A Homily for Easter Sunday

i + We have prayed, we have fasted and we have striven to perform works of charity for some forty days now. We have celebrated the Solemn Mass of the Lord’s Supper and with increasing intensity we have entered into the mystery of the Passion of the Lord culminating in our veneration of the Cross and the celebration of the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday.
 
“Haec nox est…!” the Exsultet repeatedly sings in the Paschal Vigil. “Haec dies quam fecit Dominus…!” the Gradual of Easter Day insists. This is the night.... This is the day which has been made by the Lord… This is the night for which we have prepared and for which we have longed; this is the day towards which we have persevered in our Lenten disciplines.
 
My brothers and sisters, if there is one night, if there is one day, on which what it is to be a human person is made clear, it is this one. If there is one day which answers every question any man or woman has had, does have or ever can have about the meaning of their life, of the suffering that they must endure, of the death that will one day come to them, or of the path they must follow in this life, it is today.
 
Why? What is this this night? What is this day? Let the Exsultet teach us:
 
“This is the night that even now throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to His holy ones.

This is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld...
 
The sanctifying power of this night dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty.”
 
But why, we might ask again? What power does Easter Day have? Let the Gospels teach us:
 
“I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he[a] lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him,” the Angel tells the women who come to the Lord’s tomb at dawn. (Mass of the Easter Vigil) “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him.” (Mass of Easter Day)
 
Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish prophet who was unjustly and cruelly executed by the Romans in Jerusalem at the instigation of His own religious authorities rose from the dead and appeared to His disciples. His disciples touched Him and ate with Him—He was no spirit or mere apparition; these encounters were no sentimental remembrances or mere experiences of His spirit somehow living on in the community of His disciples. No. The same body that was publicly humiliated, tortured and crucified walked free of the grave within a mere three days—glorified, certainly, but in every way the same body, the same flesh and blood that was crucified.
 
This is why the Church sings so insistently about this night, about this day. For, my brothers and sisters, if Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, if He cast off the worst that this world can do to any man (to take away his life), then His claims to be the Messiah, the Christ of God, the Way, the Truth and the Life, the unique saviour of mankind are indisputably true. His insistence that He has the power to forgive sins has been substantiated. His moral teachings have been underlined by nothing other than power that is greater than death. And His promise of eternal life for those who persevere in following His teachings to the end is real.
 
“O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human,” the Church’s liturgy sings. Let us rejoice in the very depths of our being to be able to share this blessing, rightly celebrating it as worthily as we are able with the liturgical riches that the Church has developed in her Sacred Tradition. And may so doing give us the graces of both perseverance as disciples of the resurrected Christ in the daily circumstances of our life, and of witnessing thereby to the joyful, saving Truth of which He is the Incarnation. For “This is the night [this is the day] when all who believe in Christ Are delivered from bondage to sin and are restored to life and immortality.” May we be worthy partakers in this, the greatest of realities. +