TEXT: Easter Vigil, The Resurrection of the Lord, April 19, 2025
April 19, 2025 Father De Celles Homily
Easter Vigil – The Resurrection of the Lord
April 19, 2025
Homily by Fr. John De Celles
St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church
Springfield, VA
For the last forty plus days Catholics have been turning our hearts and minds
to the Suffering and Death of the Lord Jesus for our sins.
In doing this, we have examined our own lives and consciences
to recognize and repent of those sins.
All this culminated on Good Friday,
as we focused most intently on the terrible
scourging, mocking, spitting, crowning, beating, nailing and crucifixion
of our most beloved Jesus.
Seeing in our mind’s eye the horrible mutilation of His body
that our sins caused:
the gaping wounds, the torn flesh, the bloody mess,
the excruciating agony, the opened heart of our dead Jesus.
And then seeing how our lives
have also been disfigured and mutilated by our sins
and are in desperate need of healing and conversion.
But tonight, everything is different.
We read in tonight’s gospel that the tomb is empty,
and two angels “in dazzling garments” ask the holy women,
“Why do you seek the living one among the dead?
He is not here, but He has been raised.”
“He has been raised!”
Even so, the holy women at the tomb must have thought, “Raised?”
What is that? How is that?
As we go on reading the Gospel, we read that
He then actually appeared in the flesh to Mary Magdalene,
not just a ghost but in the flesh,
as He had to gently scold her to stop clinging to His body.
Then that evening He appeared to His apostles.
Scripture says,
“He showed them His hands and His side,”
and then He asked for food and ate it.
Jesus is there in the very same fleshy body that on Friday
died on the cross, mutilated beyond recognition.
But now, alive and healed and strong.
The same body,
but now transformed in glory beyond the limitations of this life.
As St. John tells us,
“The doors [of the room] were locked for fear of the Jews,
[and] Jesus came and stood among them.”
The same body, but now apparently able to walk through locked doors.
He remained for forty days, going and coming in that body,
visiting His apostles and disciples in Jerusalem and Galilee,
at one time appearing to five hundred at once,
until finally, on the fortieth day, He ascended body and soul to heaven.
Jesus had no intention of letting the events and effects
of Good Friday and Easter just pass into mere memory, though.
He wanted us, even 2000 years later,
to share in the living reality of His Passion, Death and Resurrection.
And He wants us to share in it, somehow,
through the same means the apostles did.
He had accomplished salvation with and through His human body,
and His disciples had participated in that reality
with and through their human bodies.
As St. John says in his first letter,
“We declare to you…what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked at and touched with our hands…”
The Lord Jesus left behind signs
that we could hear and see and touch,
that would concretely and physically allow His disciples,
from 33 AD to this very evening and until He comes again,
to share in the Cross and Resurrection.
Through these signs,
the power of the Passion and Cross of Jesus
may flow to us and permit us to conquer sin and its mutilation of life,
and be transformed into the life of the Risen Christ.
And so, Jesus gave us what the Apostles and Early Church
called the “mysteries”
and what we most commonly call today the “Sacraments”.
Seven outward, touchable, visible, and audible signs
that Christ Himself instituted,
either by direct action or instruction to His apostles.
Sacraments that pour out on us the grace that flows
from the Cross and Resurrection.
So tonight, as we celebrate the Resurrection,
we do so by incorporating into this Mass the three sacraments
most closely tied to this outpouring:
Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist.
This is the way God has always approached His people:
We are not just spirits; we are body and soul, spirit and flesh.
So, when He established the Old Covenant with Israel,
making them His own people,
He gave them outward signs of their covenant
that were foreshadows of the sacraments.
Jewish Circumcision prefigured and pointed to Baptism,
as it initiates the person into the Old Covenant.
The Passover prefigured the Eucharist as a sacrificial and salvific meal.
And the Jewish feast of Pentecost
celebrated the giving of God’s wisdom in the Law of Moses,
and prefigured the giving of the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit
in Confirmation.
In His wisdom, Jesus fulfills these Old Covenant signs
in the sacraments.
He points to all three of them during his Passion and on Easter, but
He also clearly reveals these three particular sacraments
well before that first Holy Week in Jerusalem.
Months before Good Friday, He told the crowds gathered in Capernaum,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”
Then at the Last Supper,
He transforms the Old Passover into the New Passover,
the Eucharist,
taking bread and saying, “This is My body, given up for you,”
and taking wine and saying, “This is My blood of the covenant,
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
A few hours later, perhaps those words echoed in the heart of St. John
as he stood at the foot of the cross looking up at Jesus’ body,
seeing His blood pouring out of His pierced heart.
But not only blood poured of Jesus’ side,
as John writes in his gospel in an emphatic testimony,
“One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear,
and at once blood and water poured out.”
John also recalled the words Jesus spoke to Nicodemus months before:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God
without being born of water and Spirit.”
And so, John passed on to the Early Church his profound understanding
of this signifying purification and rebirth
by the blood poured out as water in the sacrament of Baptism.
Then, on Easter evening,
as Jesus appears to His apostles in the upper room,
He tells them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Then, for forty days He remains and tells them things like,
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,
and you will be my witnesses…to the end of the earth.”
And on the fiftieth day after Easter, on Pentecost, that promise was fulfilled,
and the sacrament of Confirmation made manifest.
All so that the grace and power of that one salvific event in time,
the Cross and Resurrection,
could be handed on to every generation and
made present to us, truly and really
in the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation.
These are the first three and most essential of the “Seven Sacraments.”
But there is something else that is like a sacrament
that Jesus also gave to us from the Cross and Resurrection.
That is the Church itself.
We say it is “like a sacrament” in that it also is an outward sign,
given to us by Christ as an instrument for pouring out His grace on us.
It was given to us through the Cross and Resurrection.
As the Great bishop and Church Father, St. Augustine of Hippo,
wrote in the 4th century about the wound in Jesus’ side on the Cross:
“Just as Eve was taken from the side of Adam as he slept,
the bride of Jesus, the Church,
came forth from the side of Jesus as He slept in death.”
And tonight, the Bride of Christ
celebrates the Resurrection of her beloved Spouse
by taking those three sacraments and surrounding them with
a stunning and dramatic liturgy
filled with ritualized sights and sounds, which serve to emphasize
the centrality and profound wonder and power
of these instruments of grace
that make us partakers–in rather than mere observers-of
the Paschal Mystery.
Like a diamond…and an emerald…and a ruby,
placed by an expert jeweler in an elaborate setting of
gold, silver, and platinum.
We began with the stunning contrasts of darkness and light
of the Lucernarium—the Liturgy of Light,
reminding us that just as in the beginning of creation
God “separated the light from the darkness,”
in the Resurrection, Christ is the light of the world
banishing the darkness in our hearts and
making the baptized a new creation in Him.
Then we moved into the enhanced Liturgy of the Word,
with five readings from the Old Testament,
leading us through the history of God’s Covenants
with Adam, Moses, Abraham and David,
all leading us to the revelation
of the New Covenant in the Resurrection.
In a few moments we will begin the third part of this Mass,
called the Liturgy of Baptism.
This is the great moment when the blood and water from Christ’s pierced side
pour out on three new children of God,
making them sharers with us in the new life of Christ.
We all will recall our own baptisms,
renewing our baptismal promises and
being sprinkled with the waters of baptism.
Then we will recall the great “Sacrament of the Church” itself,
as we welcome five of our brethren,
who have been baptized previously in other Christian denominations
and now seek the fullness of communion
with Christ and His Catholic Church and of the sacraments.
Then follows the celebration of the sacrament of Confirmation,
as the Father and Son send the fullness of their Holy Spirit
on thirteen of His beloved disciples, including the newly baptized
and the newly received.
Through this, they receive the fullness of the Spirit of Truth,
that they might have the wisdom, understanding, counsel,
fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God
to proclaim the salvific Death and Resurrection of Christ,
following in the footsteps of the Apostles and all the saints.
Then we come to the great crescendo of the Mass:
the Liturgy of the Eucharist,
as, by the miraculous will of God,
we somehow stand at the foot of the one Cross of Jesus Crucified
with the Blessed Mother, John, Magdalene and the holy women.
Jesus gives Himself for us and to us, and we give ourselves to Him.
And we join the newly baptized and confirmed Catholics
in receiving the true Body of Our Crucified and Risen Lord
in Holy Communion,
the font of every grace and heavenly blessing.
The very life of Christ enters into us in the most dramatic form:
The great mystery and power of His death and Resurrection
enter into our bodies and souls and every corner of our lives.
And borrowing from the words of Our Lord Himself at the Last Supper,
we remain in Him as He, literally, also remains in us.
After that, my goodness, what else could there be?!
So, we leave.
But as we leave tonight, I will dismiss you with the ancient Latin dismissal,
saying, “Ite missa est.”
This means not simply, “Go in peace,”
but literally, “Go, it is sent out.”
Which is to say, not simply you are sent out,
but what we have done and received here,
what we have participated in–
the Cross and Resurrection,
the power, grace and life of Jesus Himself–
all this is sent out in us.
So, as you leave here tonight,
the grace you have received from the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus goes with you and in you, into the world.
The life of Christ Himself remains in your life.
So do not go back to your old life,
where sin can mutilate your body and soul,
but allow the grace of Christ to continue to transform your life,
and live every day, every moment with Him.
And so, we end this Mass as we began it:
Let the light of Christ Crucified and Risen go forth with you and pierce the darkness of the world you live in.