Musings after Archbishop Sample’s 2025 Easter Vigil Homily

Each year, the Easter Vigil offers the Church a cosmic interruption. It's the night in which time cracks open and eternity pours through. And this year, Archbishop Sample’s homily reminded us—quietly but unmistakably—that the Resurrection is not a metaphor. It's a rupture. A healing. A mission.

We're not permitted to be ungrateful for the miracle of existence.

The Most Important Night—Yet the Most Overlooked

The Easter Vigil is the crown jewel of Christian liturgy. But in our time, its brilliance is hidden not by persecution, but by indifference. It begins late. It runs long. It is ritual-heavy and slow. For many, it's exhausting.

Yet perhaps its very inconvenience is the beginning of its sanctity.

In an age that worships efficiency and comfort, the Easter Vigil stands as a silent protest. It doesn't entertain. It doesn't flatter our schedules. It waits. It builds. It dares to make us linger at the edge of the tomb.

Its strangeness isn't a liability—it's a clue. Because the Vigil isn't simply one liturgy among others. It's a theological event; a metaphysical rupture; an existential confrontation. It gathers every thread of salvation history into a single night. It's not merely beautiful. It's true.

But if we are to enter it rightly, we must first ask: What do we even mean by "sacred"?

What Is the Sacred, and Why Have We Lost It?

The sacred isn't simply the religious. It's that which resists reduction. It cannot be consumed, commodified, or explained away. It provokes reverence, awe, sometimes fear. It exposes us.

To say that something is sacred is to say: “Here, the infinite has touched the finite. Proceed slowly.”

Modernity, however, has exiled the sacred from public life. Not by disproving it, but by growing bored with it. We live in what Kołakowski called “a world without windows”—a world where every mystery is either a problem to be solved or a preference to be tolerated. We no longer kneel; we scroll. We no longer adore; we optimize.

And yet—we are not at peace. The sacred, though repressed, hasn't died. It returns. Not always in cathedrals, but in dreams, in silence, in sudden tears, in great art, in deathbeds, and in the aching intuition that this cannot be all there is.

The Easter Vigil speaks to that buried longing.

The Liturgy as Counter-Narrative

The Vigil doesn't begin with noise. It begins with darkness. The liturgy forces us to wait. No music. No speech. Only a flame—one fragile light in a vast silence.

This isn't liturgical theater. It's a reenactment of the cosmic wound: the death of God. But it's also the dawn of cosmic hope: the defeat of death.

Consider the sequence:

  • We kindle fire in a world grown cold.
  • We process slowly into a building that was empty, just as the tomb was.
  • We proclaim ancient readings, not because they are informative, but because they place us within a story that precedes us, transcends us, and—if we are honest—terrifies us with its demands.

This is not “symbolic” in the shallow sense. It is ontological theater. In the Vigil, we do not commemorate resurrection—we enter it.

Why It Must Be Difficult

Modernity tells us that meaning must be accessible. That religion must be practical. That if something does not produce results, it's not worth doing.

But sacred things—real sacred things—are never efficient.

The Vigil takes time because salvation took time. The Resurrection came only after centuries of wandering, failure, promise, and pain. If you feel the readings are long, good. So was exile. So was slavery. So was Holy Saturday.

The Vigil should resist us, as the Gospel resists every age. It should feel alien. Not because the Church is out of touch, but because God is not a lifestyle brand.

How to Enter the Vigil

Let's be honest: belief doesn't come easily today. We're formed by algorithms, irony, and distraction. If we're to believe again—not in abstract doctrines, but in the risen Christ—we must pass through the fire of recognition.

The Vigil is that fire.

It's not an escape from modernity. It's an interruption of it.

It demands:

  • That we fast from urgency and rediscover awe.
  • That we surrender control and receive mystery.
  • That we stand at the tomb, not as analysts, but as witnesses.

Because here—on this night—the question is not merely “Did Christ rise?”
The deeper question is: “Will I rise with Him?”

Final Paradox: The Night That Unmakes Death

The Vigil is strange. It is long. It is dark.

But that is because it's addressing a stranger darkness: the one inside us. It doesn't “make sense” in the ordinary way. But neither does resurrection.

And this is why we must keep vigil.

Not to perform a rite.
Not to check a box.
But to stand before the empty tomb and hear again the most offensive, most beautiful, most destabilizing proclamation ever made:

“He is not here. He is risen.”

And if that is true, then nothing—nothing—is as it seems.

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