Saturday, April 07, 2012

Homily of Bishop Noel Treanor at Easter Vigil

The sacred rites of this Paschal or Easter Vigil transport us from darkness to light.

They move us from the bareness, from our intimated desolation of the death of God, from sombre silence of yesterday, Good Friday, to the light of the new Easter fire and the new Paschal Candle.

Moving our mindscape along arc of salvation history, from creation out of empty nothingness, through the struggle for faith that is the genetic code of the Old Testament books, to the stunning, silent, new-life-giving-emptiness of the tomb where Jesus had been laid, these Vigil rites fill our heart with Easter hope in the new creation of paschal life to which we have access in the sacraments.

This liturgy of the Easter Vigil fills us with a spiritual hope that ranges beyond time, suffering and pain.   

In following and enacting these Easter rites our inner being is re-charged with the assurance that the powers of darkness, which sold and bought God for pieces of silver, which spat at the divine, which beat, nailed and killed the All Holy One, have been disempowered by the creative, restorative and healing power of divine life that was en-fleshed in Jesus of Nazareth and that raised Him from the tomb.  

In memory of this deliverance in Christ from the cold, numbing grip of evil and destruction, we gathered in the silence of Good Friday burial around the warming flames of Easter fire from which was ignited the Paschal Candle, the work of bees and human ingenuity.

The flames of the Easter fire warmed our hearts with its glow, with light and with the promise of life and grace.

In the Easter hymn, the Exultet, we hailed the Paschal candle and its flame as breaking the power of death and as a “precious torch” that reminds us that Christ “has shed his peaceful light on humanity”.

That peaceful light sustains us, gives us strength and hope, emboldens us as we struggle to live the gospel values, to combat personal weaknesses and to confront our life’s trials, disappointments, failures and tragedies. That struggle and its final resolution in salvation in Christ is reflected in the series of reading we listened to – from the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Baruch and on to the faith-filled lines of St Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Then after this liturgy of the Word, sprinkled with Easter water and celebrating the Eucharist we are, as St Paul puts it, “alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6.11). Encounter with Jesus and his gospel, no matter how ephemeral, no matter how tentative, can free us for life, for new-found joy.

St Ephrem, (306-373) a  fourth century Syrian deacon, who lived in Edessa, in one of his hymns invites each person to fix our eyes steadily on the light of Christ, on the light of this candle, so that we may be filled with the joy of His light.

Now, oftentimes when we feel the need to reach out for this divine light of hope, we are in predicaments, even tortured by something that has happened to us. And even when ever so tentatively within the range of the glow of that light, our sentiments, our state of soul is often akin to that of the three women depicted  in the extract from the gospel according to St Mark that we have just heard. Twice in the text, we are told that they were stuck with amazement ;  have a look in your Bibles at the next verse, v. 8, where it is recalled that they were trembling, bewildered, and that they were afraid. A series of strong verbs are use by Mark to catch the sentiments of the two Marys and Salome on that early Sabbath morning. They expected to salve and anoint a corpse, to have to deal with a dead body. Their doleful ministry of spice and oil was surprised by a still silent God ; in time their disposition would be transformed into joyful witness.

If evil, sin, the negatives of life numb, drain and depress us, personal return to the mystery of divine mercy and life passes through the trembling of self-confrontation to the surprising amazement and wonder of new life and hope in the grace and power of the Risen Christ.

My dear friends, on this Easter night, let us give thanks in prayer, in thought and in demeanour – for Christ is truly risen – for you, for me, in our lives by virtue of our faith in Him, by virtue of our encounter with Him in Scripture and in sacrament.

And for the fifty days until the great feast of Pentecost, let us, as St Augustine, an example of one who wrestled with the call of Christ and who quested hard for the intelligence of faith, once said, “ strengthen our faith by believing” [1]…  and as we do so by word and deed, let us witness to the beauty, power and joy of the Christian faith.

Amen.