Easter Vigil Homily
Easter Vigil 2011
What are we waiting for? Why have you come here tonight? The answer may seem obvious to many, but it is still important to know the reason. Some of you may be waiting to get baptized. Others of you may be waiting to be received into full communion with the Church. Some of you may be waiting for all of this to be over so you can go and eat or drink the things you gave up for Lent. While all of these are good answers, they are not why we have come here tonight.
All of the answers I have given point to another far more important answer. We are waiting for Jesus Christ to keep his promise of Resurrection. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus foretold three times that the Son of man would be handed over, put to death and then raised on the third day. Is it true? We believe in faith that it happened in time in the year 33AD, but in that case, we can only say Jesus WAS raised. It is a part of history that we remember.
But is that all that it is? If it was, then we could only say Jesus “was.” But we say more than that, because we say Jesus “IS”. Jesus is not past, but present, and tonight he becomes present to you who have been preparing to receive the sacraments in a real, intense and personal way.
Catechumens and candidates, you join the thousands of men and women and children over the course of history that have come to this night to know if Jesus is real. Is his love real? Is his sacrifice real? Is Jesus really present in the world or not?
Tonight you find out just how real he is. You will be baptized into his death and freed from sin. You will be overshadowed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit when the living Jesus Christ takes possession of your heart and soul and body in a new and mysterious way. You will then receive his Body and drink his Blood and begin in a new way to serve the Lord by loving him with your whole heart and soul and your neighbor as yourself.
The Risen Lord through the power of the Holy Spirit will be your companion in good times and bad, in times of joy and sorrow. You are no longer alone. The sin of Adam that has made us alone, empty and without hope is replaced by the powerful life-giving grace of the Risen Lord who makes us a new creation. You will now join with us as we work out our salvation in the joyful expectation that Jesus Christ will come again in glory and welcome us into the fullness of the Father’s Kingdom in heaven.
The debt we owed to God has been paid not in dollars and cents, but in Jesus’ self-sacrificing love on the wood of the cross. Along with us, your lives are now filled with new possibilities to make a return to the Lord for all he has done for you. Every new day God grants you is a reason for gratitude. Every breath you take is a reminder of the risen Lord breathing his Holy Spirit into you. Every action you undertake is now an opportunity for you to give a true accounting before others that Jesus Christ is your Master, your guide, your God and he offers you freedom.
This freedom is from death, which no longer has any power over us. This freedom is for love, for generosity, for sacrifice to make a gift of yourself and be a witness to others that Jesus not only was, but Jesus still is. He is still loving us. He is still healing and forgiving us. He is still leading us to heaven. He is still feeding us with his body and blood. He is still breathing new life into us every day.
This is the reason we are here and this is why we are waiting. We want to share with you the life of Christ that burns as brightly in us as it does on the Easter candle we have blessed tonight. It is what the Apostles discovered from the women who returned from the tomb. It is what we discovered when we first accepted the faith, and it is what you will discover in just a few minutes. Jesus has been raised from the dead. He is here, and he will never leave us.
