My dear friends, there is a little book that tells Bishops how they are to celebrate the liturgy the great feast days of the year. It tells me that this night is an ancient tradition in the Church.“It is a night of vigil for the Lord.”It is“the memorial of the holy night of Christ’s resurrection.”So it is clearly a night of great holiness, of great mystery, and of very deep meaning for us. We find answers to deep questions here tonight. We encounter the One who has the power to save us from all that darkness that can weigh down upon us from day to day as we live out our lives.

The book quotes St. Augustine who called this night “the mother of all holy vigils.” The paragraph then concludes with these words:“The Church this night awaits the Lord’s resurrection and celebrates it with the sacraments of Christian Initiation.”

There are many different ways we celebrate Easter. Some do it with Easter eggs and bunnies – especially chocolate ones! (Always my favourite.) Some celebrate Easter with a big dinner; in our home it was usually a huge ham. Some celebrate Easter with the family making an effort to get together and be with one another, and so on. I am sure that each of us has our own traditions of celebrating Easter.

All of these are good and a great deal of fun and pleasure. But my little book says that the Church celebrates the Resurrection of the Lord, by celebrating the sacraments of Christian Initiation: baptism, confirmation and Eucharist. We, the Church, celebrate the Resurrection by bringing people into the life of the Risen Christ, into the Church, the body of the Risen Christ, through the Sacraments of rebirth.

We are now beginning the third and last day of the Triduum with this Easter Vigil. During Holy Week and on Holy Thursday and yesterday on Good Friday, we have heard the Word of God in the Liturgies tell us how Jesus, the Son of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, humbling himself in a clear act of service. Then, taking upon himself our infirmities and diseases, he accepted to be wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities and to have the punishment due to us laid upon him. And he offered his life as a sacrifice to God for love of us.

Why did he do this? What was at stake that was so great that God had to die, and indeed die so terribly and painfully and degradingly, to achieve it? God had created human beings for a reason. God had created us so that we would share God’s life in total happiness forever. But in our first parents we rejected that gift; humanity sinned and lost that life that God had created us for. And when we lost that life, we became subject to death.

We are born into the world separated from the life of God. We are born into the world with one absolute certainty: we will die. Death is our ultimate future, death controls us and we have no choice but to submit to it. Separated from the life of God, there is nothing else awaiting us; nothing but the dust of death. This was neither God’s plan nor God’s desire.

So God set out to change that for us. Tonight we listened to the long history of God’s efforts to restore us to life as we went through God’s dealings with Adam and Abraham and Moses and the prophets. All these told us how God set out to do away with the separation between us and God. To do that, death must be defeated. To do that God must experience death and overcome it. Human beings do not have the power to overcome death.

St. Augustine had a wonderful sermon on this which is found in one of the Office of Readings for Holy Week. He said that God the Son, who is the Eternal Word of God, could not die, because God is immortal. And human beings could not live forever with God because they were subject to death. So the Word became flesh, and was born the son of Mary. He took upon himself our humanity. Our humanity gave the Son of God the power to die and his death gave us the power to live forever. A mutual exchange that saved the world.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he conquered death. It had no power over him whatsoever. His new life is eternal. And as we know from the very well known passage from St. John’s Gospel, that life is meant for us, for John writes: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’

It is the belief of our Catholic faith, that when we are baptized we join Jesus in death. St Paul told us that in his letter to the Romans when he wrote:“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

When we are baptized we are united with Jesus’ death and therefore united with Jesus’ Resurrection. When we, the Church, baptize, Easter is here. When we baptize, the Resurrection is here. When we Confirm, Jesus breathes into us the life of God and we are given the power to live with God forever.

In the Eucharist, Jesus feeds and nourishes that life of God within us, so that, continually strengthened by food that comes from Heaven, we will never again lose what Jesus by his death has gained for us. Our future is not the dust of death; our future is life, caught up in the love and beauty of God, forever. Our baptism brings about a new creation.

So then, when our catechumen is baptized tonight, we will encounter the power of the Risen Christ and with the eyes of faith we will see a rebirth into the life of God take place. In Confirmation we will encounter the Risen Christ and, with the eyes of faith, behold him as he breathes his life breath into his chosen ones. In Holy Communion we will allow Christ to join him to himself and nourish the life of God that is within us.

What can we do with all of this? How can we bring this treasure to our world? Well, we can try always to remember who we are: we are the living body of the Risen Christ.

And we can try always to live and behave accordingly.

We can try to live up to our dignity and not beneath it.

And we can let our joy and happiness shine through us, to brighten the world around us.