Homily of Archbishop Leo Cushley from the Easter Vigil tonight (Saturday 4 April) at St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, Edinburgh.

“My dear friends, a very happy Easter to you all! 

Our readings tonight describe God’s great plan for us: how we are to live in harmony with Him, with our neighbour, and with our world, and how we are to live in union with Him and with each other. 

And not only does God in His goodness give us life, but He also bestows upon us the gift of living for ever in His presence, if we choose to follow his Son and His gentle, loving commands that point us towards life, and life in abundance.

Our Easter readings all point towards God’s great gift of life. In Genesis, light and life are created and freely and lovingly bestowed on us by God. 

He gives life to humanity and asks us to reflect His great glory back to him.

He gives us His own divine freedom, a freedom that lets us choose, and a knowledge that there are such things as good and evil. 

He gives us free will and with it the opportunity to choose good, to choose life. 

He gently shows us the consequences sin, of rebellion; and even He welcomes us back if we acknowledge our error, and we choose life again over self-destruction. He frees us from pride and rebellion and slavery and death. 

And He points us towards life, and towards the means to redemption through faith in Christ and the waters of baptism.

The Risen Lord

In the passage from St Paul and the Gospel, we turn to look into the empty tomb and greet the risen Lord. 

The Gospels talk of eye-witness accounts of what happened on the first Easter Day. 

This is when Mary Magdalene and Peter and John all begin to realise that something unique has happened. 

They will go on to reflect on this event for many years to come, and Peter and John will record what they saw and heard: and we will find their memories seasoning the four Gospel accounts with their dawning joy.

Their accounts that have come to us from the second half of the first century.

But let’s notice too that St Paul’s writings are largely from the first half of first century. 

St Paul is not an eye-witness to the Jesus of Galilee, but he is a witness. 

And Paul is a powerful witness, because he is a witness to Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. 

And Paul tells us plainly that what he knows of Jesus comes from direct, personal experience, from an encounter with Jesus Christ himself, that utterly transforms him for the rest of his life.  

By a couple of decades, then, St Paul’s letters are the earliest accounts we have of Jesus and of Christianity. 

They are a precious record of what the very first Christians saw and heard and believed, and all from someone who had bitterly persecuted Christians before joining them, after his famous “road to Damascus conversion”. 

So, it’s not without irony that it is left to St Paul, the man whose life was transformed by his encounter with the risen Lord, to be the earliest to unpack for us what happens in these days and to give it shape and meaning for us. 

Paul also tells us he is an apostle. Now, normally, an apostle is some who has been sent by Jesus, in other words, one of the original Twelve Apostles.  But not Paul. 

Paul was not sent by Jesus during Jesus’s earthly ministry. 

But it’s interesting that no one ever disputes that Paul has been sent by Jesus Christ, the living Lord, to spread the good news. 

No one disputes his title of apostle. Paul can only be an apostle if the risen Lord has sent him.  And, in another irony, from ancient times, Paul has come to be known not only as an apostle, but as the Apostle.

So where did this supreme confidence come from? Something radical has clearly happened to St Paul and it has transformed him completely. 

Paul changes from bitterly persecuting the Church, to a fervent apostle of the risen Lord. Even though he is a Pharisee, and a keen student of the Scriptures and the Law, he places aside the Law in favour of an experience he has had of the risen Lord that is radical, life-changing, life-giving. 

He encounters something he didn’t even think existed, and it changes him forever. 

By his own account, he never stops being a good Jew, and he never describes himself as a Christian, and yet Paul is by one measure the greatest witness of all the apostles to the living Lord through the legacy of his letters. He certainly has an undoubted impact upon world history right up to today. 

Encounter

And what is it that changes Paul? It’s an encounter with the risen Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit coursing powerfully through him. 

He has been made to choose between the old Law and an overmastering religious experience that he can’t deny – and he chooses the latter. 

Paul’s encounter with the risen Lord changes his life for ever, and that is what we still see and hear in his letters.

And so, what does he say there about Christ’s death? In Romans, he says, “If we have been united in death with [Christ], in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his”!

All of a sudden, these words start jumping off the page. 

“We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him”.  And so, in Colossians, he can say to us, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above”! 

Here are the words of someone completely transformed by meeting the risen Christ. 

My dear friends, this is who we are too, all of us here tonight. 

As disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, as disciples of the risen Lord, this is who we are too.

St Paul, the earliest and perhaps the most energetic witness to the Easter Jesus proclaims to us today, and with the greatest joy, that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, is Lord, and that we can have a share in his victory. 

With full hearts, therefore, we too proclaim that the Lord is risen, and we pledge ourselves anew to let the rebellion die in our hearts, and to be joyfully alive to God in Christ Jesus.

A very happy Easter to you all!”

Photos taken with Archbishop Cushley after Mass can be viewed on Facebook.