Easter Vigil – 19 April 2025
We are as those who think in stories. To tell a story is a defining mark of our human existence. And the stories that we remember, the stories that have meaning for us, are the stories detailing the search for love, for power, for redemption. We never tire of hearing these stories. This is why we watch films, why we watch television, why we become engrossed in literature. In the stories played out in front of us, we see reflected back to ourselves some fragment of that for which we ourselves are searching.
If as humans we are those for whom the experience of ‘story’ is a vital expression of our existence, so, too, therefore, is that sense of ourselves as those who search. We are searchers. We are searching for something. Biologically, psychologically, spiritually we know that we are not complete. There is an intrinsic dimension in ourselves that has us reach out beyond ourselves to something other, to something more. We search for love; we search for identity; we search for wholeness. As the ancient philosophers understood, there is an innate restlessness in the human spirit, an essential nomadic quality, that sets us on a journey into an infinite horizon.
“What are you looking for?” It is the very first question that Jesus puts to his disciples when they first encounter him as recounted in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. What are you looking for? As he puts this question to them, he puts this question to us. We will never come truly to know him, unless we have first stopped, and reflected on the question, for what are we most deeply searching in life? The genuine encounter with Jesus always leads us first to ourselves; it brings us home to ourselves. Only as we recognise our own heart’s deepest desires, do we then recognise who he is and all that he brings to us.
Just as the Gospel begins with a question, so, too, does the Gospel end with a question. Or more accurately, the Gospel begins again with a question. It is the question that is at the heart of the account of the Resurrection which we proclaim this evening: why look among the dead for someone who is alive? Just as discipleship of Jesus begins with hearing a question, the experience of the Resurrection, too, begins with hearing a question: Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?
The women come looking for something. And here in the empty tomb, where they do not find what they are looking for, a proclamation re-orients and transforms, not only their own search, but indeed the human search itself.
Do we, too, not search among the dead for what we are searching? How often do we search among the dead for life? We search for love, for dignity, for acceptance, for worth, for understanding in places that cannot bring life. In the tomb of our hurts, in the darkness of our addictions, in the ghosts of our illusions and fantasies, we get trapped searching for something. But when we search among the dead for life our spirits become deadened; we become paralysed, unable to move forward. Our hearts no longer breathe; we have become numb. Life cannot be found in our bitterness; life cannot be discovered in our resentments; life cannot unfold in our endless self-recrimination.
Life cannot generate in negativity; life can only burst forth when we lift our eyes and begin to search elsewhere. The Resurrection of Jesus is the bursting forth of his life such that it is no longer contained in time and space. And this busting forth shatters not only the tomb in which his body lay. It shatters, too, the tombs of our own spirits. It breaks open the cycles of entrapment, and offers us newness and freshness and possibility in those places where we thought there was only more of the same. The Resurrection proclaims it does not have to be more of the same. Something different is possible! You no longer have to search among what deadens for the life for which you yearn. Do not search among the dead for life. That for which you are searching can only be found in that which gives life, not death.
The gift of this most sacred of nights is a question: a question given to us to reverberate throughout ourselves, a question to seize us once again, to capture us, and to bring us fresh energy. Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?
Both to hear and to answer this question – this is to live the Resurrection of Christ, the proclamation of which we can never hear enough, so that it becomes for us the very story of our life.
