Part 1
Part 2
Romans 6:3–11
Luke 24:1–12
What are we doing here these very late hours of the night or early morning? The two men in dazzlingly garments we just met in the tomb tell us what we ought to be doing. We ought to be remembering. They tell the puzzled women in the tomb to remember what you have been told: Remember what Jesus told you about his suffering, his crucifixion, and the promise of his rising on the third day. That process of suffering, dying and rising, that is what we are to remember–we call it the paschal mystery. Our gathering in these early morning hours was announced as just that. This is a time for remembering. This is our Easter duty, this is what will draw us into the movement of a passage through death into life. That passage from death to life marks so many of large and small movements of life. It marks our whole life journey.
When we gathered around the fire, you will remember that we are gathering to remember that Jesus Christ passed over from death to life. Our gathering is a remembering and celebrating his paschal mystery. When we do that then we in effect build up the hope within us of sharing well in the same Passover, the same passage through suffering, death into life. We are here to let Christ’s Passover from death into life touch our lives again here in the 21st century. We remember what seems to be the past, but in that remembering it touches our present.
The content of what we are doing and keeping is simply put: it is the Passover of the Lord. We heard it around the fire, we heard it in the Easter proclamation, the Exsultet. We have heard it told in various images and stories as we gathered here around the light, or in more homey terms, around the fire, a wonderful place for telling stories, singing songs and making poems. If we remember, as the two men in the tomb ask us to do, then we will remember that we began our process of remembering Passover when we gathered here for our Eucharistic meal on Thursday. For that meal was itself a memorial of the first Passover. We remembered then that the blood of the Lamb that was slain was used to mark the doorposts so that the Lord would passover the house leaving it free from death. The blood of the slain lamb was in effect life spilled so that freedom could begin. Even then it became clear that Passover was a movement through death into life. For Israel, a life of freedom from slavery to the Egyptians.
We are remembering that our God is about leading his people in the passage from suffering and death into a new existence. We passover from death in any of its forms to the broad expanse of new life with its richness of relationships that are held together in a communion of love. If Thursday thrust us into the midst of Passover through the meal, where we learned to serve one another, then Friday we remembered that the power of the meal lies in the death of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We heard that Jesus’ Passover into death was a completion of God’s work to love the world so much that his son would lay down his life so that we might have eternal life. His death was to draw us into that love. Lifted up on the cross, Jesus proclaimed that his work of loving us to the end was finished. The suffering and death of Christ reveal the power and depths of God’s faithful love. It is not half-hearted, it is not exclusive, it embraces us all.
In many ways, the stories and prophetic messages we have just listened to are an exercise of that memory that the two men in the tomb are asking us to do. We remember that in each of these fragments of God’s relationship with his people there is a passage, a Passover if you will. It begins with passover from darkness into light, with water that symbolizes chaos and death to water that teams with life. We hear how Isaac, too, pass through death into freedom because his father Abraham trusted in the Lord’s power to transform immanent death into a real future. We heard how Israel passed through the Red Sea water, leaving behind an Egypt of slavery into the freedom of being led by the light of God’s Word. All the prophets we heard announced that a broken relationship that involved infidelity, abandonment, hopelessness and exile all passed over into forgiveness, restoration, cleansing and wisdom. The Passover of the community ended in a restored life together.
And so where will we fit into this Passover pattern? How will we be able to move forward through life’s suffering, its infidelities, its broken relationships? To make the passage we will have to get wet. We will have to get into the water, not alone but with our Christ who has completed the Passover. For in the water we can die in its chaos, but in the water we can begin to rise with the Christ who has completed the Passover and come out the victor. We call that water our baptism. Each of the readings we have heard should remind us of what lies at the end of our Passover journeys. There is something new, something of light and beauty, something of love, receiving it and giving it. All these are clear experiences of what we are remembering tonight: Christ’s victory over all that holds us back from completing the Passover into the new life God the Father holds out for his children.
We have proclaimed Christ risen. That is where Passover leads. Christ is risen. And you and I? We once joined him in that Passover. And that too is what we have to remember. We too passed through water. That was the beginning of our Passover. We know only too well that it is not over. We know only too well that it takes time for the implications of dying and rising with Christ to work their way into our bodies until the day they are transformed anew. But we can say yes again and again to our remembering that we have joined Christ in his Passover. We have left behind the old world and way of thinking. We are journeying on this side of his Passover. And so in a few minutes we will give voice to our remembering by renewing the promises we made when we first joined Christ in his dying and allowed his rising to shape our lives.
The celebration of the Passover of God’s Son we began on Thursday, we will now renew for ourselves. Yes, we will once again commit ourselves to light in the midst of darkness, to life in the face of death’s many threats, to the unspeakable dignity of human beings created in God’s image, and to the Word that holds the Wisdom of how we are to continue our Passover journey until the whole of creation stands in the peace of God’s eternal covenant of unremitting love.
Christ is Risen, alleluia!
He is truly Risen, alleluia!
~ Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB