An ancient homily for Holy Saturday

What is happening?

Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Death and concupiscence: such are the legacies of sin. Apart from Christ, we sense our interior division as we struggle to become ourselves, to become the kinds of persons we are called to be.
Afflicted by concupiscence, we feel hopeless and abandoned, unable to properly give of ourselves and fearful of our own weakness. But this is not the end of the story. In light of the Gospel, a deeper and greater truth rings out: Christ has come; the divine has taken flesh; death has been conquered; freedom is again possible. For the Good News of the Gospel is that the Redeemer has not only come, but He has given Himself up for man precisely so that man may come to share in His definitive example of self-sacrificial gift.

Thus, death does not have the final word: man experiences an internal war, but he finds victory in the Cross. Together with St. John Paul II, then, one can rightly say that “the redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history,” precisely because it is Jesus who stands at the threshold of man’s ultimate vocation, his ultimate calling. It is through Christ and Christ alone that man’s calling is made clear, and it is in the Blood of Christ that he finds the strength to answer the call.
It is Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who extends to each of us the power to become a child of God (see John 1:12). At Calvary, the Eternal Trinity definitively sundered “the dominion of darkness” (Col 1:13) which had existed since Adam’s first sin. Through the sacrifice of the New Adam, death was defeated, and the triumph of grace was brought about. This is the life-changing, world-transforming, civilization-defining truth of the Gospel. The tomb is empty. The Master is risen. Tears are wiped away, and death is no more.

Let us rejoice in that truth this Easter!