April 23, 2011: Great Vigil of Easter

Great Vigil of Easter
Mt 28.1-10
23 April 2011
Fr. Patrick Allen

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Here we are, come to the very heart of the Christian mystery and proclamation.  The entire year's cycle of devotion bends toward this night; as we have heard tonight in the ancient prophecies, the line of redemptive history angles toward this night – this mysterious night, in which our Lord Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.  Pope John Paul the Great noted that this Vigil is not only the heart of the Christian year, "but is in some ways its womb, for from it springs all of sacramental life."[i]

All of sacramental life, which is all of life – real life, divine life, eternal life.  In the sacraments, by God's grace, the eternal and divine penetrates and unites with the physical and mutable.  In Christ, the Word became flesh, and in this mystery of the Resurrection, in Christ triumphed over the grave, we see the full potential and promise of our human flesh, joined to divinity, no longer subjected to the futility of a fallen creation, but fully alive because fully redeemed.

This Vigil is in some ways a womb, John Paul said.  We have seen that already tonight.  We have seen little James, from this Vigil-womb born again to new and unending life in the waters of baptism.  But notice that the genius of the Vigil is that this new birth happens precisely in the land of death – on death's own ground, death's own turf.  That is the peculiar nature of this liturgy.

After all, what have we done tonight?  We have processed together into this darkened church as a way of walking along side those holy women who, in the dark and chill predawn hours, walked to a cemetery, went to visit a tomb, to anoint the body and compete the burial of a dead man, Jesus of Nazareth.

This Jesus, whom they had loved.  This Jesus, whose every word and step took them farther into the depths of the Father's love.  This Jesus, their friend, who had been betrayed into the hands of sinful men, beaten, spat upon, scourged, crucified.  Dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  And dead with him their own hopes for a spiritually revived Israel, for peace in their time. 

That is what these faithful but defeated women, alongside of whom we have walked, expected to find.

But ... instead they and we with them have walked smack into history's greatest reversal, tired nature's greatest surprise.  In this land of mourning, on inevitable death's own turf, behold: an angel perched cheerfully atop the grave stone, greeting them with the Gospel - He is not here.  He is risen.  Risen.  Truly and wonderfully alive. 

And, just to be clear:  not somehow alive only in their happy memories.  Not somehow alive merely in the continued moral weight of his teaching.  Not somehow alive as a symbol or in the fellowship of surviving but just as death-doomed friends.  Not alive in some gnostic "really but spiritually" sense.  Alive in the only sense that matters.  Alive in the only sense that can – and did – change the world.  Fully, gloriously, humanly, body and soul alive.

So you see the genius of the Vigil:  the tomb becomes a womb, and Jesus is the firstborn of the dead.  And the glory of it is, of the Father's love he is delivered not just from but through the grave.  And on that last great Day, like Jacob clutching Esau's heel, we will be delivered with him into that glorified life.  This is the transformative power of God's love:  not some cosmic sleight-of-hand so that joy is substituted for suffering, but honest and true redemption, all the way down, so that when the fully human and fully divine Christ takes it and us on himself, suffering is transformed into joy, and the grave becomes a gate, the tomb becomes a womb.

And from this womb the Community of the Resurrection, the Church, is born.  This night, this Resurrection faith, is the animating principle of the Church's life.  It is the reason – the only good reason – the Jesus movement endures through violent persecution and despite our own self-inflicted wounds.  And the more we, individually and corporately, commit ourselves to it, the more we will ourselves become the signs and agents of light and life in a dark and dying world.

Resurrection means that love can stand in the face of death.  Resurrection means that love can bear all things, as St. Paul says, and dare to hope all things. 

And it really does.  It really happens.

Some of you may have read about – because we in Charleston haven't yet had the chance to see – a film called Of Gods and Men.  It is the true story of a small community of Trappist monks in largely Muslim Algeria.  In the 1990's, as radical Islamic influence began to infiltrate into and disrupt poor but relatively peaceful Algeria, the local villagers warned the monks, whom they loved, that danger was likely coming.  The monks' own superiors in their order encouraged them to leave. But discussing the matter thoroughly and saying their prayers, the monks decided to stay and continue their life of prayer and of loving service and witness to the village. 

In March of 1996 the monks were abducted, and their severed heads were found a few months later.

Their abbot, Dom Christian de Cherge (the actual man, not the cinematic adaptation), anticipated what would happen and wrote a short testament setting out his own thoughts and even hopes in the face of violent death.  It is a magnificent document of Christian humility, love, and gratitude, and I commend it to you. 

Towards the end of his testament, he writes a last greeting to family and friends:

[For] this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God who seems to have wished it entirely for the sake of that JOY in and in spite of everything. In this THANK YOU which is said for everything in my life, from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, O my friends of this place, besides my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families, a hundredfold as was promised!

This is wonderful, but perhaps not entirely unexpected.  But then Dom Christian turns to address that man, that man who he knows is out there but has not met yet, that man who will be his murderer.  He writes,

And you too, my last minute friend, who will not know what you are doing, Yes, for you too I say this THANK YOU AND THIS "A-DIEU"– to commend you to this God in whose face I see yours. And may we find each other, happy "good thieves" in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. . . AMEN![ii]

My friends, that is the power of a true Resurrection faith, of Love Himself reaching in and transforming fear and death into joy and life.  It can take us beyond mere non-violence to actual and active love, and so transform a normal, standard issue human heart so that even an enemy, even a murderer, may be received and greeted and loved as a "last minute friend."

And it can do that for us to, in and among our own families, our own communities.  This night has shown us that in Christ love is stronger than death, and that the tombs of our own hearts, united to Christ in his Resurrection, can be transformed into wombs, our own lives giving birth to peace and joy.  And all because, Alleluia, Christ is Risen.

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[i] Bl. John Paul II. Homily at the Easter Vigil, 1999.

[ii] http://www.patheos.com/community/deaconsbench/2011/04/19/exquisite-love-exquisite-heartbreak-the-last-testament-of-dom-christian/