THE EASTER VIGIL
ST PETER'S BASILICA
23 APRIL 2011
ST PETER'S BASILICA
23 APRIL 2011
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The
liturgical celebration of the Easter Vigil makes use of two eloquent
signs.
First there is the fire that becomes light. As the procession
makes its way through the church, shrouded in the darkness of the
night, the light of the Paschal Candle becomes a wave of lights, and it
speaks to us of Christ as the true morning star that never sets – the
Risen Lord in whom light has conquered darkness.
The second sign is
water. On the one hand, it recalls the waters of the Red Sea, decline
and death, the mystery of the Cross. But now it is presented to us as
spring water, a life-giving element amid the dryness. Thus it becomes
the image of the sacrament of baptism, through which we become sharers
in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Yet these great
signs of creation, light and water, are not the only constituent
elements of the liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Another essential feature
is the ample encounter with the words of sacred Scripture that it
provides. Before the liturgical reform there were twelve Old Testament
readings and two from the New Testament. The New Testament readings
have been retained. The number of Old Testament readings has been
fixed at seven, but depending upon the local situation, they may be
reduced to three.
The Church wishes to offer us a panoramic view of
whole trajectory of salvation history, starting with creation, passing
through the election and the liberation of Israel to the testimony of
the prophets by which this entire history is directed ever more clearly
towards Jesus Christ. In the liturgical tradition all these readings
were called prophecies. Even when they are not directly foretelling
future events, they have a prophetic character, they show us the inner
foundation and orientation of history. They cause creation and history
to become transparent to what is essential. In this way they take us
by the hand and lead us towards Christ, they show us the true Light.
At
the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture
begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of
telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not
information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man
himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of
this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of
the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential,
towards the true beginning and end of our being.
Now, one might ask: is
it really important to speak also of creation during the Easter Vigil?
Could we not begin with the events in which God calls man, forms a
people for himself and creates his history with men upon the earth? The
answer has to be: no. To omit the creation would be to misunderstand
the very history of God with men, to diminish it, to lose sight of its
true order of greatness. The sweep of history established by God
reaches back to the origins, back to creation.
Our profession of faith
begins with the words: “We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator
of heaven and earth”. If we omit the beginning of the Credo,
the whole history of salvation becomes too limited and too small. The
Church is not some kind of association that concerns itself with man’s
religious needs but is limited to that objective. No, she brings man
into contact with God and thus with the source of all things.
Therefore we relate to God as Creator, and so we have a responsibility
for creation. Our responsibility extends as far as creation because it
comes from the Creator. Only because God created everything can he
give us life and direct our lives. Life in the Church’s faith involves
more than a set of feelings and sentiments and perhaps moral
obligations. It embraces man in his entirety, from his origins to his
eternal destiny. Only because creation belongs to God can we place
ourselves completely in his hands. And only because he is the Creator
can he give us life for ever. Joy over creation, thanksgiving for
creation and responsibility for it all belong together.
The
central message of the creation account can be defined more precisely
still. In the opening words of his Gospel, Saint John sums up the
essential meaning of that account in this single statement: “In the
beginning was the Word”. In effect, the creation account that we
listened to earlier is characterized by the regularly recurring phrase:
“And God said …” The world is a product of the Word, of the Logos, as Saint John expresses it, using a key term from the Greek language. “Logos”
means “reason”, “sense”, “word”. It is not reason pure and simple,
but creative Reason, that speaks and communicates itself. It is
Reason that both is and creates sense.
The creation account tells us,
then, that the world is a product of creative Reason. Hence it tells
us that, far from there being an absence of reason and freedom at the
origin of all things, the source of everything is creative Reason,
love, and freedom. Here we are faced with the ultimate alternative
that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are
irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of
everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being?
Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what
everything hinges upon in the final analysis. As believers we answer,
with the creation account and with John, that in the beginning is
reason. In the beginning is freedom. Hence it is good to be a human
person. It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late
stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some
species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find
rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.
If man
were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins
of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a
chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative,
divine Reason. And because it is Reason, it also created freedom; and
because freedom can be abused, there also exist forces harmful to
creation. Hence a thick black line, so to speak, has been drawn across
the structure of the universe and across the nature of man. But
despite this contradiction, creation itself remains good, life remains
good, because at the beginning is good Reason, God’s creative love.
Hence the world can be saved. Hence we can and must place ourselves on
the side of reason, freedom and love – on the side of God who loves us
so much that he suffered for us, that from his death there might
emerge a new, definitive and healed life.
The Old Testament
account of creation that we listened to clearly indicates this order of
realities. But it leads us a further step forward. It has structured
the process of creation within the framework of a week leading up to
the Sabbath, in which it finds its completion. For Israel, the Sabbath
was the day on which all could participate in God’s rest, in which man
and animal, master and slave, great and small were united in God’s
freedom.
Thus the Sabbath was an expression of the Covenant between
God and man and creation. In this way, communion between God and man
does not appear as something extra, something added later to a world
already fully created. The Covenant, communion between God and man, is
inbuilt at the deepest level of creation. Yes, the Covenant is the
inner ground of creation, just as creation is the external
presupposition of the Covenant. God made the world so that there could
be a space where he might communicate his love, and from which the
response of love might come back to him. From God’s perspective, the
heart of the man who responds to him is greater and more important than
the whole immense material cosmos, for all that the latter allows us
to glimpse something of God’s grandeur.
Easter
and the paschal experience of Christians, however, now require us to
take a further step. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week.
After six days in which man in some sense participates in God’s work of
creation, the Sabbath is the day of rest. But something quite
unprecedented happened in the nascent Church: the place of the Sabbath,
the seventh day, was taken by the first day. As the day of the
liturgical assembly, it is the day for encounter with God through Jesus
Christ who as the Risen Lord encountered his followers on the first
day, Sunday, after they had found the tomb empty. The structure of the
week is overturned. No longer does it point towards the seventh day,
as the time to participate in God’s rest.
It sets out from the first
day as the day of encounter with the Risen Lord. This encounter
happens afresh at every celebration of the Eucharist, when the Lord
enters anew into the midst of his disciples and gives himself to them,
allows himself, so to speak, to be touched by them, sits down at table
with them. This change is utterly extraordinary, considering that the
Sabbath, the seventh day seen as the day of encounter with God, is so
profoundly rooted in the Old Testament. If we also bear in mind how
much the movement from work towards the rest-day corresponds to a
natural rhythm, the dramatic nature of this change is even more
striking. This revolutionary development that occurred at the very the
beginning of the Church’s history can be explained only by the fact
that something utterly new happened that day.
The first day of the
week was the third day after Jesus’ death. It was the day when he
showed himself to his disciples as the Risen Lord. In truth, this
encounter had something unsettling about it. The world had changed.
This man who had died was now living with a life that was no longer
threatened by any death. A new form of life had been inaugurated, a
new dimension of creation. The first day, according to the Genesis
account, is the day on which creation begins. Now it was the day of
creation in a new way, it had become the day of the new creation. We
celebrate the first day. And in so doing we celebrate God the Creator
and his creation. Yes, we believe in God, the Creator of heaven and
earth. And we celebrate the God who was made man, who suffered, died,
was buried and rose again. We celebrate the definitive victory of the
Creator and of his creation.
We celebrate this day as the origin and
the goal of our existence. We celebrate it because now, thanks to the
risen Lord, it is definitively established that reason is stronger than
unreason, truth stronger than lies, love stronger than death. We
celebrate the first day because we know that the black line drawn
across creation does not last for ever. We celebrate it because we
know that those words from the end of the creation account have now
been definitively fulfilled: “God saw everything that he had made, and
behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31).
Amen.