It is with great joy that I welcome all of you to our Easter Vigil mass this evening. Easter Vigil is such a joyful and wonderful
time for us as Catholics – there is really no other mass like it in the rest of
the liturgical year. I was speaking to
some of our office staff last week, and we were all remarking how the symbolism
of this mass sticks in our minds, how it so very dramatically represents what
our faith is all about. I had Jimmy
Shipp build us the Easter fire out in front of the church this evening,
symbolizing the light of Christ that is brought into our world and into our
lives in our very special way through tonight’s celebration of his death and
resurrection.
Our very first reading tonight brings us
back to the very beginning of the world, where there is this formless darkness
covering the abyss, where wind is sweeping over the waters, and God announces:
“Let there be light.” As we hear this
reading in the midst of the darkness of our church, the symbolism is
striking. The lights of the paschal
candle – the lights of the small candles that we held which were lit off that
paschal candle – they are all lights penetrating the darkness of the
world.
We celebrate Christ’s resurrection today
as we hear about the women who go to the tomb to anoint his body, but to amazingly
find that the tomb was empty. It took
awhile for those women, the apostles, and the members of the early Church to
figure out all the implications of what resurrection meant to them in terms of
their faith.
And that is for us to figure out as well. How does Christ’s death and resurrection
affect our journey? How does it the ways we live out our faith. There is a painting in the dining room of our
parish house here in Yazoo City that is entitled The Cross of St John of the
Cross, a print of a famous painting by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Dali was inspired by a drawing that the
mystic St John of the Cross made from a vision he had. The painting shows Jesus on the cross from
the point of view of God watching what is going on from the heavens, watching
the completion of Christ’s mission here on earth. Since this crucifix is shown
from the point of view of God the Father, Dali is depicting Jesus as the bridge
between God and humanity, with the crucifix hovering over a seascape on earth
below.
And that is the thing that we can never forget about Easter,
that we can never forget about our faith.
The resurrection is intrinsically tied to the cross, and the cross is
intrinsically connected to the resurrection.
We had 40 days in the desert during Lent in order for Easter to really
mean something to us in our lives of faith.
We live in a world today where our faith is under attack, where our
government is taking stabs at the freedom we have to practice our religion and
to live out our faith. In order to see the light of the resurrection, we in
turn must be lights shining in the darkness of our world. And while we had 40 days of Lent, we need to
be aware that the Easter season does not end with this Easter Vigil mass and
with Easter morning tomorrow. We will
travel through the Easter season to Pentecost on May 27. For these next weeks during the Easter season,
we will ponder what the resurrection of Jesus really means to us, we will
ponder what it really means to live the resurrection in our lives.
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