resurrection of the sacred humanity of His Son in time and space that almighty God created the universe of time and space in the first place. Christ is the logos, the plan, the reason, the wisdom through which all things exist. God created time, matter and space so that there could be a resurrection, which depends on time, matter and space.

There is no more important time than the time that we are liturgically remembering just now. As we sang earlier in the evening in the Exsultet, the great hymn in praise of the resurrection, “O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and the hour when Christ rose from the underworld.”

Our liturgy tonight, whatever imperfections it might have, is a foretaste of the life that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven. In heaven we will be gathered with the vast company of all the angels and saints around God the Father to worship him and to sing the praises of His Son the Christ who, for our sake, was made man, was put to death and was raised to a radiant, shining, triumphant new life, never to die again. That is what we will be doing in heaven and that is what we are doing here in this place and now at this time. Tonight’s liturgy breaks down the barriers between heaven and earth and reminds us that while the life of heaven comes to its perfection and fullness beyond the grave, it is a life which begins and grows here on earth. For us heaven has already begun thanks to the rising of Christ.

Easter places great emphasis on baptism. After these words of mine, we will renew our baptismal promises and we will be splashed with the freshly blessed Easter water as a reminder of our own baptism, as a reminder that the life of Christ, which is the life of heaven, has already begun in us.

As the followers of our risen Lord, it is our baptismal vocation to allow God to bring to perfection the saving work he has begun in us. We do that by striving to think and act in accordance with the mind of Christ – to live in the light of His example, and, above all, to share the troubles, the burdens and difficulties of those around us in the spirit of the compassion of Christ who died and rose again for us. In heaven now the cross is only a memory, but if we are serious about following the way of Christ, then our daily lives will be frequently lived under the sign of the cross – but this is only a temporary situation.

Our hope for our eternal future is held under the sign of the resurrection – and that is what ultimately counts because not the cross but the resurrection is, please God, the final goal and destiny for each one of us. Through union with Christ in His obedience to God and His compassion for others may we come to rise with him in whom we find joy, peace, happiness and delight without end.

AMEN.

Fr Christopher Dowd, OP is is a lecturer in Church History at Catholic Theological College of the University of Divinity, and is assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.