Easter Vigil

Easter Vigil
16 April 2022
Gospel: Luke 24:1-12

In the ritual system of our Catholic worship, whose absolute pinnacle you are climbing by your participation in this Easter Vigil with its evocative gestures and symbols, we regularly hear from the narrative of mankind’s salvation by listening to God’s Word recorded in that Catholic book called the Bible.  In entirely unique fashion, this Vigil has us listen to God’s love and saving action through a hefty number of readings, nine in all.  And that doesn’t even count the psalms that we sing and the numerous antiphons and other ritual words that come directly from the Sacred Scriptures.  In listening to the Scriptures we encounter God’s living word.  And we are intended to take that Word into our being and our way of living.  We are intended – the image might be – to breathe it in.  To let God’s inspiration be our respiration!  It is a living, not a dead Word.

We have to be careful that we do not succumb to the unhealthy and unholy busyness of modern life, falling prey to its materialist and secular mind, such that we begin to think of God’s Word as only words on a page, a static recounting of someone’s past history, a monument to the unsophisticated mind of some past cultures before the scientific age, dare I say… a dead word.  Salvation history recounted in Scripture is composed of past historical events and saving actions, yes, but God is acting to save us in our time too and to speak His Word to us, a Word that is always alive.  And so, we need to practice the art of seeing ourselves in salvation history.  We need to practice the art of seeing and receiving what God is doing now for us in the gestures and symbols of worship that communicate and make present His saving power.

An ancient homily on Holy Saturday is used in the Church’s prayer on Holy Saturday.  That ancient homily is a reflection on what faith tells us this day is about.  Quote: “The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.  The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began.  God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear,” end quote.  God has chosen to subject Himself to falling asleep because by Original Sin and by our personal sins we are deserving of falling asleep.  God comes in our flesh.  He comes to live our very life.  He comes, collapsing the distance between us and Him, to place Himself into our experience that He might plant the seed of divinity there.  That means we must see our lives as the soil to receive God’s planting.  The living God with His living Word comes even into our sleeping to plant the divine power of new life.   That ancient Holy Saturday homily goes on to describe how God has entered His creation to bear and to reform the marks that cause us to fall asleep.  “I order you, O sleeper, to awake.  I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell.  Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.  Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image…. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed … in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.  See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you.  See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image.  On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back.  See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.”

All this is to say that, as we hear salvation history in God’s Word and renew our faith that it is a living Word, and as we meditate upon God’s action and the response of His people, and as we marvel at how God has chosen to enter into our life and to plant in our way of being the seed of divinity, what we marvel at is not only God’s action in entering our life, but that in the gestures of worship we recognize a call to seek, and to enter, and to live a godly life – we marvel that we are called to enter His life.  What God has done in coming to us and working within us is a relationship and not a one-way street.  As that ancient Holy Saturday homily reflected on what the Lord Jesus did in taking on our life and entering our sleep to overcome it, so relationship with God is an invitation to us to place ourselves into godly life.  God’s living Word experienced in the Scriptures but also in the gestures and symbols of our liturgical life is a principal way we enter into and we live the life of God.  It is a practice of sorts that we get here.  But entering into and living a godly life must happen outside these walls too, so that the light of divine life we have received might grow and dispel the darkness that still envelopes so many in our world.  As we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus the empty tomb is the witness to the truth of this saving event.  It is a witness on which we must firmly plant our faith.  Yet, in an almost curious-sounding way, it is NOT a witness on which we are called to plant our feet.  For just as the women in the Gospel went to perform the liturgical action of anointing Jesus, but then left, returning “from the tomb and announced all these things,” so our liturgical action here is meant to strengthen and restore our faith in God’s saving action and to drive us out to announce all this to others that they, too, might be amazed at what has happened.

 (slightly adapted for delivery Easter Sunday)