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, and our fall. Most especially tonight, we celebrate our redemption. You might ask, “Celebrate our fall, the loss of our likeness to God through sin?” Yes, we celebrate even that. Listen again 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 ChristOur sin, our most grievous 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 himself through love and not by punishing us.
O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a redeemer1
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 were 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- the life of grace.
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 God’s image is perhaps best described as a divorce between the orders of nature and grace. The result of this great divorce is death.
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 merely as strong as death, but stronger than death.
It is light of Christ’s triumphant resurrection that the apostle Paul taunts death:
Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?2
Just as God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage through the waters of the Red Sea, he delivers us from sin and death through the waters of baptism. Baptism is our own exodus from Egypt. This is exactly what St. Paul was getting at in our reading from Romans. “Are you unaware,” he asks the Christians of ancient Rome, “that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” You see, in baptism we die, are buried, and rise to new life, “so,” quoting Paul again, “that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”3
The new life you have in Christ does not begin when you die; it begins at baptism. Eternal life is now! For Christians there is one vocation: follow Christ. Each of us received this calling at baptism.
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 observed: “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.”4
The good news, my friends, as the ancient Christian greeting puts it is, Christo anesti. Alithos anesti – Christ is risen! Truly he is risen! And so, we are not the most pitiable people of all. We are the most blessed people of all because, through Christ, we have conquered death.
Jesus is not merely a historical figure from the remote past, who lived a long time ago in a land far away, belonging to an ancient culture that’s difficult for us to understand. To view Jesus, either exclusively or primarily, as a historical figure is to “seek the living one among the dead.”5
My friends, Jesus is risen from the dead. He is alive and active through the Holy Spirit, who is the mode of his resurrection presence in, among, and through us until he comes again. In a few moments we will all witness resurrection, when our Elect are baptized. We will see, hear, and by their anointing with Sacred Chrism, even smell for ourselves the life-giving love of God generously poured out.
Since Thursday night, the Church has been in liturgy. At the end of our Mass this evening, you will be dismissed, that is, sent forth. You are sent out to tell others about what you have witnessed. It isn’t possible to keep truly Good News to yourself.
1 Roman Missal, Sunday of the Resurrection, The Easter Vigil, The Easter Proclamation (Exsultet), sec. 19.↩
2 1 Corinthians 15:54b-55.↩
3 Romans 6:3-5.↩
4 1 Corinthians 15:17.19.↩
5 Luke 24:5.↩
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