Introduction
THE PASSOVER OF THE LORD

Almost twenty years ago, when I was living in England, I got up one cold morning while it was still dark. I showered hastily, trying to scrub drowsiness away. I pulled on a heavy coat and walked down the steep hill from my flat, across the bridge that spanned the River Wear, and up another, steeper hill to reach the Cathedral Church in Durham. It was spring, but there was fresh snow on the ground.

As I moved closer to the cathedral, I joined a small but steady stream of other worshipers, bundled against the predawn frost, making their way into the nave. If anyone was speaking, it was in hushed tones. We were gathering for the service of the Great Vigil of Easter, the climax of the entire Christian calendar. I had been to many Easter services, but I was attending this one with a mix of intentionality and expectancy.

When we entered the vast, shadowed, silent space, ushers with small flashlights directed us out of the nave, the main sanctuary, to the chapter house (a windowless stone chamber where clerics meet), where we would sit in total darkness for a long series of Scripture readings that together recalled the high points of God's covenant history with his people. The service began with these words: "This is the night in which our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life. The church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer. For this is the Passover of the Lord, in which through word and sacrament we share in his victory over death."

There was a reading from the book of Genesis about God's creation of the world. Another reading about the first human couple eating fruit that God had forbidden them and thereby plunging their descendants into woe and death. Another about Noah, the ark he built in a waterless plain, and the improbable flood that destroyed everyone alive except the small family huddled in the big boat.

I shivered in the dark.

On the litany went: Isaac awaiting but ultimately avoiding his father Abraham's knife, Moses throwing off his sandals as he knelt in front of the burning but unburnt bush. Reading after reading. Voices intoning ancient stories followed one after another, like ticks of a slow clock.

We arrived, finally, at the story of the Passover. God's people, the Israelites, had been slaves for hundreds of years, barely conscious of any honor they retained as Abraham's progeny. Maybe the fact that God had promised Abraham a land of their own sustained hope that they could still be released-but maybe it didn't, at least not for many. To this disillusioned people Moses appeared, announcing that the time for rescue was here. God had heard his people's lament and decided to act. God bombarded the recalcitrant Egyptian king with a torrent of plagues, the last one of which would, he promised, cause "a loud cry throughout the whole land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again" (Exodus 11:6). The final judgment would be a visit from a dark, inscrutable divine messenger who would take the life of every firstborn in every home in Egypt.

There was a chance of escape, though. Moses relayed the plan God had made for the Israelites' protection: they were to kill a lamb, roast it, and eat it hastily (they'd soon be walking out of Egypt, so best not to sit down and kick off shoes), and smear its blood on their homes' vertical doorposts and the horizontal beam that connected them (which some of the church's most insightful teachers have interpreted as a cruciform pattern-the two doorposts featuring the blood from Jesus' pierced hands, the lintel collecting the flow from his thorn-torn scalp). When the angel of death saw the blood, he would know to pass by the house so marked and spare the children inside from the terrible decree. This experience of the Hebrew people-pesakh in their language or pascha in Aramaic and Greek-is the church's oldest name for its observance of what happened with Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion.1

After several more readings-the story of the rescued Israelites crossing the Red Sea, poetic prophecies from Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the last of which rushes hearers to a bleak valley of dry bones slowly being reanimated with sinews, muscles, and skin-we emerged blinking from the crypt and moved into an enclosed courtyard surrounded by four covered walkways. By the time I got there, the bishop was already standing in the middle next to a billowing fire from which an enormous candle was being lit and pierced with five grains of incense ensconced in wax nails, symbolizing Christ's wounds on the cross.

"The light of Christ!" a cantor intoned once the wick flamed.

"Thanks be to God!" we all responded.

Then the cantor chanted the ancient words of the Exultet:

This is the night when you first saved our ancestors,

freeing Israel from her slavery

and leading her safely through the sea.

"Glory to you for ever," the congregation sang in response.

This is the night when Jesus Christ vanquished hell,

broke the chains of death

and rose triumphant from the grave.

Glory to you for ever.

This is the night that gave us back what we had lost;

beyond our deepest dreams

you made even our sin a happy fault.

Glory to you for ever.

Holding the enormous candle aloft, the cantor continued,

As we gaze upon the splendour of this flame

fed by melting wax conceived by mother bee,

grant that this Easter Candle may make our darkness light.

For Christ the morning star has risen in glory;

Christ is risen from the dead and his flame of love still burns within us!

Christ sheds his peaceful light on all the world!

Christ lives and reigns for ever and ever!

We filed slowly into the nave and stopped at the rear of the cavernous space and encircled the baptismal font. It was large and slightly elevated. When the bishop stood near it, to baptize several infants that morning, he stood under a wooden structure that spiked upward like an ornate crown. Once the baptismal rite was finished, he took a palm frond, dipped it in the water, and swung it dramatically, showering us worshipers with cold droplets.

"Remember your baptism!" he thundered, wielding the frond like a whipped towel to quell flames.

Then we proceeded toward the front altar. Just as the circular rose window began to let in the first fingers of sunlight to touch our upturned faces, the bishop-finally-yelled out the Easter acclamation: "Alleluia! Christ is risen!"

"He is risen indeed!" we yelled back, sounding like an army celebrating a triumph. People around me took noisemakers-bells, kazoos, xylophones, maracas, and all manner of homemade instruments-out of their purses and backpacks. The nave suddenly resembled a football stadium, with whoops and hugs and smiles and cheers.

By this time, the rose window above the altar was ablaze with light. The bishop slowly mounted the steps to the pulpit. We all waited expectantly to hear what he would say. Only a few years earlier, he had written an eight-hundred-page book persuasively defending the claim that when the earliest Christians said Jesus had been raised to new life by God, they meant it concretely. They really meant that the same person who had been killed and buried was now alive with a new, indestructible bodily life; the corpse that had lain in the tomb had been transformed and recreated by God.

"The resurrection of Jesus," the bishop proclaimed, "is the shocking new birth of a new form of life, a life that has gone through death and out the other side, a new sort of physicality that the world has never seen before."2

I recall sitting in the pew in that moment and thinking that, for all the bishop's eloquence, there was something inadequate in his words. How could human speech, even the most ardent and artful, ever do justice to the reality of that first Easter Sunday?

Preaching is good, but perhaps the singing that we had all heard a few minutes before was even better:

It is right and good that with hearts and minds and voices

we should praise you, Father almighty, the unseen God,

through your only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,

who has saved us by his death,

paid the price of Adam's sin,

and reconciled us once again to you.

What I've just described is one of the most ancient ways the church has kept its greatest, most joyous feast day-the day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, his passing over from death to life. "This magnificent ritual," one liturgical scholar has said, "packed with deep and ancient symbols, gathers into one celebration the essence of Christianity."3 And in my experience, despite all the long centuries that have passed, it has lost none of its power to enchant.

One modern convert from an atheist background and now a priest in the Episcopal...