Holy Saturday Night: The Easter Vigil
Bishop of Lake Charles
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
Lake Charles, Louisiana
April 7, 2012
Easter Vigil
“He saw and believed.” John 20:8
Hans Urs von Balthasar, a great Catholic theologian of the last century, once wrote that everything can be seen in one of two ways. We see it as either a fact or a mystery. This includes man. Seen as a fact, man is a marginal phenomenon in a universe, produced by chance. Seen as a mystery, man was created, for his own sake, by the will of God. Facts without mystery lack purpose. If we look only at the facts, then the world and life can look a little bleak. If we look beyond the facts to the mystery, then we see something else entirely. We see God.
Easter challenges us to see the mystery. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, not in some spiritual way, not in some symbolic way, but truly and really. God has conquered death. Life is triumphant, a life that only God can give. As the accounts of the appearances of Jesus following the Resurrection will show, Jesus is not a resuscitated corpse. He is not a ghost. He has risen in glory. His body is glorified. As Pope Benedict XVI observes, the bodily Resurrection of Jesus
“… is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of
history and transcends it…. [W]e could regard the Resurrection as something
akin to a radical ‘evolutionary leap,’ in which a new dimension of life emerges,
a new dimension of human existence” (Jesus of Nazareth, volume 2, Ignatius
Press, 2011, pp. 273-274).
The man Jesus is found in “the sphere of the divine and eternal” (ibid, p. 274). A “leap occurred… that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God” (ibid, p. 274).
Mary Magdalene went to the tomb with Mary and Salome on that first Easter morning fully expecting to find the tomb intact. “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” (Mark 16:3) was the question they asked. What they found was beyond their imagining. An empty tomb lay before them and a messenger dressed in white who proclaimed, “He has been raised; he is not here” (Mark 16:6).
In the Gospel of St. John, Mary Magdalene ran to announce this news to Peter and John. They in turn ran to the tomb and found it empty. The disciple whom Jesus loved, we are told, “saw and believed” (John 20:8). What did he see? “[H]e went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place” (John 20:6-7). What he saw were facts, an empty tomb and a head cloth, not thrown into a corner as a thief would have done but neatly “rolled up in a separate place” (John 20:7). What was left for him to do was to embrace the mystery, for while “he saw and believed,” neither he nor Peter “did not understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead” (John 20:8-9). It is one thing to see the empty tomb. It is another to understand what it means.
Every Easter the Church places before us the reality of this historic occurrence. It challenges us to enter ever more deeply into its significance. Our faith is a dynamic faith that should move us beyond earthly concerns and into the mystery of “being in union with God.”
In a moment we will renew our baptismal promises. We will renounce sin and Satan and profess our faith. This is not some random or idle gesture, but an act of faith that should plunge us more fully into the mystery, just as certainly as the newly baptized are plunged into the waters of Baptism tonight.
Jesus lives. He lives to give us life, a life that is eternal. This requires death, a death to self. St. Paul writes, “We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin…. If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Romans 6:6, 8). We die when the old self of sin is put to death through repentance and forgiveness. What replaces it in this act of faith is a new life by which we live with Christ.
Mary Magdalene, Peter and John saw an empty tomb. Later they would see the Lord whom the empty tomb revealed. They saw Jesus who transcended death and rose to life for us. The mystery had begun to unfold, and it has not stopped unfolding in the lives of many.
Many see it at the Easter Vigil. The repentant see it when forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance. We see it in Holy Communion devoutly and reverently received. We have the potential to see it in every act of gratitude and praise, of kindness and charity. It is the life of faith where the mystery is embraced. For when we look beyond the facts, we see so much more.