Paschal Vigil
Among all the Biblical lessons Holy Mother Church gives us in this solemn paschal vigil, there is a common thread. God intervenes when all seems lost. From the first page of Genesis in which God unexpectedly – so to speak – draws being and order out of nothingness and chaos, to the Flood when when it seemed that all of humanity would be wiped out and He provided for its preservation through Noah; from the sacrifice of Abraham in which the apparent end of any hope of posterity is saved at the last minute by an angel, to the unheard-of opening of the Red Sea at a moment when the Hebrews were on the verge of being slaughtered by Pharaoh’s army; from the last-minute conversion of Nineveh which saved them from annihilation, to the protection granted to the three young men in the fiery furnace: each time we see God leaving things get to a point where there is no hope in any human help. All seems lost. That is when God intervenes to save.
With the principle event that we celebrate on this holy night, the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we are taken a step further. God does not save His Son when all seems lost. He does not save Him from death. He allows Him to undergo the torture. He allows the forces of evil to conquer. He saves Him when all is lost. The victory comes after the defeat. We may ask ourselves: why is this so? Why doesn’t Our Lord’s passion end in deliverance in such a way as to mirror exactly the events we read about tonight?
The answer is quite simple: ultimately, if we remain in the mentality by which God intervenes to save us at the last moment, we end up in a world in which the only thing that matters is continuing to live here below, and that leads to a world in which the more people we have and the more money we have and the more power we have, the more we are blessed by God. Sadly, that mentality continues to reign in the minds of many.
The Resurrection of Christ inaugurates a new era, one in which the salvation we hope for is not a few extra years of life and prosperity in this world, but the promise of unending life with God in eternity. This is why the event of the Resurrection takes place only after the apparent defeat of Christ, whereas the other events take place before that final defeat.
There is, however, another reason for which He allows things to get so bad, and even to end in physical death, and it is the most fundamental reason of the universe, and it was given to us already on the First Sunday of Lent. On that day, you may recall, we sang Psalm 90 [91], in which the principle theme is confidence in God. If the life of our Lord is paradigmatic for each of us, if He is the model we must imitate, then in our own lives, too, we must remember that it is when all seems lost that God steps in. There is nothing greater than to put absolute, blind confidence in the Being who rules the universe, even when, and especially when, it seems that all is lost, and our own career, life earnings, everything we worked for, and our lives themselves are lost. To trust in those dire circumstances, to hope that God can bring life from death, such is the most important lesson God wants us to learn. For most of us, the only way to teach us is to leave us in hopeless situations. So let’s try to keep that in mind in the midst of our trials.
The Resurrection does not mean that God fixed this world for good. It means that the first step towards fixing it was accomplished. The first day in the New World has begun, but the other days have to be added, and they are yours, and they are mine. It’s our turn now to hope in God, to trust that when all seems lost, He will intervene, and even if He doesn’t, and all is lost, we will still trust in Him! We will say with Job: Even He if kills me, I will hope in Him! (Job 13:15).
This is also why, since the Resurrection, there is no foundation for imagining an ideal world in which evil is destroyed and good reigns definitively. This will come about, but not here below. It will come about only in the hereafter, where Christ Our Lord reigns in glory, surrounded by His saints who, after Him, understood this lesson and lived it, giving their lives for Him and to Him, content to follow in His footsteps, placing all their confidence in Him.
The Resurrection is a transcendent event, in that with it we are projected into a new world, the world of the spirit, in which it is no longer possible to conquer others with weapons in the name of God. Since God has accepted to be conquered in death, it is blasphemy to want to conquer others in His Name. The only conquering that is to take place in the New Testament is the conquering of the heart and the mind, leading them captive by the love of Christ, love that conquered death by accepting to undergo it. This is the marvellous example that made the martyrs; it is the reason why the true Christian does not kill others, but aspires to die for them. Our Blessed Saviour gave us an example that as He has done, so we should do. It is in this hope that Easter is our day of victory, ultimate and definitive victory, for no one has ever conquered like the one who has given his life so that others may live.
