Liturgical Colour : White

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, this evening on this Easter Vigil Mass, all of us finally have reached the end of our Lenten journey, a forty days long period of purification and reorientation of our lives, of more intense connection with God and renewal of our lives. Now, on this very evening we celebrate the glorious Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who has suffered and died for us, bearing all the burdens and punishments that are due for our sins and wickedness. Through His Resurrection, He has shown us the great triumph that He had won over sin and death, showing us that they no longer hold dominion and power over us. And tonight we have finally come to the culmination of our long wait for salvation, and rejoicing together as one Church and holy people of God, we cry and sing out together, ‘Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Christ has conquered death!’

All these joy and celebration that we have this evening and this upcoming fifty days of rejoicing during the whole Easter season come from the fact that we have been given the assurance of eternal life and freedom from the damnation and domination of sin, and how death no longer reigns over us. Through His glorious Resurrection, Our Lord has promised that we too shall rise with Him and enjoy forever the true joy and glory of God’s Kingdom, where we shall enjoy forever the fullness of God’s grace and blessings. This is what the Lord has always meant and intended for all of us, as each one of us have been created out of God’s overflowing love and kindness, and He has always wanted us to enjoy forever the fullness of His love, all the blessings and good things He has created in this world. However, our disobedience and sins came in between us and God.

God however never gave up on us and His love for us endures even though we have rebelled against Him and have often showed a lot of stubbornness in our attitudes and ways. He has promised from the very beginning of time, from the time when He created us all as we have heard in the account from the Book of Genesis of the creation of the whole world and the Universe, creating all the things good and perfect as He has always meant it, including us mankind, His most beloved ones, created in His own image and likeness. But disobedience caused by our ancestors’ inability to resist the temptations of the devil led them and all of us into sin, which brought corruption into the perfection that used to be ours before our downfall into sin. And this separated us from God and His love, forcing us to be separated from God and exiled from Eden, from God’s Holy Presence.

We heard therefore throughout the many readings covered in this Easter Vigil liturgy the many things that God had done in planning for and bringing about our salvation, our liberation from sin and from the dominion of death. He showed us all His love and desire to be reunited with us by calling those from among us to be the ones to prepare the path for the eventual coming of His salvation, beginning with Abraham as we heard from our second reading today, also taken from the Book of Genesis. We heard in that occasion how Abraham, with whom God had made a Covenant with, was called by the Lord to bring his beloved son Isaac to be offered as a sacrifice to God at Mount Moriah. For the context, Isaac was the son which God had long promised to Abraham and his wife, Sarah after they had long been barren without a child.

Yet, God sought to take Isaac away from Abraham, made him to be a sacrifice to be offered to God. Certainly Abraham must have had some uncertainties or even doubts about this instruction from God, and he clearly would have struggled internally over it, considering just how much he had treasured and loved Isaac. But ultimately, Abraham chose to obey God and to put his faith in Him. Abraham trusted that the Lord knew what was best for him and his son Isaac, and went up the mountain of Moriah with Isaac, with the intention to offer him up to God as a sacrifice, with a heavy heart but also at the same time, with faith and trust in God. God saw Abraham’s great faith and trust in Him, and He told Abraham at the moment that he was about to sacrifice Isaac that He had seen his faith and was testing him with the instruction, sending a ram to replace Isaac as a sacrifice, while renewing the Covenant which He has made with Abraham, affirming the blessings that Abraham and his descendants will receive.

Now, this location of Mount Moriah is very significant and the reason why this passage was chosen as one of the readings of this Easter Vigil because many centuries later, long after the time of Abraham and Isaac, another important sacrifice were to take place at the very same site. Yes, I am referring to none other than the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus at Calvary, a hill or mountain located just outside of Jerusalem. This site of Mount Moriah was historically and traditionally associated with the site of the Lord’s crucifixion at Calvary. Therefore, the sacrifice of Isaac was in fact a prefigurement of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross at Calvary, revealing the plan that God has in mind in His desire to redeem all of us from our sins.

And there are a lot of symbolisms from this event of the sacrifice of Mount Moriah when placed side by side with the Lord’s crucifixion. Just like Abraham who willingly offered Isaac, his own most beloved son to be sacrificed to God even when he could have refused to do so, God did not spare His own most Beloved Son, His only Begotten, Whom He offered willingly and freely for us all, to be sacrificed as the Paschal Lamb, by Whose sufferings and death, we may be freed and healed from our many sins and corruptions due to those sins. Through the breaking of the Lord’s Most Precious Body and the shedding of His Most Precious Blood, sharing these with us through the gift of the Most Holy Eucharist, God has crafted for us the perfect and ultimate remedy for our sins.

The death of Christ Who willingly took upon Himself our many sins and their punishments is also reminiscent of how God spared Isaac by sending a ram to be sacrificed in his place. Therefore, as we have commemorated yesterday on Good Friday, Our Lord’s crucifixion, His sufferings and death brought us to freedom from our sins because by His Most Precious Body and Blood that we have partaken in the Eucharist and by our sincere faith and desire to be reunited with Him, God has forgiven us all our sins and made us all whole once again, freed from all the shackles of sin and all the bonds of temptations and evils that have so far kept us chained and separated from Him, our loving Father and Creator.

Then from our third reading today, which is a compulsory reading for this Easter Vigil liturgy, we heard the passage of the Book of Exodus from the moment when the Lord brought His people, the Israelites to the shores of the sea, where He opened the sea before them and allowing all of them to walk on the dry seabed, protecting them from their enemies and pursuers, the Egyptians and their Pharaoh. The latter did not want to let the Israelites go and made one final attempt to capture all the Israelites or to destroy all of them, after earlier on having let them to go free to the land promised to them by God. And we heard how God rescued His people, leading them through the waters of the sea to the other side, beginning their journey towards the promised land. It was at that moment when they left the land of Egypt behind.

And of course we heard how God crushed those Egyptians and their chariots and armies, sinking them all beneath the waves. But the Israelites were brought safely to the other end of the sea, and they rejoiced greatly at God Who has shown them His great might and triumphed against their enemies and all those who have once enslaved and persecuted them. This account of the Exodus and how God rescued His people is in fact also very symbolic and very much related to what the Lord Himself would do to save His people through Jesus Christ, His Son and Our Saviour.  Again in this case, much as the parallels between Isaac’s sacrifice and that of Christ’s, here we can also see how God led His people through the darkness of sin and into a new life with Him.

That journey through the water of the sea, opened up by the Lord before the people symbolised the Israelites having left behind their past life and slavery in Egypt, and instead they then entered into new lives and existence in which they were free and were guided by God on their journey to the land of promise. This is experienced by all of us who have gone through the Sacrament of Baptism, especially those among us who have been baptised on this Easter Vigil itself. And for all those among us who are going to be baptised later after this, as they receive the water of baptism either by pouring or immersion, this is symbolic of what the people of God had once experienced in the miraculous crossing of the sea as depicted in the Book of Exodus.

Like the Israelites who have been led from the place of their slavery into a new land of freedom, all of us have been led from our past, sinful existence into a new life and existence blessed by God. And just as the Lord has crushed and defeated the forces, armies and chariots of the Egyptians chasing after them, liberating them from the shackles of their slavers and oppressors, thus through baptism, all of us as Christians have been brought to freedom as the Lord has triumphed through His glorious Resurrection that all of us celebrate today, crushing and defeating all the forces of evil, the dominion and power of sin and death. They no longer have power and dominion over us, and through this victory, God is leading us all to the new, blessed existence in Him. That is what we all rejoice for today, because in Christ, our Risen Lord, we have the hope of eternal life and overcoming death.

Death is always something that is fearsome to us, as it marks the end of our earthly existence and life as we all know it. It is something that all of us have to experience because of sin, and by our sins, all of us have to suffer through death, and yet, because we know that Christ has Risen from the dead, we now know that there is life and existence beyond death, and death is not the end of all hope. Instead, through the Resurrection, we know that by sharing in His humanity, all of us have shared in the death of Christ, the death to our past, sinful way of life, symbolised by the gift of water which destroys the Egyptians in the days of the Exodus, and then the new life which water also symbolises, as we are led into the new life in Christ, in the assurance that we will also share in the Resurrection of Christ when the time comes. This is what we have heard earlier on from the Epistle reading before the Gospel, taken from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans.

The remaining passages of the Scripture readings today from the Old Testament highlights the promises of the Lord of His salvation through the prophets like Isaiah, Baruch and Ezekiel, all of which have come to fruition in the coming of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord. By His coming into this world, God has revealed to us all that He has planned from the very beginning for us, to rescue us and to lead us all back to Himself. And that is why, it is important that Christ our Lord truly died that day on Good Friday, just as we have reflected about it yesterday, because without His suffering and death, then the significance of the Resurrection will be diminished and missed. It was precisely because of the death of Christ that we have been redeemed, united to Him in death, and by His offering of a most pure and holy, a worthy offering on our behalf, we have been cleansed and forgiven from our sins.

The Lord’s Resurrection is then even more important, as if the Lord had died and not risen from the dead, then truly there can be no hope for us. Since, if the Lord Himself, Who is without sin, perished and died, and did not overcome death, then how can there be hope for us? Yet, since the Risen Lord had triumphed over death itself and showed that death does not have the final say over us, and that by His grace and love, God will restore life to all of us, hence, we should no longer fear death and yet, we must remain vigilant of sin because if we still continue to sin against God and refuse His generous offer of forgiveness and mercy, then in the end, it is by our sins that we have not repented from that we will be judged against and condemned by.

Therefore, we are also reminded that as Christians, as Pope St. John Paul II once famously said, that we are all Easter people, and Alleluia is our song. This means that all of us are called to live a truly holy and worthy lives, lives that are truly active, committed to God and missionary, full of compassion for one another and righteousness, justice and virtues in all of our actions throughout life. We must have the right disposition and attitude in life in order for us to be able to follow the Lord worthily in our lives. And just as the Israelites still continue their journey after crossing the sea out of Egypt, which is a symbolism and prefigurement of our baptism, therefore, baptism is not the end of our journey towards God, but rather, marks the new beginning in this journey we have towards God.

Essentially, we are called to proclaim the Lord and His Resurrection, His Good News and salvation to the world. But in order to do this, we must first live our lives worthily as good and faithful Christians, and this is something that many of us have difficulty doing because we face so many obstacles, temptations and challenges in our daily lives. And this is why as we enter into this joyful Easter season, we have to renew our commitment and dedication to the Lord, in doing our best to live our lives worthily and to commit ourselves to a truly holy and blessed existence in God, in all of our actions, words and deeds, and in how we interact with others around us. We cannot be hypocrites who claim to believe in the Lord and yet act in the manner that is contrary to our faith and beliefs in God.

That is why as we all enter into this joyous season of Easter, celebrating the Lord’s glorious Resurrection, let us all strive to commit ourselves to be ever more faithful and sincere in following our Risen Lord in everything that we say and do. Let the transformations and conversions that we have experienced during the Lenten season continue to bear their fruits through this time of Easter and beyond. May all of us be faithful and ever more courageous witnesses of Our Lord and His Resurrection, being good role models and inspirations to our fellow brothers and sisters, helping ever more people to come closer to God and His salvation. May our Risen Lord continue to bless us all and give us His light of Hope, and strengthen us in our resolve to follow Him wholeheartedly, now and always. Amen.