22nd March 2008THE EASTER VIGIL

Fr David Cherry

Homily at the Easter Vigil and First Mass of Easter

“Behold Jesus met them, saying All Hail.  And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him.”

The Bible reveals all – warts and all – the moments of despair, the faulty apprehensions of God as well as the clarity and beauty in words of poetry that prose cannot contain.

We tell stories by looking back.   How else do you tell a story?  We are revisionists, always revising the story in the light of what we now know.  We stand in the present and look back over the past.  

What makes you tell a story a certain way, editing out bits, inflating other bits?  Perhaps because something needs to be concealed, or something needs to be revealed because it is now clearer.   How easily I tell stories in which I am presented as the protagonist, the not-so-secret hero!   Such is my vanity.  It’s worth a chuckle!

The Bible reveals all – warts and all – the moments of despair, the faulty apprehensions of God as well as the clarity and beauty in words of poetry that prose cannot contain.

Easter has been proclaimed and we have heard in seven OT readings extracts from our salvation history.  In doing this, we are contextualised, even relativised for we find ourselves part of some greater Narrative with a common language, a common focus and reference point.  This is our story – or rather this is God’s story unfolding in our ears, before our eyes.  We are in it.

And we have read them and heard these readings in a new light, the light of the Resurrection.  Those who wrote these wonderful texts from the OT were inspired; they were searching and being brought to a greater light.  Here in the Year of our Lord 2008, long after the Resurrection, from the Now, we are looking back.  And in the endless stream of resurrection light, the Spirit of our God still leading us to the fullness of understanding of the resurrection, they are resonating for us with new meaning.  We read the OT in the light of Christ.  To the ears of faith and a heart in love with Christ, we see and understand that in fact they point to Him.  What they were searching for and reaching out towards THEN has, in fact, NOW been made known.

And we are rehearsing the story of the world in terms of salvation – God’s action in the world.  

The newspapers will tell stories by a different – if one can call it a light at all - often sensationalised stories which reveal an obsession with sin and hypocrisy, which make us feel indignant and, let’s face it, rather better about ourselves.  “How on earth could they?”  “Just look at that lot!”  Some will tell the story in the light of a philosophical or political theory.  Nowadays, social history is often told with a Marxist hangover. The Church is always the one in control, terrified of losing power, oppressing the poor peasantry who built Saint Denis and Notre Dame; Westminster Abbey, Lincoln and Wells.  Without a sense of the glory and love of God, what other way is there to tell the story?  The way you tell the story is sometimes about who you really want to knock.

But the story we hear in the Light of Easter is a story of how God calls us into being, calls strange people into becoming a People, waifs and strays, murderers like Moses, harlots like Rahab. tax collectors, cheats and fishermen; how he delivers them from bondage, saves them from affliction and slowly over a long time, reveals his true nature as the only real and True God of faithful and undying love. It is the story of diverse people being drawn together by a common and growing perception of a True God, being brought out of darkness towards a dawning light.  

And this liturgy is part of the conveying of that story.  This isn’t something David Cherry invented on a laptop yesterday afternoon.  This liturgy, like scriptures, is part of the tradition that conveys to us our salvation story.

Those who write the New Testament are writing it in a new light, the light that fills their hearts with hope.  They are writing with new insight.  They are changed men and women.  They see differently, they tell the story in a new way – in the Light of Truth, God’s Truth.   And even so, they are not infallible.  Only God is.  And his Spirit is leading them and leading us still into the fullness of truth.  

What is the story we tell about ourselves this Easter?   How will it be told?  In Easter light.  It will be told in terms of God’s undying love for you and me which enables us to see our lives as he sees them; a light that shows up the beauty, the cracks too; and lets the sin fade into the background?  

My story will be told as a fraction of a vast narrative of how we were far off and have been brought near; how we, in the words of Saint Peter (1 Peter 2 : 9-10) became a chosen race (not because we are better than anyone else), a royal priesthood (a people with a vocation and purpose), a consecrated nation (made holy by the living God), a people set apart (called out of lesser stories) to sing the praises of God who called us out of darkness into his wonderful Light.

A story of frail humans, enlightened with an everlasting, joyful, unstoppable hope; a story of Persons being undone by love generated and originating in a True God; a story, please God, of those who, like Mary, go quickly to tell others so that they too may come and hold onto Jesus’ feet and worship him.

The Renewal of our Baptismal promises which follows is also a re-collecting of memory; recalling what happened then in the now.  We remember how we became part of God’s story; we say : Yes, I want this.  I believe this.  I trust this, but not ‘this’: HIM.

Every Mass is a re-immersing in the grand narrative of salvation.  We are allowing God to reach us as we do it; we are allowing God to in-spire – in-spirit us – anew so that we can tell a different story from God’s point of view.  

May Easter Light radiate in our hearts, possess our minds, change our lives.  May we be so incorporated into God’s story that all despair is banished, all cynicism cease, all sense of my story being against others come to an end.  

I love Matthew who gives us Jesus saying ‘All hail’.

Here let us greet him, receive him this Easter Communion as we would a Lover, with joy.

Brothers and sisters : “Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed.  Alleluia.”