Easter Vigil Mass 2019 – By Abbot Peter McCarthy

My dear brothers & friends, 

It is in chapter 4 of the letter to the Hebrews that we are warned: 

The word of God is something alive & active, it cuts like any double edged sword but more finely. It can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit or joints from the marrow.

Just because the Word of God is the Word of God it has the power to call us into our present selves radically, I mean between the  joints & marrow of our very bones, as it call us, exactly at the same time, out of ourselves to a particular historical event. It is indeed a two-edged sword!

St. Paul echoes this same experience in our Epistle tonight from his letter to the Romans:

We were indeed buried with him so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.

My sisters & brothers,  The Story of the Resurrection of Jesus is written in the language of our own most intimate inner-life experience. The Easter Gospel calls us to another part of ourselves…that part of ourselves we know is within us but from which we often feel exiled or excluded. It was the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton who reminded us:

 WE have been called to share in the Resurrection of Christ NOT because we have fulfilled all the laws of God & humanity, NOT because we are saints, but because we are suffering & struggling human beings, sinners, fighting for our lives; prisoners , fighting for our hope…our freedom!

So let us enter our Easter Gospel tonight & let it enter into us. Notice the very concrete physical setting in Luke’s first sentence.

On the first day of the week, at the first sign of dawn (at deep dawn…daybreak) the women went to the tomb with the spices they had prepared.

Just stop here…you know this language…you “know” the experience of walking into deep dawn…just reach for it within you…YOUR experience is an important fragment of this Easter Gospel. I invite you to listen to one man’s experience of deep dawn, the Oregon poet John Daniel.

First Light

I stand at the woodstack

with owls still calling

four deer in the frozen pasture

the tops of the tall pines 

incandescent with sun.

This is the way it begins.

We come back to ourselves

always here, now, in the light

divided from dark by no clear line,

that returns us to our own keeping.

In this light

anywhere would be home.

We are wakeful together,

as if keeping an old promise

to meet here, in this first light.

It is the women, this first Easter morning, specific women, Luke  gives us their names…these women…Mary of Magdala, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. They call us now to meet them here in this “first light” this “deep dawn” of the Risen One.

When the women returned from the tomb they told all this to his 11 apostles…but this story seemed pure nonsense, (writes Luke) and they did not believe them.

But really, by this point, toward the end of the story,  we should know better than to think it simply ends here… no one’s faith journey is ever quite so simple. And we can never underestimate the “Peter Factor”! The figure of Peter is key to Luke’s Easter Gospel. Why?

The key to Luke’s portrait of Peter is that “He went running to the empty tomb.” Luke uses this verb “running” only one other time in his entire Gospel and it is very significant. In Chapter 15 when describing the father of the Prodigal Son: 

“When his son was still a long way off his father saw him & had compassion & went running to him & fell on his neck & kissed him tenderly.”

Luke is telling us that Peter “knew” Jesus as the Father “knew” his prodigal son. This is the “knowing” of love and it is only the lover, Peter, that goes home “Amazed” Luke’s code word for an experience of the physical presence of Jesus.

Just like Peter, we need to bend down to real life in all its poverty. WE need to bend down with Peter to all that’s really NOT there in our lives…to our raw desire… our hunger & thirst. But, like the Father of the prodigal son, & like Peter , we need to make of our emptiness – A Place.

That place where the love of the Father awaited the return of his prodigal son.

That place, that cold dark tomb, where the bent-down Jesus awaited the Life of His Abba.

That place within each one of us, where Peter bent-down, saw nothing,

And was filled with Easter Joy!

+ Abbot Peter