Easter Vigil
It is a special moment in a family’s life when a child first learns to walk. The child usually takes the first steps a bit gingerly and awkwardly, but as the child’s leg muscles and core develop, and as the child learns balance, he or she gains more independence concomitant with more mobility. While there is a period where the child will go back and forth between crawling and walking, with the mastery of the skill of walking, the child gains a new form of life, and parents have to exercise increased vigilance over the child in his or her new life.
Tonight as we celebrate the beginning of Easter at this Vigil Mass, we celebrate new life. All of our readings told of some form of new life. We heard about the beginning and new life of literally everything in the first reading as we heard God create the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. We heard about Isaac’s new life after his father, Abraham, was willing to sacrifice Isaac, though God stopped Abraham at the last minute. In the third readings we heard about the new life that Israel received after passing through the waters of the Red Sea, with their oppressors, the Egyptians, being destroyed in the same waters after the Israelites made it through safely. Isaiah prophesies about new life, as he spoke for God in the fourth reading: “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back.” Israel receives new life from its renewed covenant with God. Likewise, in the fifth reading, Isaiah talks about the new life that comes when one receives the word of God, just like the fields receive new life from the snow and rain and the seed sown in the ground. The prophet Baruch reminds the people that life comes from following the commandments of God, and abandoning their sinful ways. And the prophet Ezekiel in the seventh reading speaks for God and tells the people that, while they turned away from God, and God let them feel the consequences of their sins, He will give them new life and prove His holiness and fidelity, so that the nations may know that He is the true God. St. Paul talks about the new life that comes from baptism and dying with the Lord so that we can “live in newness of life” by rising with Christ. And the Gospel is the climax of the focus on new life as we heard the angels proclaim that Christ had been raised, and Jesus Himself met the holy women on their way back to the Upper Room.
Our Elect will receive newness of life through Holy Baptism, as God washes away all their sins, adopts them as His own children, and makes them members of His Holy Church. Our candidates, those who were baptized in other Christian ecclesial communities, will join with our Elect in receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation, after they profess full faith with us, and they and even adults baptized as Catholics earlier who never completed the rest of the Sacraments of Initiation, will be given the new life that comes from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And then all those who have not yet made their first Holy Communion will receive new life into them by sharing for the first time in the Body and Blood of Christ, the truly unblemished Lamb who saves us from death, just as the blood of the unblemished lamb over the lintels saved the Chosen People in Egypt from the Angel of Death, which wiped out the first born.
Whether we are receiving new life through the Sacraments for the first time, or renewing our covenant of new life with God tonight, God calls us to continue to live in new life, not in death. It would be odd for a 5-year-old to return to crawling on the ground all the time, rather than walking. We should approach our old, sinful way of life in the same way: it would be odd to go back to that. Sin holds us down. The new life of Christ gives us the freedom to run to God with the dignity of our heads held high on our own two feet. The temptation will be to treat tonight as a beautiful ceremony, but only a ceremony that doesn’t change how we live. Instead, God calls all of us to recommit to putting behind us our old habits of sin, and live in the new life of grace that Christ won for us.
Tonight, Christ has risen from the dead. Tonight, Christ takes your hand and invites you to walk with Him in the new life of holiness. Tonight God reminds us that we should be dead to sin, and alive in the new life of Christ. Alleluia!!
