Homily – Easter Vigil 2025-04-19 Fr. Lawrence
Dear Brothers and Sisters: maybe you’ve heard the saying, “Nature abhors a
vacuum.” But someone else has said, well, if that’s true why did Nature make so darn
much of it. Most of the universe is a vacuum, incomprehensible distances filled, so to
speak, with complete and utter emptiness. Perhaps it’s not nature which abhors a
vacuum, but us. God seems to be very comfortable with emptiness.
We have waited and prayed, remembering our sins, practising and probably
failing at various penances we have set ourselves, living with Jesus through the
scriptures as he completes his journey to his condemnation and death, waiting patiently
for this night, the night, as we have heard in the Exsultet, when Christ broke the prison
bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld. So what do we hear from our
Gospel today? An empty tomb. Empty. Maybe we expected something a little more, I
don’t know, cosmic? OK, there’s a couple of stern guys in dazzling garments, fairly
impressive, but where’s Jesus? Where is Christ triumphant, the resurrected, the
glorious? Not here. Only an empty tomb.
A friend once said that he walked around most of his life with a huge hole at his
centre, a hole that he tried to fill with anything he could get his hands on, drugs, alcohol,
food, entertainment, but nothing even began to fill that hole – spoons-full of sand into a
bottomless well. But one day, after what folks call hitting bottom, and after a bit of work,
he realized that the hole inside of him was, in his words, God-sized. But even after this
realization, the hole did not disappear, was not suddenly filled up, but instead of
something to be avoided, ignored, or stuffed up, this hole became a source of comfort, a
mystery rather than an affliction. The hole was not just God-sized, it was God. The
emptiness was in fact God’s presence. It always had been.
Perhaps some of us here tonight have experienced or are experiencing that
emptiness inside ourselves, that hole in our very centre. It may make us feel very
uncomfortable. And we may be afraid that if we didn’t somehow cover it up or run from
it, we might fall into that hole and never get out. But our Gospel today shows us that this
emptiness, this empty tomb which seems to us to be fearful, threatening, death itself, is
instead a place of life and hope, light and comfort. God is very comfortable with
emptiness, God has created an awful lot of it, the vast emptiness between the stars,
and the vast emptiness inside ourselves, the emptiness of the empty tomb, which is
paradoxically the very presence of God, the resurrected Christ, the great mystery which
we can’t see or define. This emptiness is the Word, the Word that created light and
darkness, being from nothingness, the silent creative Word that is Christ.