Easter Vigil and Confirmation |
“If we have been united with him in a death like his we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
This is a night of contrasts. We assembled in the crypt – the place of the dead – and we have travelled through the gloaming led by the newly kindled Easter fire, and we have celebrated deliverance from slavery into new life.
This is our community’s map of the reality in which we live. We do not make a very good job of living as human beings in all the splendour and freedom of a fully human life. To move into the light we have first to see the darkness. To throw off the chains we must first see them.
These last few days by just looking at the bill boards in London I see an eight year old boy has been stabbed. Last night in Leytonstone two teenagers were knifed, one is dead and one fighting for his life. A thirteen year old has been arrested. But these things are easy to see and condemn. There has also been the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which details the effect on the poorest and most vulnerable in the world of the way in which we have been living. The rich and the masterful have had it their own way and the scars can be seen on our common planetary home.
Slavery and darkness are things that other people suffer from – surely not us. It has been said that man is born free and is only then corrupted and put in chains by social conventions.
Jesus Christ turns the map upside down and reveals how the world in which we live is not at all secular but full of hidden persuaders – little gods if you like – which teach us from our earliest years that we must look after number one and that we can be happy if we accumulate more and more things like this year’s must have plasma screen, which of course channels the hidden persuaders into our homes with even greater vividness. If we set our hearts and build our world around these things then we shall shrink in soul.
But there is no possibility of escaping from these chains simply by our own efforts. The void is simply too terrifying if we leave our comfort zone.
But God is at work, labouring to give us freedom and to initiate us into a full human life. Far from being self-made men and women, in reality we are given our identity by others. We are given our names, our mother’s face broods over us like the Spirit at the dawn of earth’s history drawing out a response from the infant. We are recognised, we are loved into loving, we are given status and worth or tragically we are overlooked and condemned and made to feel like dirt. We are given our identity by others.
It must also be true that we have been given the power to shape the identity of our neighbours for good or ill. God names our ancestor Adam – the earth man – and then he is charged with giving the animals their names. We are all involved in this giving and receiving of names and identities.
Tonight you are entering the community of those who have been caught up in the life of God where this giving and receiving leads not to lethal consequences but to freedom.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son into the hands of sinful men. We have seen on the cross, the Son gives himself to the Father, and the Father is the Father because the Son, who has answered his call, has given him his name. The Spirit enables creation to participate in this dynamic of giving and receiving.
This is God the Holy Trinity’s way of being - calling, responding, giving up myself to the other, participating in mutually offering identity and freedom.
Humanity is one of the languages which the persons of the Trinity use in communicating with one another and by initiating us into the life of the Trinity we are taught how to grow into our full humanity.
You are being called by name to join a community in which we are involved in this work of giving and receiving freedom. We are to regard one another as our work of art as Hildegard of Bingen once said.
The community of the church is the work of God addressed to building the full stature of humanity. If we do not together with God make one another our work of art then much of each one of us remains missing and never comes to be. We are all in debt to one another and each other is precisely what we owe. Each of us is commissioned to speak the other into being.
In the early Church, the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with Our Father and asks for the forgiveness of our debts, was only given to those who like yourselves had undergone preparation and who this night were being enrolled in the community. It was the prayer of nominal Christians but of those who had been called up for active service.
As yet we speak humanity very badly. It is a language and a life we are scarcely acquainted with. We are born into this world of smoke and mirrors and full humanity is not our beginning but our end and goal.
God holds out the gift to us of life with him and he has started the work of building a holy people.
The Eucharist is not something that we do as an audio visual aid to what has happened once and for all but is also a gift of a medium in which we are initiated into a fuller humanity as each awakes in each what else would never be. Our celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice should ache with the longing for his coming again in full power and glory.
Perhaps we are misled by the court room context which Western thought builds around the notion of sacrifice. In reality it is the induction into a new medium, a new way of human relating and account giving – giving up ourselves to receive our lives back charged with a new vitality – an induction into the life of the Holy Trinity in which the Father gives the Son, and the Son gives himself to the Father, and the Spirit enables creation to participate in this dynamic of giving and receiving.
If we have been united with him in a sacrificial death like his we shall certainly share with him in his resurrection. This is the true real Easter mystery. Christ is risen!
