St John’s Cathedral

22 March 2008

The Easter Vigil is all about a new life, a new beginning. Everything in our ceremony has spoken about new beginnings. We brought the light from the paschal fire to bring light and life into the darkness of the Cathedral. Then in the readings we heard how “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; we heard about the new beginning for God’s people as they passed from slavery in Egypt towards the freedom of the Promised Land.

And now we have heard the familiar account of the first Easter morning the greatest new beginning of all. The angel with his face like lightning and his robe as white as snow delivers the news that Jesus has risen from the dead. The women were filled with awe and great joy. We too need to be amazed by what we are celebrating. This is the beginning of the defeat of death and evil by God’s power. It is the beginning of the fulfilment of all the longings of the human heart ( Cf Gaudium et Spes, 45 ). It is the beginning of a new creation.

In the Easter Vigil we give thanks and we pray with wonder and rejoicing at the fact that Christ has risen, that he has conquered death and defeated everything that threatens us. But the Easter Vigil also challenges us to think about what the Resurrection means in our lives.

In a few moments, we go on to renew the promises of our baptism. We will do that because of what St Paul told us: “When we were baptised, we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life”.

The Easter Vigil is about our new life. We renew the promises of our Baptism because they are about living the new life that began in us when we were baptised. St Paul told us what that new life means: “you must consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus”.

We need to look at our lives as individuals and as a community. All of us will find in ourselves attitudes and behaviour that do not belong in the new life into which Jesus has led us. We will find jealousy, selfishness, unfairness, complacency and lack of gratitude, perhaps resentment, lack of forgiveness and even hatred. We will find in our communities grudges, unfairness, lack of concern for others, violence and people living in fear. We will see in our society hopelessness, crime, violence, the abuse of drugs and people frightened in their own homes. Some of these are symptoms of neglect and despair and exploitation and all of them are signs of a society that has not come to terms with its own problems. This Easter, as we celebrate new life we all need to commit ourselves to the process of regeneration which is seeking to bring new life to parts of our city which have been neglected for far too long. In the world we will starvation and deprivation and suffering among those who are our brothers and sisters. And we all need to commit ourselves to recognising and trying with God’s help to change the things in ourselves which lead to hurt and division.

To be a community of the baptised, a community living the new life within us, means recognising that these signs of sinfulness in ourselves and our community do not belong in our new life. We believe in Jesus who suffered from rose from the dead and entered a life beyond death and mourning and suffering. That is the life we began to live at Baptism.

Every year the Easter Vigil and the renewal of our baptismal promises puts a question to us about how well we are doing that and about what needs to change if we are to live that life. But that effort has its foundation in what we celebrate at Easter. So much needs to be changed in ourselves and in the world that people who set out to make things better can fall into two opposite traps. One is to give up because the task is so enormous; the other is to become fanatical and to try to force the changes on everybody else ( Cf. Spe Salvi, 35 ).

What makes the difference is the hope of Easter. Our hope is greater than any particular failure, even ones that seem disastrous. Easter tells us that in spite of all the failures that may and do happen, our lives, and the whole of human history “are held firm by the indestructible power of Love” ( Spe Salvi , 35 ). That is not a reason for us to be complacent. On the contrary, it is a call for us to receive and to take part in the gift that God has given us and to do so with all our heart and soul and might.

So we approach the failures in our own lives, and the times when our best hopes seem to have failed with the awe and great joy that the women felt when they realised that death did not have the last word and when they heard the words: There is no need for you to be afraid… He is not here, for he has risen as he said he would.”

+Donal Murray