Easter Vigil
March 29, 1997
Provincial House, New Rochelle
I have Easter “off,” so
to speak—just concelebrating at home without any “outside” obligation. Here’s
an old homily delivered here at home.
“God
said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ God created man in his image; in the divine
image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them…. God looked at everything he had made and he
found it very good” (Gen 1: 26-28, 31).
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| Adam & Eve in the Garden by Lucas Cranach |
On
the 6th day God made creatures in his own image. On the 6th day God found what he had created
to be not only “good,” as on the 1st 5 days, but “very good.”
This
exceeding goodness must be because God’s own authority, his order, his
purposeful fruitfulness had become part of the created world, exercised by
creatures—male and female humans—created in God’s own likeness: full of life, holy, self-giving. These human creatures were God’s viceroys,
sharing in the divine dominion over the rest of creation.
That
was God’s plan. We know what happened
next:
God’s plan made a
hopeful beginning,
But man spoiled his
chances by sinning.
We trust
that the story
Will end in
God’s glory,
But at present the other
side’s winning.
The
Exsultet—quoting St. Augustine, I think—calls our fall from grace a “happy
fault”; not in itself, surely, but in the great consequence of our fall,
namely, that God adapted his plan to give us new hope. He made a new creation. He restored the divine image and likeness in
man, male and female.
That
is what we celebrate tonight.
No
longer are our chances spoiled. No
longer is the other side winning.
The
Father of all things created a human body for his Only Son, with the
cooperation of a human being, Mary of Nazareth. Jesus Christ, the Only Son in his human
body—and in all else that it means to be human—reversed the course of history,
reversed man’s relationship with his Creator and our prospects for eternity.
Jesus
Christ, son of God and son of Adam, by his obedience, by his passion and
resurrection, has made all of us sons and daughters of Adam into a new
creation. He has restored the image of
God, has once more made mankind the crown of God’s creation.
In
the Easter collect, after the Gloria, we prayed that God “quicken the spirit of
sonship” in his Church. Quicken here is used in its old English
meaning of “make alive,” “give a sudden renewal of life”; and indeed the prayer
continues: “Renew us in mind and body to
give you wholehearted service.”
By
our Baptism in the water that flowed from Christ’s pierced side, by our
anointing with the holy chrism at Baptism and in Confirmation, we have been
made new, made into the image of God’s Son, quickened like Adam when God 1st
breathed life into him, quickened like the entombed body of Jesus himself,
consecrated with Christ among all the created universe for service to God.
Christ
is risen, and with him are we also.
Quoting Augustine now (for certain, this time):
Of ourselves we had no power to live, nor did he
of himself have the power to die. Accordingly,
he effected a wonderful exchange with us, through mutual sharing: we gave him the power to die; he will give us
the power to live.[1]
Whether
or not Adam’s sin was a happy fault, this is surely a happy exchange, that we
gave the Son of God a mortal body, and he offers us everlasting life.
The
Father was very pleased with his beloved Son.
May he look on his new children and see in us his Son’s image. May he find us once again “very good” and
bless is.
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