Easter Vigil

The Gospel tonight tells us “they were amazed.”  This resurrection is a new story.  This hasn’t been told before.  Nothing, I mean nothing, like this has ever happened before.  It begins to dawn on the disciples that the crucified one has risen.  The women are the first witnesses.  They proclaim: the Lord Jesus lives!  Hopes that had been dashed and broken reignite.  Can we allow ourselves to be amazed?  Can we open our minds and hearts and let in the joyous news that what happens to Jesus happens to us?  Can we believe it?  Will we live it?

But the angel immediately tells them, “Don’t be afraid!”  Get going.  He’s heading to Galilee, the region where God among us began his announcement of the new dawn, the reign of God breaking through into our time and space.  Get going.  It’s time to begin to live the way of life he preached.  Don’t be amazed.  Be amazing.  Start forming the Body of Christ.  Be the Jesus who conquers death and gives us life and life eternal.  Be the Jesus who calls us to love everyone, even our enemies.  Get going and build with God the kingdom of truth and trust, justice and joy, peace and prosperity, hope and healing, faith and freedom, love and life.

All the readings tonight speak the story of our God.  From the opening words of Genesis to the call of Abraham, to the freedom song of Exodus through the consoling words of the prophet Isaiah and the responsorial psalms.  St. Paul reminds us that we have died with Christ in baptism.  And Matthew takes us back to the earliest accounts of the moment that changed all of human history, the resurrection of Jesus.

Let’s allow ourselves to be amazed by all this.  And let’s get moving.  Let’s be amazing.  Let’s live as disciples of Jesus.  Let’s realize that something awesome and magnificent is happening.  When we see water poured on the heads of Sara, LeeAnn and Hitomi and lives transformed for eternity, let’s be stunned and astonished.  And then, let’s get moving.  Let’s allow the Holy Spirit to invigorate our lives and get us doing the deeds God needs done to make the reign of God real in our lives and in the lives of our contemporaries.

How?  By responding to those hurt, suffering and crucified in our days.  We have to stay with people in their pain, until we begin to feel the joy of resurrection.  Tonight’s Vigil is the time between the cross and the resurrection.  Mary Magdalene and the other Mary are responding to the horror of his murder.  They want to prayerfully anoint the body of the one they listened to and came to love, the one they had hoped would be the Messiah of Israel.  They find an empty tomb and it begins to dawn of them the Lord of Life has risen.  This Jesus, their Rabbi and Lord, has overcome death.

They begin to hear again the words of the beatitudes and the parables.  The teachings of the Beatitudes and Matthew 25 – feed the hungry, visit those in prison – begin to amaze them.  And they realize it’s time to get moving, to tell the world we are to pray the Our Father, reconcile with those from whom we are estranged, and take up our cross and follow Jesus.  In the Easter Vigil, we plunge with him: “Are you not aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Being like him through likeness to his death, so shall we be through a like resurrection.”

For us who have been given the gift of faith and have opened our minds and hearts to the radical realities of our triune God, the world changes again this night.  The dawn brings the power of the love of God, the God we experience in the community of the church, the God we receive in the Eucharist.  Let’s allow ourselves to be amazed.  Let’s get going.  And let us pray.

Paul A. Magnano

Pastor