Sunday, April 4, 2021

Triduum: Easter Vigil

Tonight, our celebration of the great mystery of faith reaches its culmination as we celebrate with great joy the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Tonight, we celebrate our creation in God’s image and likeness, our fall, and, above all, our redemption. You might ask, “Celebrate our fall, are you serious?" I am serious. To support this bold assertion, I appeal to these stunning words of the great Exsultet, sung at the beginning of this Vigil:
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ/
O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a redeemer
Think about it, it’s mind blowing: Our sin, our fault, our rejection of God, did not earn us God’s wrath, but earned us Divine Mercy. How good is God? Only God can take our rejection of him, our attempt to displace him and establish ourselves on his throne and turn us back to himself through love and not by punishing us.

The orders of nature and grace go together, the one, nature, being brought into existence by the other, grace. Created in the image and, at least initially, in the likeness, of God, human beings are created for communion with God, with each other, and with the rest of creation. Being created for communion means being made to participate in God’s divine life - the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Stated simply, we are made for eternal life.

Life eternal is that longing you feel when you find that even your satisfaction has a limit. When your satisfaction reaches that limit, it dissolves into dissatisfaction.

While the image of God is ineradicable and can never be lost, our likeness to God is lost through sin. Losing our likeness to God through sin while retaining the imago Dei, the image of God, is perhaps best described as a divorce between the orders of nature and grace. The best proof of this great divorce is sin, which results in the punishment of humanity by humanity and ultimately death.

According to St. Paul, sin results from death. You see, death threatens to make everything seem futile, worthless, ephemeral, and passing, lacking in ultimate meaning. It is through this crack that sin seeps in. Death is a sign that something is deeply wrong with us and with the world.

While death is a part of nature, and so, natural, it is only “natural” because the order of nature has been disconnected from the order of grace. Christ came to restore this vital connection. He did it by his passion, death, and resurrection, thus proving that love is not only as strong as death, but stronger than death.

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, considering Christ’s triumph, the apostle Paul taunts death:
Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting? (15:54b-55)


Just as God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage through the waters of the Red Sea, he delivers us, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, from sin and death through the waters of baptism. This is exactly what St. Paul was getting at in our reading from Romans. “Are you unaware,” the apostles asked his readers, “that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” In baptism we die, are buried, and rise to new life, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-5).

The new life we have in Christ does not begin at mortal death; it begins at baptism with our paschal death and resurrection. Eternal life begins with our re-birth, with our dying, being buried, and rising with Christ to new life in baptism. Life eternal is not a dream deferred, let alone just a nice idea. Eternal life is now!

Our baptismal vocation is to make God’s reign a present reality. It is not an easy call to fulfill. Heeding your vocation can even mean being killed, which is why it is the only way to be truly alive. Our Lord told his followers, “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body but after that can do no more” (Luke 12:4). Because you died and rose with Christ in baptism, you cannot be killed.

If Christ was not raised from the dead, then, taking a cue from Monty Python, baptism is a farcical aquatic ceremony signifying nothing at all. As St. Paul wrote to the church in ancient Corinth, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins,” before concluding, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all” (1 Cor 15:17.19).

Christos anesti. Alithos anesti – Christ is risen! Truly he is risen! And so, we are not the most pitiable people of all. Through Christ, we have conquered death. Christ’s Easter victory is our Easter victory! To view Jesus as an historical figure is to “seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified” still in the tomb, instead of the Son of God who “has been raised” from the dead and who is now present in a more powerful way, by means of the holy Spirit (Mark 16:5-6).

My friends, Jesus Christ is alive. He remains present in us and among us by the power of his holy Spirit, who is also the Spirit of the Father. We will witness this for ourselves when the holy Spirit is called down upon the waters of the font, when the Spirit is sealed on the foreheads of the newly baptized, empowering them to live for Christ, and when this same Spirit, who is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence in us and among us, transforms the bread and wine and, in turn, us into Christ’s very body- the holy Church of God in Christ, established and perpetuated by the power of the holy Spirit.

But the surest proof that someone has encountered the risen Lord is that s/he feels impelled to become a witness. The Greek word for witness is martyr. And so, like the two Marys in our Gospel, you are sent to tell others, to bear witness to your encounter with the risen Christ.

So, sisters and brothers, let us go forth from this place, filled with joy, bearing witness to Christ’s death and resurrection by loving our neighbors and our enemies, demonstrating our faith by our works, bearing good fruit. This is the mission Christ entrusts to his Church until he comes again. This is the mission on which we are sent at the end of this sacred Triduum, when we are finally dismissed after two solid days of prayer and fasting, by which we have been preparing to renew our baptismal covenant, to renew our acceptance of God’s call.

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