Easter Vigil – 2004

            Someone once wrote that religion is essentially universal because death is.  At the center of all religions is the attempt on the part of man to come to terms with – and even conquer somehow – death itself.  This explains the burial rites of so many cultures – all are geared toward some kind of afterlife.  The mystery of death, of dying, has to be dealt with, and because man is ultimately powerless against it, he searches for a power beyond himself that can do what he cannot:  provide victory over death. 

            Today we mark and celebrate the greatest possible triumph over death:  the Resurrection.  But Christianity is not really unique with its presentation and profession of a god dying and rising again.  Such tales, myths, have proliferated all over the world.  But Christianity is unique in this sense, that the God we speak of – Jesus Christ, God Incarnate – is not a character of some myth; He is, rather, a character of history.  All that we have been commemorating these past three days are not mere lore and tales and myths, but things that really happened.  There really was, 2,000 years ago, an upper room in Jerusalem, where Jesus ate His last Passover Meal with His closest followers, where He dismissed Judas Iscariot into outer and eternal darkness, where He took up bread and wine and consecrated them into His Body and Blood and ordained the men around Him to “do this in memory of me,” perpetuating for all time through the Holy Mass Christ’s sacrificial death for our sins.  Two thousand years ago, there really was a trial before the Roman governor who has the dubious “honor” of being mentioned in our Creed as the one under whose “authority” our Lord was sentenced to death and was crucified.  There was those many, many centuries ago a place where Jesus was born, Bethlehem (still there to this day), a place where He grew up, Nazareth, a temple in Jerusalem and a local synagogue where He prayed, a river, the Jordan, in which He was baptized, a city where He raised to life a dead man, Bethany, and a place called “the Skull,” Golgotha, where He was murdered….

            No here is no mere myth or fable, but a history with all the grandeur of the greatest of mythic stories and all the mundaneness of the everyday chronicling of events that are being reported to us by eyewitnesses – those men and women who were His first followers – whose honesty really can’t be impugned since they report their own failures, cowardice, sins and foibles openly and most of whom were either martyred or sorely persecuted because they refused to deny what they had most definitely seen and heard and, as was the awesome experience of the Apostle Thomas to actually have his eyes opened to believe by placing his finger in the crucifixion wounds of the Risen Savior.

            Yes, there are all kinds of myths of death and resurrection out there that are beautiful and seem so close to our own Christian story.  None, however, claim to be historical.  Only the Christian story does.  And that’s because it really happened.  And that’s why we Catholics speak so boldly about what has stirred the hearts of people everywhere all through time:  how to escape the power of death.  By dying with Christ, that’s how.  Just as St. Paul tells in the reading from Colossians just now.  “Are you not aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Through baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life.” 

            So there it is.  For us Christians the power of death is broken, not by some magic spell, correct incantation, or highly developed means of preserving a corpse, but by the historical fact and reality that 2000 years ago Christ the Son of God died, and that dying was the destruction of death itself.  For when God takes on flesh so that He can draw so very near to us, suffer with and for us, and, yes, die – when God undergoes this, it is not God who is defeated, but rather it is death that is transformed – from the seeming dark and mysterious finality or, at best, some bleak passageway into the vagueness of the underworld – transformed into the very portal of eternal life, all accomplished because Christ died… and rose again.

            Baptism is where it begins, where this powerful, yet hidden, reality of God’s life-giving grace, signed by water and words, anoints a soul even as a human heart’s commitment receives this gift of all gifts – the gift of God’s action that unites the one baptized to Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection.    And here, then is the pattern, the Way, of the whole Christian life:  union with Jesus Christ, a union, a companionship, that is to grow ever stronger, inside and out, in our hearts and in our lives, through availing oneself of the Sacraments of Christ’s love that more and more transform us into His image.  We die everyday, then, with Him as we live out our baptism… so that we might live, so that we conquer death by passing through it one day with our Savior, so that we gain eternal life – all of this commencing with the simple pouring of water and words which through the power of God change a man or woman forever and gives them the beginnings of everlasting life.