A Season for Alleluia

Happy Easter!

We’ve entered the season of the church year of celebration and feasting – forty days of remembering with joy that Christ is risen and is among us. If we’ve observed Lent, the forty days of fasting before Easter, then we surely should mark this time of feasting afterwards.

Augustine of Hippo, the eminent theologian, spoke in a sermon about this time of celebration – a time of saying “alleluia.” (Especially as during Lent, we don’t say this word; in fact, some people symbolically bury the word during Lent and then dramatically bring it out on Easter morning.) Here’s the quotation from sermon 255:

Since it was the Lord’s will that I visit your graces in alleluia time, I owe you a word or two on alleluia. I trust I won’t bore you if I remind you of what you already know; because, after all, we not only say this alleluia every day, we also take pleasure in it every day. You know, of course, that alleluia means, in English, “Praise God”; and by singing this word together, our voices in harmony and our hearts in agreement, we are urging each other on to praise God. The only people who can praise him without a qualm are those who have nothing about him that might displease him.

And indeed, during this time of our exile and our wandering, we say alleluia to cheer us on our way. At present alleluia is for us a traveler’s song; but by a toilsome road we are wending our way to home and rest where, all our busy activities over and done with, the only thing that will remain will be alleluia.