Homily of the Cardinal-Patriarch of Lisbon at the Easter Vigil
We do not lack Christ, let us not lack!
By celebrating the Easter Vigil and remembering all that the sacred text has brought us, from creation to the new creation of all things in Christ, we do much more than set a date, however extremely important.
Important for us, who can celebrate here in peace; and not least for those who live amidst the affliction of war, give to other places where humanity, in spite of everything, survives. Survival that Christ’s victory over death marks and guarantees. With them we are in prayer, adding our desire to the God of peace himself. With them we will remain, until the war is over and beyond.
In fact, we are at the source of a new life that makes us revive ourselves – and for us certainly many more, as it can and should happen. Easter is God’s “passage” through us and the passing of everything to God, who, indeed, is finally our Promised Land, eternal coexistence and perfect communion.
It is also surprise, detailed and total. Circumstances as we have heard, that emptiness that filled with astonishment whoever found it like this. Total, above all, because in that nothingness that was, it signaled the everything that fills us now: the risen life of Christ, whom we also resurrect. They are truths that we say and sing with the words that the Liturgy offers us and, above all, certainties with which God remakes us.
The baptismal connotation of this Vigil means just that, with Christ’s Easter renewing us. So we follow him on the path he took, finding him also in the cross of the world, as it subsists in the drama of life, ours and that of others. There we meet Christ, to follow him to the end.
End that almost everything in the life that sprang from there. Because fully delivered, it was returned to us, like us and we always celebrate, as if we were there, as we actually are.
Faced with the empty tomb, we conclude that we have risen with Christ in God, who with Christ empties himself, in order to be entirely of God as the son; and entirely for others, as a true brother.
The baptismal Spirit leads us to this, which makes the path of Christ in each one of us. For this reason, even because we are “Christians” It is a matter of a noun, which does not really change from the inside, and not of an occasional and external adjective. – Enough of pretextual and merely decorative “Christianities”, which are so contrary to the cause of the Gospel!
Resurrected life that emptied itself to be only for eternity. It was like that with Jesus, throughout his human journey. If one day it can be said: “I the Father is one”, it was because he kept nothing of himself and nothing moves him that was not the will of God the Father, which he entirely assumed as his own.
It was, in the few and few years that he lived on earth, what God lived: a life eternally is in every year and fully repaid. This is how we confess it in the Creed: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”. The Spirit that moves him in this way is what he offers us in Baptism, so that we can be equally divinized and eternal in God. In this way it was absolutely for everyone, because the will of God the Father is the salvation of each one of Jesus semper, as the action of Jesus semper, as. And as it has the same time of receiving your Spirit.
This and this alone is the criterion of holiness. Men and women of other times and conditions, children, adults and elders who would be, are altars where they climbed because they descended to the most and beginning of the lives of the others, in the varied ways that a decision finds to serve those who need it. Esva from itself, like the tomb of Christ, revived with Him in the then divined.
All this and let us improve it just now to Saint Paul, as he wrote to the ears of Rome, that very first time: “All of us who were baptized into Jesus Christ were in his death. We were buried with him through Baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life”.
And we, at least, this is what we remember shortly, what we do not remember about the freedom of the children of God. Sin is selfishness that holds us back; the freedom of the children of God is what Christ shares with those who really live from God for others and with others in God.
Obligation is that it survives in many at a cost that presents itself too much like a closed pulchre, as it is in fact because of so much death, destruction and accumulated rubble, because of wars and other males that are not lacking. Also in many lives prevented from being born and in others who despair of living. Also in many truths and abandonments, which contradict the unquestionable that “living is questionable solidity”.
In these and other situations, it is trapped tombs that are treated and with stone blocking them. In this Vigil, however, illuminated in a paschal light, the empty tomb of life over death, the very victory of life over death, already proclaims the whole life, for the entire, intense, that is complete. So with Christ – and for Christ in us and for us wherever we go.
The Gospel told us just now that, seeing the tomb empty and only what remained, “Peter returned home amazed at what had happened”. We already know what the apostle also knew at that moment, that we certainly do not lose Christ for all that Easter does not offer in the unseen novelty of Christ’s victory over death.
That’s why we’ll also return home in awe. And we will admire more when our own life, in Christ, generates life for others, especially where there is greater urgency to happen. – We do not lack Christ, let us not lack!
Lisbon Cathedral, April 16-17, 2022
D. Manuel Clemente, Cardinal-Patriarch