Easter Vigil 2023
Preaching by Sister Elise D. García, OP, Prioress

Easter Vigil - April 8, 2023
Matthew 28:1-12

We gather this evening after having journeyed through 40 days and nights of Lenten prayer and preparation, the celebration of Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, his radical reversal of master-servant roles with foot washing on Holy Thursday, the grief and horror of his excruciating death by crucifixion on Good Friday – and, now, we come to this astonishing moment of revelation. A revelation that is made all the more astonishing by the fact that Matthew and the other Gospel writers all say it was given to women – a class of persons whose testimony by virtue of gender was untrustworthy, according to the laws and cultures of the times. These were the same women, the authors confess, who were there “when they crucified my Lord.”

The striking detail of who God chose to give the astonishing revelation of the resurrection to is another remarkable and transformative reversal so characteristic of the Way of Jesus. It has the power to further awaken us today to the transformation of consciousness it ignited 2,000 years ago.

As we just heard, this evening’s readings stretch back to Genesis, beginning with the story our Judeo-Christian ancestors understood as the way God brought everything into being, including ourselves and our Earth home. The stories move forward in time to the revelation of God to the people of Israel, their journey into and out of captivity, and on to God’s revelation through the coming of Christ. In Paul’s letter to the Romans we learn how our first Christian ancestors began to understand that they were One with Christ through baptism, death and now the astounding promise of new life.

These readings and so many others in our tradition tell stories about the way we humans have experienced God through God’s word, deed, and presence in our world over the centuries – and the profound transformation of consciousness it has provoked. Although nearly 2,000 have passed since the last of those readings was written, the power of the stories and their call to transformative change is still alive and at work within us.

We are just beginning to understand the profound social and spiritual implications of what it means to be created – all of us, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, ethnicity – in the image of God, as our ancestors first heard some 3,000 years ago.

We are just beginning to understand what it means that God chose to reveal the astounding reality that there is life after death to a group of humble, powerless women. That Mary of Magdala, according to Matthew, is the one called by God to spread the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. What reversals would it mean for our Church if she were truly, and not just symbolically, recognized as “the Apostle to the Apostles?” And what might it mean in our Dominican order if we too went beyond symbolism in recognizing her as the Patron of the Order of Preachers, along with Catherine of Alexandria?

As we once again celebrate the transformative good news of the resurrection and its astonishing promise of new life, let us accept the invitation to grow more deeply as followers of the Way of Jesus into the magnificent expansion of consciousness he is calling us into as women, as people of color, and as a Beloved whole Earth community that from its very beginning was blessed by God as “very good.”