Sunday, April 8, 2012

4/7/2012 – Easter Vigil – Genesis 1:1-2:2; Mark 16:1-7


      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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