Easter Vigil – Year C: 20.04.25
St. Peter & Paul’s Church, Portlaoise @ 11pm
Homily:
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”[1]
Many have commented this year on the timing of Easter, April 20th, as last year it was three weeks earlier, March 31st. If we remember back to 2019, Easter fell on April 21st, and in 2011 on April 24th. And if we are still around in 2038, Easter will fall on April 25th, which I’m told is the latest date that Easter can fall.
We have to thank St. Laserian, the patron of the Leighlin end of our diocese, for the timing of Easter. In 630 he travelled to Rome to resolve a descrepancy between the Celtic and Roman method for calculating when Easter should fall. Laserian went with the Roman calculation for Easter, the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. This year the Spring Equinox was March 20th and the first full moon was Palm Sunday.
Time is the great gift God gives us … our very existence begins in time. Time is the great gift we give to each other. The women make time to go to the tomb to embalm the body of Jesus. I love the simplicity of the Easter accounts, and perhaps Luke keeps it the simplest of all. Luke’s account begins in the early hours of dawn on the first day of the week. It all happens on one day, there is seemingly no sense of a 40 day period between resurrection and ascension.
My dad used to teach us a verse on the way to school, when we asked him the time, in case we were running late for our class, as we usually were, with cows to be milked and calves to be fed.
“Ten past, a quarter past
No particular time
If you want a watch, buy a watch
And don’t depend on mine”
Our generation has become very time-sensitive. Not only do we have just-in-time delivery, but we feel the need constantly to watch our watches and our phones, on where we have to be and what we have to be about. Sometimes we are in too much of a hurry to be really present.
At Easter, time stands still. The light of Christ ends the reign of darkness. Tonight the Old Testament speaks to us of God’s faithfulness to his people. God’s faithfulness to what he has begun is the source of the Israelites’ hope. This night and its visceral symbols — fire, light, water, and with its evocation of time in the hands of the Creator of Time — “Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the end—all time belongs to him, and all ages; to him be glory and power, through every age and for ever. Amen”. This night proclaims and evokes the triumph of hope over despair, good over evil, love over hatred and faith over fear.
The angels in Luke’s Gospel are speaking to the shattered but faithful followers of Jesus, who were the first to the tomb. They remind the women of all that Jesus had told them and suddenly as the angel spoke, the women remembered everything: “and they remembered his words”[2]. The two men in dazzling apparel triggered the memory of the women. The women needed to hang around no longer at an empty tomb – “why look among the dead for someone who is alive?”[3] – they had a job to do. And we have to continue doing what they did that Easter day.
Remembrance is the de-coder of our experience. By remembering the women were able to suddenly make sense of what they were seeing with their eyes. The Easter Vigil is all about retelling and remembering our story and being remembered into the living body of Christ, with all its implications, through the renewal of our baptism.
Were the women believed? Will we always be believed? Luke uses the Greek word ‘léros’, which translates as “idle talk” (Luke 24:11), other commentaries see it even stronger as “the wild talk of a sick person in delirium”[4]. Only Peter “rose and ran to the tomb”[5], the wounded denier whom Jesus stared at on Good Friday[6], becomes the first to believe the witness of the women, the first to accept their proclamation of the resurrection.
The Easter Candle is our guide, a reminder that all time belongs to Christ, not to us. “Ten past, a quarter past, no particular time …”. And remember the grains of incense inserted into the Easter candle, are reminiscent of the wounds of Jesus. We are wounded followers, like the women, like the eleven; but the wounds we carry can be healed. No darkness is final. No wound beyond healing.
Pope Francis, who continues to recuperate in Santa Marta in the Vatican, reminds us that in his weakness of body, he is witnessing more and more to the presence and closeness of the Risen Christ. May we all feel that presence and closeness this Vigil night.
[1] Lk.24:5
[2] Lk.24:8
[3] Lk.24:5
[4] The Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1968, pg. 162
[5] Lk.24:12
[6] Lk.22:61