Ah
ha! I found it. It was in a book,
not online like I thought. It was in Fr. Kocik’s book
The Reform of the Reform?; specifically,
an essay (?) by Fr. John Parsons.
Having celebrated the Easter Vigil from 1993 to 1997 with the four readings retained in 1951 and reproduced in the typical edition of 1962, I increasingly felt that there was something wrong with the readings; they suffered from an undeniable air of anti-climax and incoherence. When I took the time to study the traditional series of twelve “prophecies”, each followed by a collect summing up its meaning in the mind of the Church, and to study the sung responsories mysteriously placed after the fourth, eighth and eleventh in the series, I realised that they were not twelve readings in a row, but rather
three nocturns of four readings each, and that each nocturn had a
theme that was
summed up in the sung responsory that marked its end. The first four; the Creation, the Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Crossing of the Red Sea, are about
God’s creation of a Chosen People; the second four are about the increasing
inadequacy of that people’s response to God’s Call; while the last nocturn is about
God’s solution of this conundrum through the sending of the Messiah, who is foreshadowed in
three readings as respectively Priest, Prophet and King.
The
twelfth reading, mysteriously placed after the final sung responsory and unaccompanied by the penitential gesture of kneeling, is explained by the fact that
the Vigil, properly speaking, is over; the reading looks forward to what is immediately at hand. In the crowded Baptistery on Easter night, the candidates descend up to their waists into the waters of the enormous font and walk about in them, saved and praising God for their deliverance from the worship of the idol of Caesar which the Roman imperial power had so recently demanded.
The baptizandi are seen by the Church, through its choice of Old Testament reading, as foreshadowed by the three young Hebrews who walk about in the flames saved and praising God in Nebuchanezzar’s fiery furnace, likewise delivered from the worship of the idol of the Babylonian king and from the dilemma of physical or spiritual death.
The fiery furnace is a kind of anti-type of the Lateran Baptistery.