Rising in Darkness

Scriptures: The Great Vigil of Easter, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This is it. This is the moment we’ve been awaiting for the entire Christian year, the climax of our faith. Tonight all the promises given unto the people of God from the time of father Abraham down to this very day are one and all fulfilled. Tonight humanity realizes our deepest and most longing dreams, which have haunted us ever since the loss of Eden and the breaking of the world. Tonight is the Passover of our Lord Jesus Christ from death to life.

The implications are staggering, especially to those of us who yet trudge through the valley of the shadow of death. Our whole lives are twisted by insecurities and fears. We mourn losses we cannot recoup. We grieve chances we did not take. We fear always that we are not good enough, not smart enough, not strong or handsome or brave enough. We fear that we can be neither loving nor beloved.

And we are surrounded by powers and principalities that prey upon our fears—systems, governments, ideologies, that can smell our brokenness like blood in the water, and offer false promises of wholeness if we would just buy more, travel more, do more with our brief and fleeting lives. Eat more food but don’t get fat. Earn more cash but don’t get stressed. Fame and fortune and freedom await, especially freedom from meaning, freedom from purpose, freedom from the hard road of virtue and truth and nobility. Freedom from life. And we eat it up, don’t we? We consume the lies, filling our emptiness with nothings.

Then along comes this Man, who tells us the strangest things. “This is not what I made you for,” He insists. “This is not what your purpose is. I built you with my own two hands, shaped you in the womb for limitless horizons. I did not create you because I had to, but because I chose to—chose to bring you forth purely in love and generosity and superabundant life. No one knows you as I do. And I made you to live forever. And I made you to be loved eternally. And I made you to love others as I have first loved you. And yes, it’s all gone wrong. And yes, the world is broken. But oh, my beloved—I have come now, to set it all right again.”

This Man told us He was God. And He told us we were kings. And He promised us that even now He was ever hard at work resurrecting this world, making all things new. And He forgave the unforgivable and cured the incurable and raised the unarousable. And He told us not to fret over finite things, for the infinite had come down to earth. He told us not to despair in sufferings, for every tear would soon be wiped away. He made us believe that even the dead would live again in Him.

And it scared us, that love, the intensity of it. The impossible promises. The unmerited grace. It rattled our little world of limits and fears and sudden, absolute loss. And so we turned on Him with the one thing that was ours, the one thing to which we could stubbornly cling: death. Death found in the wood of the cross, the stone of the tomb. We killed that Man-who-was-God and stuck Him in the ground. Such were the depths of our darkness that we feared the Light, feared the Truth. We didn’t want to see what we truly were, because we knew, deep down, that what we had become was unlovable, unforgivable, unsalvageable. We could not be saved. We did not want to be saved. We were too scared.

But it didn’t stop Him. Oh, no. We couldn’t stop Him. Still He uttered forgiveness, even from that Cross, even for His murderers. His last words were the praises of God. And when His soul—that unspeakably beautiful soul—plunged down to the depths of hell at our behest, the very earth shook. Death could not conquer Him; He conquered death! He battered down the gates of hell. He ransomed forth the souls of the dead, even those drowned by their own cruelties in the Great Flood, and pulled them up from death to life. He peeled back His own gravestone and burst forth from the spiced tomb: the Son of God Risen in the night; the Light of the world dispelling all darkness from this time forth and forevermore!

And we saw Him rise in glory and we saw Him harrow hell and we saw Him return to Heaven to prepare for us a place in His Father’s Kingdom and send down upon us the Holy Spirit to dwell among us and within us. And every godly promise was fulfilled on that holy night. And every pagan dream came to fruition in that Easter dawn. And we are free, brothers and sisters, freed forever from fears and regrets and the endless tally of sins that has kept us broken and fettered in the dark. There is no question anymore, no uncertainty. We are loved, infinitely, truly, eternally. We are forgiven for all that we have done and all that we have left undone. And we are alive, truly alive, for death has hold of us no longer, and we shall live forever in the Light of the Risen Christ.

Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again. This is the faith that makes us whole. This is the joy that makes us one. And this is the Resurrection that we are called to live out even now, calling the world from darkness to light, from death to life, from loss to love. Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

And the world shall never be the same.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.