Easter Vigil 2006 - Dom Peter

“Who will roll back the stone for us?”
We have spent the past forty days working at prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These practices are recommended by the Church to combat the usual blockages in our spiritual lives posed by the flesh, the world and the Devil. For many of us, this is a frustrating experience. Our plans for more prayer get blocked by emergencies or the intrusions of angry thoughts that return to us from other experiences during the day. Our efforts at fasting are undermined by forgetfulness, by excuses and by simple weakness of will. Our efforts at kindness to others are met by indifference from our families and friends and certainly by the world. Our efforts to forgive others are stifled when those persons commit the same old sins against us over and over.

In other words, were Lent meant to be a time of concentrated self-improvement, many of us would have to admit that we fell a bit short. If we feel that we have succeeded, perhaps by August we will be back to wherever we had been last August.

While the problems I mentioned above seem to stem from others’ intrusions on our spiritual lives, in fact the reality is different. The angry thoughts we have at prayer are not caused by our neighbors, however irritating or belligerent they might be. In reality, these persons demonstrate that we are not yet rid of our anger, or our self-concern or so on. This should hit us when at the end of Lent, Jesus Christ, a man unjustly persecuted if ever there were one, serenely takes up His cross and marches off to his death.

Here is a tremendous paradox: when we set out to choose life, we hope that it will bring us liberation and happiness. What we don’t always reckon on is that before we make this decision to choose life, we have been silently choosing death all along. When we make an effort to turn around and follow Christ more closely, our past choices spring to life and hold us back. The experience may feel like one of God’s abandonment, that we are alive but He is nowhere to be found. We desire to find Him, but we fear finding only a corpse and, what’s more, a huge stone stands before us. Who will roll it away? It does not occur to the women that Jesus Himself is alive and quite capable of a small task like moving a huge stone.

What the women, and we, also don’t count on is the fact that the things we tend to associate with life in our world today: excitement, interesting stories and disputes in politics and ideals, just wars, the latest plot of The Sopranos, the most interesting blogs and websites, even the good feelings of being with those whom we like, if I dare say so (and I might bring forth Abraham to testify to my interpretation); these things are part of a world that is passing away and clinging to them is more like choosing death than being alive. God created the world good, of course: we heard this in the first reading. The reading we don’t hear tonight is of the sin of Adam and Eve. We become what we love, and Adam and Eve, by turning from God, heard the just sentence: to dust you shall return. When we prefer the world, we may feel momentarily alive, but we are on the road to dust. When we come to our physical deaths, this may appear to us as a sudden event, but in fact, it is the consequence of the choices we make for spiritual death. This will be its reality, at least until we are reclaimed by the One who brought life by His own death.

The ancient pagans were puzzled to see the ancient Christians approach death in rather a different way. The Christians, according to St. Ambrose, carried their dead high and sang “Alleluia!” Why? Because as life and the good creation had been changed into death by the sin of Adam, death and suffering have been changed into life and victory by Jesus Christ. As the eternal logos, He consented with His Father’s plan to come down from heaven, but He never lost sight of heaven, was not allured by the pomps of the Devil, as we heard six weeks ago. We become what we love: if we are in Jesus Christ, then death does not mean a final reversion to dust, but a transfiguration into the Divine Life. If we love with Christ’s love, then we will become like God Himself.

Have I changed my tune here? Didn’t I begin by saying that our efforts to better ourselves, to follow Christ more faithfully turn out often to be failure? Indeed, and I stand by that assertion, and I stand by the fact that it is Good News. This is because only Christ can roll the stone away, and a recognition of that fact is the key to salvation. We can only be saved, we can only desire a Savior, where we find ourselves perishing, where we recognize the places where we have chosen death. In these places within ourselves, where we are dead spiritually, let us place the Body of Christ, that on this night, He may triumphantly rise and put life in those places. During Lent, we have been searching out not our virtues, not our strengths, but the sepulchers within us. When we find these, we should rejoice: Christ desires to go there before us, and to have us hear there the Good News: He is risen indeed! Like the ancient Christians carrying their dead and singing Alleluia, we should come upon the dead parts of ourselves and sing Alleluia, for these are places where we can have a new life, and one we probably didn’t expect.

Can it be this easy? Am I making this up? If this were not the case, why do we sing, O felix culpa, O happy fault? God’s power makes even our faults, especially our faults, into a reason for rejoicing. What other news can compare with this? Listen to the invitation our Lord makes: all who are thirsty, you who have no money, come to the water and receive without paying! It’s on me! Christ has paid the ransom!

If our efforts at Lent don’t actually improve us, is there not then a better way to arrive at Christ? No, our efforts bear much fruit if they bring us to a realization of our need for Christ, and if we surrender ourselves into His merciful and loving hands. If we consent to our death: this we will do in a few moments when we renew our baptismal vows. As Saint Paul has reminded us, we who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into His death. So our promises at baptism are a consent to die the death that Christ died: the death to self, the death to this world, the death to death, as it were.

We will, after all, promise once again to reject sin. In a sense, we will promise to renew the fight that we took up at the beginning of Lent, but we will do so now with the renewed faith that comes of the realization that where we find death, Christ bursts forth with life from the Father. Where we have gathered in the darkness this night, the light of Christ has burst forth with an unconquerable joy. What we will have learned is that this victory, impossible for us, is already won by the Strong Man, Jesus Christ. By our efforts to break free of sin, Christ will find a welcome home in us this night.

So let us review a bit where we have been this Lent: what were our greatest disappointments? What were the self-revelations that we most disturbing to our self-image? What are the stones that we need rolled away? Having seen these, let us raise our eyes again and see that One who has already broken out of the tomb. Let us sweetly forget ourselves and let our failings be blotted out by the All-powerful, by the One into whose hands the Father has given all things. Christ is Risen. He is truly risen, alleluia!