BONUS HOMILY: Easter Vigil 2022

Here we are: we have reached the climax of our celebration. For the past seven days, we have journeyed from the Lord Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, to the final hours of His life, His death on the Cross, to this: the glory of the Resurrection. The glory of the Resurrection that it so beautifully described in the Easter Exsultet as “the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.”

Resurrection is so often described as the goal of Christian life, the promise made by Christ to all Christians. I dare say, though, that we might not fully grasp the meaning and the significance of the Resurrection of Christ or what it offers to us; actually, I don’t think it takes too much boldness to say because to grasp the fullness of the Resurrection is to grasp the fullness of God, and what we must constantly remember is that pursuit is beyond our reach. The human family has been given a mediator to the inaccessible God, His Son, Jesus Christ, and to know the Church and the breadth of its gifts is to know Him, but I don’t think even the boldest of Christians would claim to know Christ, His Church, His will for them, or the meaning of the Resurrection fully.

We live in that in between time where the victory of life over death, good over evil, Christ over sin has already been accomplished, but in the in between time we still don’t see Christ fully in the great beatific vision that we have been promised—that is to say, that great heavenly splendour that awaits us.

As we have done throughout this Holy Week, it would be useful to turn again to the symbols that our faith offers us to understand the great mystery of God in our life. On Palm Sunday, we saw how even of deepest despair could be a proclamation of faith; on Holy Thursday, we saw how service and love of our neighbour brings God even more fully into the world; and on Good Friday, the symbol of suffering was made manifest in the example of Mary who herself is a symbol of perfect discipleship. At this most ancient celebration, the clearest and most distinct symbol offered to us is the contrast between light and darkness, especially as it’s made manifest in the Easter fire that continues to burn in our Easter Candle.

Rightly, the Easter Vigil begins with this holy fire because, unlike how fire is often a symbol for the Holy Spirit at times like Pentecost, it is a symbol for Christ. The fire burns greatly in the beginning of time and indeed even before time when all that existed was God. In the time before time, before space, God lived in perfect relationship with Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation happens, and this is the very first scripture we hear proclaimed: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” but if there is a beginning, there must have been something before that beginning. That something before the beginning is what we call God; St Thomas Aquinas might call it the unmoved mover. The point is that God was before there was. 

His first creation, while “the earth was [still] a formless void” was light. But for a time, human life still seemed to be in darkness. God had not vanished, but His light was that of a candle in the darkness, and the people He chose to reveal that light to most clearly were the Jewish people. Why God chose particularly the Jewish people will always remain for us here a mystery, but certainly the faith of men and women like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were part of that choice. Their great example of faith, of encountering God in profound ways, anticipates the faith we are called to emulate and the deep relationship with God that we are similarly offered. 

The people in these ancient times, the Jewish people included, did not know God as we know God; we must uphold their great dignity and uniqueness while acknowledging that to know Christ is something different, and indeed, something better. That doesn’t mean that Christians themselves are necessarily better; we need only to look at history recent or long ago to know that with certainty. But that knowing Christ is objectively something different and better is what the Lord reveals to us in the great prophecies of Isaiah and Baruch that we hear tonight—the promise that the Lord will not abandon Israel, and how that promise is manifest in His messiah, His messiah who is the manifestation, in fact the Incarnation, of law and prophet, of God Himself. This promise is what Baruch and Israel are anticipating.

Turning back to the Exsultet, we hear proclaimed, the great petition:

            “We pray you that this candle,
             hallowed to the honour of your name,
             may persevere undimmed,
             to overcome the darkness of this night.
             Receive it as a pleasing fragrance,
             and let it mingle with the lights of heaven.”

The undimmed candle that Christ, and its mingling with the light of heaven, is the promise we live in now. The promise of living with Christ in the time of victory is the promise we are given and the time we live in now. It is the death that we share with Him when we are baptized, but also the resurrected glory we share and anticipate, as St Paul says in his letter to the Romans. 

But while the mingling of the light produces the same perfect illumination, it is not the same perfect light in which we will live in heaven. We can know this by turning, at last, to the Gospel tonight. This great account of the third morning after Christ’s death. St Luke describes how Jesus’ friends Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women went to prepare Jesus’ body for its permanent rest, but instead, they are greeted by “two men in dazzling clothes” who St Luke will later call angels. These angels reveal the light; they point the women to understand that Jesus has risen from the dead, and these women in turn take the news to the eleven remaining Apostles. For the Apostles, this seemed “an idle tale, and they did not believe the women,” but perhaps out of the desperation because of the shame he still felt for denying Jesus three times, St Peter goes to the to the tomb, and is amazed to see just the linen cloths of Jesus and not His body.

More events after the resurrection of Jesus will be revealed in the weeks to come, but what stands revealed to us now is that those who experience the light hand on the light, and without the handing on of the light, there is no faith. Without the Marys, Joanna, and the other women, the Apostles might not have heard of the Resurrected Christ; they were called to reveal the light of God, and so they did. And in doing so, God’s light defeated darkness.