Homily of the Easter Vigil, March 31, 2024
«Don’t sleep anymore! Macbeth has murdered the dream, the innocent dream.» They are famous verses from Shakespeare’s tragedy. To usurp the crown, Macbeth has just killed the king while he was sleeping. But by stabbing him he has not only killed an individual, but he has killed sleep. He has killed him because Macbeth himself will no longer be able to sleep. But also because from now on betrayal will become a habit, and no one will sleep confidently. Not only the king has died, a world has died: that world where it was possible to abandon oneself to sleep.
Just as it happened with Macbeth, it happens today: a world, a culture, a civilization dies. Keys to the common life that have united us for decades are disappearing. And so, for example, when abortion is constituted as a right, it is not only a human being that is killed, but that world where the sacred novelty of each new life is perceived. With abortion, initiative and creativity die. In the same way, euthanasia kills more than the patient. It kills patient compassion, so that you don’t have to take care of your brother and accept the challenge of restoring hope. And so we could go on describing the death of our world. Faith is also a casualty in secularized society. We have not been able, as Nietzsche wanted, to kill God, but we have killed a world habitable by God. How can we remain united with each other? What kind of world should we introduce our children into?
Today, on this Easter Vigil, we also hear: «Sleep no more! Christ has killed sleep.» Saint Augustine already said that it is proper for the Christian to keep watch at night, because in this way we become accustomed to the resurrection. Like Macbeth, Christ has killed sleep, but not innocent sleep, but the sleep of isolation and despair. For sleep, the ancients said, differs from wakefulness in that, when we sleep, each one withdraws into his own world, while when we are awake we inhabit a common world. Christ’s resurrection reintegrates us into the common world because he resurrects his flesh, the place where we form one family. And Christ gives that world a new destiny, in his risen flesh.
This resurrection of the world is illustrated in the following tale, inspired by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati. On a hill outside the walls stands the leper colony. The lepers look with envy at the city of the healthy. When – rarely – someone is cured, he is subjected to inspection, and only then can he depart with great joy. One day a young man came in who was not resigned to leprosy and longed to return to amusements. He locked himself in his room to pray and pray, striving to be healed. To the admiration of the unbelievers, his flesh was gradually being cleansed. He was finally found healthy. I would finally go back to the pleasures of before! But the doctors still discovered a blemish on him: to stay locked up! Then he gave himself more rigorously to his prayer. And one day, even that little stain was erased. The doors of the leper colony were opened to him, and in the background he could see the desired city. Then the young man stopped in the doorway and—» He didn’t want to leave! What had happened?
Someone said, «I know. You have prayed so much, you have come so close to God, that you have lost your taste for the things of the earth.» But he explained. He had approached the flesh of the Risen One. And this had not made him lose his desire for the earthly, but had transformed it. First, he had discovered that his flesh was common meat with the other lepers. Jesus, in being resurrected in the flesh, does not rise as an isolated individual, because the flesh makes us members of a family. His resurrection reveals to us that with him he resurrects our life together. That is why the healthy man understood that his full healing went through the healing of the other lepers. Second, he had discovered that the destiny of the flesh was not only to make it healthy in order to live a joyful life, which would eventually come to an end. The destiny of his body was to be assimilated to the body of the Risen One, full of glory. In this way he would be able to overcome death and reach the fullness of all his senses, for he would taste, hear, and see the living God. That is why he chose to live in his body the same love of Jesus, to bring all leper colonies, with Jesus, to God.
So with Christ a new world with a new destiny is resurrected. When destiny changes, the whole world changes, because man, as Julián Marías said, is a futuristic being, that is, inclined towards the future, who already lives in the future. Tell me about your plans and hopes and I’ll tell you who you are. Well, if the resurrection is our future, we become «resurrected» men, who live in advance the fullness that the Risen One already gives them.
«God so loved the world that he gave his only Son», we read in the Gospel of John (Jn 3:16). This delivery includes the resurrection. He loved the world so much that he raised his Son from the dead, so that the world might come to God. God so loved our flesh that He took it with Himself. God loved the «one flesh» of spouses so much that He opened a way for you to reach God together. He loved your children, the fruit of your flesh, so much that he gave you baptism so that you might give them the destiny of Jesus as their destiny. God loved the world so much that he invented the consecrated life, so that the world would have a living sign of its destiny in the resurrection.
This anticipation of the future gives us hope in the face of the cultural disaster we are experiencing. For, even though the past is dead, we can continue to generate a Christian world from the future of Christ. I recently attended a gathering that discussed the relationship between family and God. One of the panelists narrated how he had learned prayer thanks to the climate of prayer that his parents cultivated in the family. Then another, who was a missionary in Peru, told a very different story. He came from a broken family, his father had abandoned them, he never prayed in his childhood and as a young man he was lost with only one obsession: surfing on the beaches of California, where he lived. He then had the grace of an encounter with Christ that led him to faith. And, grateful to have been rescued despite his family experience, he said to himself, «If you haven’t come out of a healthy family, make a healthy family come out of you.» He did not learn fidelity or prayer from his parents, but he worked for a faithful marriage and was able to teach his children to pray.
This story is a testament to the power of the resurrection. Well, it breaks that «nightmare that bites its own tail» that those who want to heal our culture encounter. For example: «How do you build stable families? Educating young people to stable love. How to educate them? Forming stable families.» This circle can be broken because, even if the experience of a healthy and strong love has not come to us from the past, this experience is given to us, in baptism, from the future, from the Risen One.
To see it, it helps to understand how the Church transmits its message across generations. We can imagine a relay race, in which the baton is passed from one to the other. It’s a somewhat poor view. I prefer that of the ancient Greeks who transmitted a torch. Or, even better, I imagine a relay race in which the baton is a mirror that the runner holds aloft, so that it reflects the light that comes from the front, from the finish line.
That is to say, tradition is necessary, but not to deliver the mirror frame. What difference does it make if it’s a rococo frame or a classic or a modern one? The key is not the frame, which is our work and passes, but the glass that reflects the light, the future light that comes from the Risen One. In addition, this light grows as the corridor approaches it, so that our children will grow what we give them. Let us remember what the crucified martyrs saw in the novel Quo vadis? and who sustained them in their pain. It was not so much the Risen One, but «the resurrection,» that is, they saw how their sufferings led them to Christ, and this sustained them.
What is this light-reflecting mirror-witness? Christ gave it to us summed up in the Eucharist, where we eat the flesh of the Risen One. We pass this mirror-witness on to others when we live the Eucharist as the fullness of God’s love for the world He created. The key, then, lies in two sacraments. On the one hand, the Eucharist, which configures us to the flesh of the Risen One. On the other hand, marriage, which confirms to us that the Eucharist fulfills God’s plan for man, when he created them male and female in his image and likeness as the first cell of society. Linked to marriage, the Eucharist is transmitted, not as an escape to a future world, but as the fullness of God’s love for this world of ours.
To sum up, it could be said: it is enough to transmit, as a mirror-witness, Sunday, with the Eucharist at its center. It’s hard for us to see this because we’ve tamed Sunday, which has become the day where the week tirelessly ends: the weekend. But Sunday is the first day, full of vitality, because from it the other days are directed to their fullness. A liturgical hymn speaks of Sunday, evoking the fire from which we have lit this paschal candle: «It is Sunday. From his bonfire / shines all week.» Let us rehearse, then, to live Sunday forward. In Eucharistic thanksgiving let us give thanks for what we will experience from Monday to Saturday: projects, conversations, celebrations, trials… Let us try it as a route to the Risen One. Some imagine the Christian journey as a journey from victory to victory, forgetting the cross. Others imagine it from defeat to defeat until the final victory. Actually, the road goes from Sunday to Sunday until the final Sunday.
«Don’t sleep anymore!» Enter into that common world that Christ has inaugurated and that Christ invites you to build together. And since the destiny of that world is resurrection, it can be said: «Die no more! Christ has murdered death, the fruitless death!»