Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday

Easter Vigil & Easter Sunday
4 & 5 April 2026
Gospel: Matthew 28:1-10

 On this holy [night/day] the Church ushers in the greatest of solemn feasts, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This great feast comes after the long preparation of penance in Lent. In Lent, by the means of penance and more serious striving, we seek to die to the things that weigh us down and that keep us bound to the fallen nature of this world. We seek to die to those things, to our sins, so that we, too, might celebrate a rising to new and deeper life in Christ. By his resurrection, our Lord is ushering in a new creation. We are invited to be part of that new creation. He “makes all things new” (cf. Rev. 21:5), the Scriptures say. In fact, we need to be part of that renewing work in Christ if we are to ultimately rise in the only way that matters: rising after our own bodily death and rising such that we are rescued from that death that is called eternal. This participation in the new creation of the Risen Lord is the foundation for the serious opportunity and obligation that we have for Sunday worship each week. What the Lord did on the day of his resurrection is the reason we gather each and every Sunday.

I think Mary Magdalene can serve as a model for what should be taking place in the life of a Christian who commits himself to participating in the Lord’s work and in his new creation. The scene of the arrest of Jesus, his torture, his crucifixion and his burial – which we have meditated upon in these holy days – were not very proud moments for the men who followed the Lord. There was betrayal and denial among the apostles. All of them were absent or had fled and so did not even witness the crucifixion, except for John who is recorded as being there. But Mary Magdalene appears several times in the scenes of Jesus’ crucifixion, his burial where she stayed watching the tomb after it had been sealed, and in the resurrection passage we hear today, where she is the first to see the empty tomb, to hear the message of the resurrection, and to encounter the Risen Lord as she went to announce that good news.

 The Gospel tells us that “[A]fter the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning” Mary Magdalene came again to see the tomb. She had been quite focused on the reality of the torture and death of the Lord. She had been quite focused on staying near the sign of his death, the sealed-up tomb. But something happens on this visit to the tomb after the sabbath, very early on the first day of the week. That timing is significant for us and for our participation in this mystery. The Lord rose from the dead on the day after the sabbath. The Jewish sabbath is a reflection of the seventh day of creation where God rested from His work. The sabbath is observed on Saturday. To celebrate faith in the new thing that was accomplished in the resurrection, in time Christians naturally focused on the day after the sabbath and transferred sabbath disciplines and obligations to Sunday. Now that does not mean that the sabbath has moved or is now Sunday. No, the sabbath remains Saturday but our Christian obligations to observe the sabbath commands have been transferred to Sunday. When the Gospel tells us that the resurrection happened early on the first day of the week, we have confirmation of that day being Sunday. The Gospel tells us the first day of the week is the day after the sabbath. So, if you count backward from the sabbath (Saturday) as the seventh day, you get Sunday as the first day.

  This is important for us who know ourselves as Christians to have significant opportunity for blessings on Sundays. The Book of Genesis [the Vigil’s first reading] with its familiar account of creation gives us an important clue not only about what God was doing then (in the original creation), but about what He is doing now on Sunday, the first day of the week. As we know in the Genesis account, God rested from all His work on the seventh day, the sabbath. When you count back to the first day, that means God began creation on a Sunday. In that work of creation, we are told that a mighty wind swept over the waters. That word translated as “wind” is the same Hebrew word for “spirit” or “breath”. As the Spirit of God, the mighty wind, moved over the waters in that formless chaos at the beginning of creation, light was created and broke through darkness on that first day. When we consider that Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week after a sabbath, we have something new taking place on a Sunday. Jesus described his own departure, his crucifixion and death as his baptism, his immersion as if in waters (cf. Mk. 10:38-39). The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, brought new life and light from darkness after the Lord Jesus was immersed in the consequences (chaos) of our sin. This Gospel passage of the resurrection gives us allusions to the beginning of creation. In so doing, we see that Sunday of the Resurrection is the beginning of a new creation that is ushered in by the Lord after he takes his sabbath rest in the silence of the tomb, in the sleep of death. He is victorious over sin and death. He does so to invite us to participate in his fullness of life.

 In this we can understand what Sunday is for us and how Mary Magdalene can be a model for us. If we want to be renewed and refashioned, to rise from our defects and all that is old in us, we are called to participate in the recreation brought about by the Lord. We begin that participation by faith and baptism, our own being covered by the waters made holy by God’s Spirit. But our recreation, while accomplished once for all in baptism, needs to develop into fullness and maturity. And thus, time and time again, fulfilling the Lord’s Day, we come here on the first day of the week. If your life is like mine, days are packed, weeks go by so very fast, and – sadly – it doesn’t take long after being in church, to go outside these walls and to lose grasp on a spiritual focus and to fail to keep our eyes fixed on the Lord. In some sense, perhaps we are like Mary Magdalene, focused so much and so easily on the tomb, unaware that we might even expect anything different from it. Like her, perhaps we have generally good motivations and we desire to honor the Lord, but with the pace of life we can find ourselves revisiting tombs, familiar places, but places where we are not fully alive. Like Mary in the Gospel, perhaps we seek “Jesus the crucified”, meaning we aren’t expecting more from the situations of life than what they have already given us, a finality, an end, the death of a crucifixion. But God in His faithfulness and love, in His work of ushering in a new creation, can work even with our failure of vision and can break through the darkness and chaos of life such that new life breaks through the darkness. Our fidelity to our Christian duty and opportunity on Sundays creates the possibility that we will be where the Lord is active in making us new and revealing himself as very much alive in the fast pace of our days. As easy as it is to lose our focus and trust in the Lord’s recreating work, we come time and time again on the first day of the week so that we can be renewed in the Lord’s new creation. Receiving such grace and growing to the maturity begun in us in baptism, we, like Mary Magdalene, are called to announce the good news to others. And when we do, we not only have an empty tomb or a dark past of our own to serve as proof of the Lord’s redeeming work; rather, we have a living and active encounter with the Risen Lord himself who tells us not to fear, to go out to others, and ultimately to have the grace of new life in him.