New Life

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.

    My dear brothers and sisters, tonight is all about new life.  We enter into the new life that Christ won by His Death and Resurrection.  We renew our covenant with the Lord, the covenant began at Holy Baptism when we died with Christ so to rise with Him to newness of life.  And for some of our brothers and sisters, tonight will be the beginning of new life for them.
    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!!

Getting the Bigger Picture

Easter Vigil
    I know someone well who is very smart.  His mind is a well-oiled machine.  When faced with different data points, he can put it together to make sense, and anticipate challenges and/or opportunities, and adjust expectations or actions as necessary.  Because of this, he is very gifted at administration.  When it comes to friendships: he struggles a bit more.  Because his mind tries to get to why a friend didn’t tell him something, or why did a friend use the words he did, and is that friend trying to communicate something subtly that he doesn’t want to say directly.  And then anxiety kicks in and his brain goes into overdrive trying to make sense of it all, and often reading into things that are much more innocent.
    I try to help him by reminding him to consider other facts that he knows to be true that will put his mind at ease.  I encourage him to expand the amount of data that his mind is analyzing to include more positive facts and input, and not just the negative ones to which his brain so easily goes.  While it takes work, seeing the bigger picture can help calm his fears of rejection and realize that he really does have good friends who aren’t looking to get rid of him.
    Maybe you don’t have an analytical mind, but with what has happened over the past few days, starting on Holy Thursday, there’s a lot to process.  In this one grand liturgy that began with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, we entered into the model of service in the washing of feet; the institution of the priesthood and the Eucharist at the Last Supper; and the agony in the garden at the altar of repose.  On Good Friday we joined with Christ in the fruits of the betrayal by Judas and our God, Savior, and hope dying in the most horrible way possible.  Earlier today we just waited, joining with the apostles who had all likely lost hope and were wondering what they should do now that their Master was in a tomb.  And now, tonight, we celebrate that hope did not die, but that God raised His Son from the dead and conquered sin and death forever.  If we take these events seriously, they should make us wonder what God did and what it all means.  We may not get anxiety, but it calls for a deeper reflection on more facts, more data to understand God’s plan.
    And that’s why we had all these readings tonight.  We heard about how God created life to be good and an expression of His love.  We heard about Abraham almost sacrificing his beloved son, but God providing a ram to take Isaac’s place.  We heard about the Egyptians being put to death in water, which was also the way that God’s chosen people were saved: through water.  We heard the Prophet Isaiah talk about how God would take us back, though we had abandoned Him, and how God would give us the good things of life and renew His covenant with us.  The Prophet Baruch encouraged us to follow the ways of the Lord and so receive light and favor.  And we heard God tell the Prophet Ezekiel that God would give new life to His people, cleanse them from their sins, and lead them back to their promised inheritance.  
    These are all realities we all need to hear tonight, to better understand God’s plan.  But especially you, Dylan and Isaiah, need to hear these as you prepare to become Catholic through your baptism, confirmation, and reception of the Holy Eucharist.  You will go through water which will destroy all that is fallen in you, but will give you new life in Christ.  God will send His Spirit upon you to help you live the new law of grace.  And God will prepare for you the “rich fare” of the Eucharist, the food which is truly the Body and Blood of Christ, which will help join you to Christ in the closest union you can have with anyone while on earth.  Your stories–what brought you to this holy night, your path of conversion–now becomes a small part of the larger story of salvation, by which God gives us a greater gift even than the Garden of Eden, which He created for us, the people He has made in His image.  God made Eden for Adam and Eve, who lost it by their disobedience.  God opens heaven to you, greater than any earthly paradise, and you can receive it by your life of obedience to God.  

    The price of this great gift of heaven was costly indeed: the death of the Son of God.  But Christ accepted it lovingly as the will of the Father and because it meant you could go to heaven and be united with Him for all eternity, which is exactly why God created humanity in the first place: for union with Him.
    So do not only consider the drama of the past few days.  Do not fix your minds on what causes anxiety.  Consider all of salvation history, and how God, who created you in love, has redeemed you in love, and now welcomes you into His family of love, the Catholic Church, and now shows you the straight and narrow way to enter into eternal love in heaven.