MASS READINGS
April 19, 2025 (Readings on USCCB website)
PROPERS [Show]
COLLECT PRAYER
Easter Vigil in the Holy Night, Opening Prayer: Dear brethren, on this most sacred night in which our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life, the Church calls upon her sons and daughters, scattered throughout the world, to come together to watch and pray. If we keep the memorial of the Lord's paschal solemnity in this way, listening to his word and celebrating his mysteries, then we shall have the sure hope of sharing his triumph over death and living with him in God.
Easter Vigil in the Holy Night, Collect: O God, who make this most sacred night radiant with the glory of the Lord's Resurrection, stir up in your Church a spirit of adoption, so that, renewed in body and mind, we may render you undivided service. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
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On Holy Saturday, the Church waits at the Lord's tomb, in prayer and fasting, meditating on his Passion and Death and on his Descent into Hell and awaiting his Resurrection. The Church abstains from the Sacrifice of the Mass, with the sacred table left bare, until after the solemn Vigil, that is, the anticipation by night of the Resurrection, when the time comes for paschal joys, the abundance which overflows to occupy fifty days. Holy Communion may only be given on this day as Viaticum. —The Roman Missal, Third Typical Edition
From the Easter Vigil Liturgy of Light:
May the light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.
From the Exsultet:
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour
when Christ rose from the underworld!
This is the night of which it is written:
The night shall be as bright as day,
dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.
“O truly blessed Night," sings the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil, which alone deserved to know the time and the hour when Christ rose from the realm of the dead! (“O vere beata nox, quae sola meruit scire tempus et horam, in qua Christus ab inferis resurrexit!”) But no one was an eyewitness to Christ’s Resurrection and no evangelist describes it. No one can say how it came about physically. Still less was its innermost essence, his passing over to another life, perceptible to the senses. Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles’ encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history. This is why the risen Christ does not reveal himself to the world, but to his disciples ‘to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people’” (Acts 13:31; cf. Jn 14:22). (CCC 647).
Meditation for Holy Saturday
This morning the Church's "station" is not at a particular basilica made holy by the relics of martyrs and the prayers of those who have venerated them; rather, the Church's Holy Saturday "station" is her religious imagination. There is no Mass during the day, so there is neither a collecta where the Church gathers nor a statio to which the Church processes. In the evening, as the sun sets, the Church will gather at St. John Lateran, the "mother and head of all the churches in the city and the world," to await the dawn of Resurrection. Now, before the Easter Vigil, is a time to enter reflectively into the divine rest.
In today's Office of Readings, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews ponders this moment by reference to the Sabbath that God decreed on the seventh day, so that he might rest "from all his work which he had done in creation" [Genesis 2.3]. The divine promise, in creation, was that humanity might also enter that Sabbath rest. Sin changed, not the promise, but its realization, which required human cooperation. Our ancestors "did not benefit" from God's word and fell away from the righteous path God had pointed out, arousing the divine wrath: "Therefore I swore in my anger that they should not enter my rest" [Psalm 95.11].
The God of creation—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom Jesus calls "Father"—does not renege on his promises, however; nor is his anger the essence of his being. He is the Father of mercies, who welcomes the prodigal son back from his foolishness, restores to him the dignity of his squandered sonship, and invites him to reenter his family home, where he may be at rest. And so, the author of Hebrews writes, God "again... sets a certain day," a new day of Sabbath rest: that rest is the Kingdom of God come in its fullness, the Kingdom announced in the person and mission of Jesus. The key to opening the gates of that Kingdom is the Son's obedience to the Father's will, which makes sonship possible for all who believe in the Son.
In this moment of rest and reflection, the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to begin our reflection on the cosmic drama of creation and redemption that will be continued tonight at the Easter Vigil, and to ponder, in the silence of this day, the rest—the eternal Sabbath—that awaits the faithful.
The unknown author of the ancient Greek Holy Saturday homily that follows in today's Office of Readings also remarks on the silence of this day that is in-between: "There is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep." Stunned by the epic drama that took place yesterday, when "the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, and earth shook and the rocks were split" [Matthew 27.51], nature itself is quiet: "The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh."
Yet the King, while asleep in the tomb, is not inactive. Rather, as our anonymous Greek preacher puts it, "he has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep." As centuries of Christian iconography, following the Apostles Creed, have depicted the scene, Jesus at his death descended into the land of the dead. But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes clear, "he descended there as Savior, proclaiming the good news to the spirits imprisoned there."...
What happened yesterday touches and transforms all of history, including the past. There is nothing in the human condition that Jesus did not share, and there is nothing in the human condition that Jesus did not redeem.
This day of rest is also an opportunity to reflect upon the nature of the atonement that Jesus effected yesterday by his obedient death on the Cross. Few aspects of Christian doctrine are more misunderstood than the doctrine of the atonement. In its liberal Protestant forms, mid-twentieth-century Christian theology was so off-put by the idea of the divine wrath and the atoning death of Christ that it ended up stripping salvation history of its cosmic and redemptive drama; such smiley-face Christianity was famously parodied by H. Richard Niebuhr in biting terms: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Traces of this biblical hollowness can be found in various Christian communities today, again because of a misunderstanding of the doctrine of atonement....
In the silence of this day, the Church ponders the Good News that some considered a folly and others a stumbling block, but that nonetheless changed the world: in the crucified Christ, now in the tomb, the eyes of faith see not absurdity and divine vengeance, but the ultimate demonstration of divine love.
—George Weigel, Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches
Holy Saturday
Holy Saturday (from Sabbatum Sanctum, its official liturgical name) is sacred as the day of the Lord's rest; it has been called the "Second Sabbath" after creation. The day is and should be the most calm and quiet day of the entire Church year, a day broken by no liturgical function. Christ lies in the grave, the Church sits near and mourns. After the great battle He is resting in peace, but upon Him we see the scars of intense suffering...The mortal wounds on His Body remain visible...Jesus' enemies are still furious, attempting to obliterate the very memory of the Lord by lies and slander.
Mary and the disciples are grief-stricken, while the Church must mournfully admit that too many of her children return home from Calvary cold and hard of heart. When Mother Church reflects upon all of this, it seems as if the wounds of her dearly Beloved were again beginning to bleed.
According to tradition, the entire body of the Church is represented in Mary: she is the "credentium collectio universa" (Congregation for Divine Worship, Lettera circolare sulla preparazione e celebrazione delle feste pasquali, 73). Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, as she waits near the Lord's tomb, as she is represented in Christian tradition, is an icon of the Virgin Church keeping vigil at the tomb of her Spouse while awaiting the celebration of his resurrection.
The pious exercise of the Ora di Maria is inspired by this intuition of the relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Church: while the body of her Son lays in the tomb and his soul has descended to the dead to announce liberation from the shadow of darkness to his ancestors, the Blessed Virgin Mary, foreshadowing and representing the Church, awaits, in faith, the victorious triumph of her Son over death.
—Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy
Although we are still in mourning, there is much preparation during this day to prepare for Easter. Out of the kitchen comes the smells of Easter pastries and bread, the lamb or hams and of course, the Easter eggs.
There are no liturgies celebrated until the Easter Vigil. Some local parish priests bless the food baskets on this day. In Slavic countries there is a blessing of the traditional Easter foods, prepared in baskets: eggs, ham, lamb and sausages, butter and cheeses, horseradish and salt and the Easter breads. The Easter blessings of food owe their origin to the fact that these particular foods, namely, fleshmeat and milk products, including eggs, were forbidden in the Middle Ages during the Lenten fast and abstinence. When the feast of Easter brought the rigorous fast to an end, and these foods were again allowed at table, the people showed their joy and gratitude by first taking the food to church for a blessing. Moreover, they hoped that the Church's blessing on such edibles would prove a remedy for whatever harmful effects the body might have suffered from the long period of self-denial. Today the Easter blessings of food are still held in many churches in the United States, especially in Slavic parishes.
If there is no blessing for the Easter foods in the parish, the father of the family can pray the Blessing over the Easter foods.
The entire celebration of the Easter Vigil must take place during the night, so that it begins after nightfall and ends before daybreak on the Sunday. See further details on the Easter Vigil Liturgy.
Highlights and Things to Do:
- Today we remember Christ in the tomb. The day is usually spent working on the final preparations for the biggest feast of the Church year. The list of suggested activities is long, but highlights are decorating Easter eggs and attending a special Easter food blessing.
- For families with smaller children, you could create a miniature Easter garden, with a tomb. The figure of the risen Christ will be placed in the garden on Easter morning.
- Another activity for families is creating a paschal candle to use at home. See Family in Feast and Feria, Jennifer Gregory Miller's personal blog for an easy Paschal candle graphic to use to make a candle for home.
- The Directory on Popular Piety discusses some of the various devotions related to Easter, including the Blessing of the Family Table, Annual Blessing of Family Home, the Via Lucis and the Visit to the Mother of the Risen Christ.
Meditation on the Easter Vigil:
During the Easter Vigil, the Church awaits its "blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds" [Titus 2.13-14]. The Church's waiting is both historical and eschatological, both "then" and "future": with the holy women, we await the dawn of Resurrection and the announcement that the Lord is risen indeed; as the Church today, we await his return in glory, which will complete the drama of salvation history and inaugurate the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in its full splendor.
The readings at the Easter Vigil, which follow the lighting of the paschal candle and the singing of the Exultet, make present in word and imagination the crucial moments in salvation history: Creation, culminating in the breath of life being given to man and woman, images of the Creator in themselves and in their communion; the testing of Abraham, whose obedience made him our "father in faith"; the exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the chosen people from slavery and its death-dealing habits; Isaiah's visions of a world made aright in justice and peace, a world of bounty freely given and gratefully received; Baruch's testimony to the divine wisdom in giving humanity the law that liberates; Ezekiel's exilic prophecy of a people of God cleaned from impurity, whose "heart of stone" will be replaced by a "heart of flesh."
After these readings, best proclaimed with the lights dimmed, the Church anticipates the proclamation of the Lord's Resurrection by singing the Gloria, during which bells are rung and the church fully illuminated. Now, in anticipation of the baptismal liturgy that will shortly follow, the Church reads Paul's reminder to the Romans that "all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death." This dying with Christ is no mere recapitulation; rather, it is a sacramental living out of what the Church has pondered throughout this day and anticipates in its Easter celebration: "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life."
The gospel reading at the Easter Vigil varies according to the three-year Lectionary cycle. Each of these Synoptic gospel selections ends on a note of surprise and puzzlement: it will take time for the holy women and the remaining eleven disciples to understand the meaning of the empty tomb and the angelic message there. Read today, with the eyes of faith, the initial incomprehension of those closest to Jesus is a reminder that every disciple must grow in a knowledge of the Resurrection and in an appreciation of what Easter faith truly means.
Pope Francis stressed this note of surprise in his first Easter Vigil homily as Bishop of Rome, noting that, as it was with the apostles and the holy women, "Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness that God asks of us." Easter calls us beyond such fears, though: "Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives! Are we often weary, disheartened, and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won't be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up." For Easter faith teaches us that "there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if only we open ourselves to him."
—George Weigel, Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches
Holy Saturday--Easter Vigil of the Sacred Triduum
Station with San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran):
The Station returns again to St. John Lateran. During the afternoon of Holy Saturday the faithful were summoned here for the final scrutiny of the catechumens. Then, in the evening began the vigil or night of watching which concluded at dawn with the solemn baptisms—-the neophytes, plunged into the baptismal waters and there buried with Christ, were born to the life of grace at the very time when our Savior came forth triumphant from the tomb at dawn on Easter morning.
For more on San Giovanni in Laterano, see:
For further information on the Station Churches, see The Stational Church.
