Easter vigil, the Pope: remember and walk, to return to the first encounter with Jesus

Alessandro Di Bussolo – Vatican City

“Remember and walk! If you recover your first love, the amazement and joy of meeting God, you will go forward”. It is the invitation that Pope Francis extends to himself and to all the faithful in the homily of the Easter Vigil, the Holy Night, which he presides in the Vatican Basilica, accompanied by forty cardinals, 25 bishops and two hundred priests. Because, he explains, the Lord’s Easter “invites us to roll away the boulders of disappointment and distrust” and “brings us back to our past of grace, makes us go back to Galilee, where our love story with Jesus began ”, when “we proclaimed him Lord of our lives”. In fact, to remove the dust deposited in our hearts and “resume the journey” we must not look “to an abstract, ideal Jesus, but to the living, concrete and palpitating memory of the first encounter with him”.

The “Mother of All Eves”

The Vatican Basilica is immersed in darkness, when at 7.30 pm, in the atrium, at the central door, the Pope begins the “mother of all vigils” as Saint Augustine defined it, leading the rite of the Skylight, with the blessing of the new fire and the lighting of the paschal candle. Then, at the entrance to the Basilica of the procession of all the concelebrants, at the third intonation of the “Lumen Christi” by the deacon, after the candles of Francis and the faithful, all the lights are lit. The singing of the Exultet announcing the Resurrection is followed by the Liturgy of the Word with readings from the Old and New Testaments, and the baptismal liturgy. Eight adult catechumens to whom baptism and then confirmation, the sacraments of Christian initiation, are administered: three come from Albania, two from the United States and the others from Italy, Nigeria and Venezuela. The Pontiff presides over the Vigil remaining seated in front of the altar which he reaches to pronounce the homily, while later he will go to the baptismal font to administer the sacraments. Celebrating at the altar were Cardinal Artur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, with Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re and Leonardo Sandri, dean and vice-dean of the College of Cardinals.

Enter the path of the disciples

In his re-reading of Matthew’s Gospel on the Resurrection, offered in his homily, Pope Francis looks at the path of the women, who at the first light of dawn go towards the tomb of Jesus. “They advance uncertain, lost – she explains – with their hearts lacerated by pain for that death which took away the Beloved”. But, seeing the empty tomb, “they reverse course, they change direction; they leave the tomb and run to announce a new path to the disciples: Jesus is risen and awaits them in Galilee”. Thus, the Pope clarifies, “in the lives of these women Easter occurred, which means passage”, and they pass “from the sad journey towards the sepulcher to the joyful run towards the disciples”, to say that the Lord is risen, but also that the appointment with the Risen One is in Galilee. “The rebirth of the disciples, the resurrection of their hearts passes through Galilee”. Thus Francis invites everyone to enter “the path of the disciples which goes from the grave to Galilee”. At the beginning, everyone “thinks that Jesus is in the place of death and that everything is over forever”.

Sometimes it also happens to us to think that the joy of meeting Jesus belongs to the past, while in the present we know above all sealed tombs: those of our disappointments, our bitterness and our distrust, those of “he is no more nothing to do”, “things will never change”, “better to live day by day” because “there is no certainty about tomorrow”.

Going to Galilee means opening up to the mission

When pain gripped us, the Pontiff explains, or sadness, sin, failure and worry assailed us, we too “experienced the bitter taste of tiredness and saw the joy fade in our hearts”. We felt “the fatigue of carrying on with everyday life, tired of taking risks personally in front of the rubber wall of a world where the laws of the smartest and the strongest always seem to prevail”.

The news that changes history: Christ is risen!

Or, “maybe we have come face to face with death”, of our loved ones or our own, which has brushed against us in sickness or calamity, and so “we have fallen prey to disillusionment and the source of hope has dried up”. These are all situations, Pope Francis clarifies, in which “our paths stop in front of tombs and we remain motionless crying and regretting”. Instead, women at Easter do not remain paralyzed in front of a tomb but, as the Gospel says, “hastily leaving the tomb with fear and great joy, they ran to give the news to his disciples”. They bring the news that will change life and history forever: Christ is risen! And with it, the Lord’s invitation to the disciples: that they go to Galilee, because there they will see him. Going to Galilee, the Pope underlines, means two things:

On the one hand, to emerge from the closure of the cenacle to go to the region inhabited by the people, to emerge from hiding to open up to the mission, to escape from fear to walk towards the future. On the other hand, and this is very beautiful, it means going back to the origins, because it all began right in Galilee.

Return to original grace

There, in fact, Francis recalls, “the Lord had met and called the disciples for the first time”. And going to Galilee “is returning to the original grace, it is regaining the memory that regenerates hope, the ‘memory of the future’ with which we have been marked by the Risen One”. This does the Passover of the Lord:

It pushes us to go forward, to get out of the sense of defeat, to roll away the stone from the tombs in which we often confine our hope, to look to the future with confidence, because Christ is risen and has changed the direction of history.

Don’t look at an ideal Jesus, but at a concrete encounter

But, to do so, the Lord “brings us back to our past of grace, makes us go back to Galilee, where our love story with Jesus began”. In other words, the Pontiff explains, he asks us to relive that moment, that experience “in which we met the Lord, we experienced his love and we received a new and luminous gaze on ourselves, on reality, on the mystery of life ”. In short, to start over, to get back on track, we always need…

To go back not to an abstract, ideal Jesus, but to the living, concrete and throbbing memory of the first encounter with him. Yes, brothers and sisters, in order to walk we must remember; to have hope we must feed the memory. This is the invitation: remember and walk! If you recover your first love, the amazement and joy of meeting God, you will go on.

Reconstruct the first encounter with Christ

“Remember your Galilee and walk towards your Galilee”, Pope Francis reiterates, because it is the “place” where “you met Jesus in person, where for you He has not remained a historical figure like others, but has become the of life”: the close God, “who knows you more than anyone else and loves you more than anyone else”. The Pope’s is an invitation to remember “your call, of that Word of God which in a precise moment spoke precisely to you; of that strong experience in the Spirit”, of the great joy of forgiveness “felt after that Confession”, of that “unforgettable moment of prayer”, of that light that “transformed your life, of that encounter, of that pilgrimage… ”

Try those sensations again, remove dust from the heart

Francis asks each of us to go back “to that first meeting. Ask yourself how it was and when it was, reconstruct its context, time and place, try again its emotion and sensations”. Because “it’s when you forgot that first love”, that “dust began to settle on your heart”. So you experienced sadness and, like the disciples, “everything seemed without perspective”, without hope. But today, concludes the Pontiff, “the strength of Easter invites us to roll away the boulders of distrust”. And the Lord, “an expert in overturning the tombstones of sin and fear, wants to illuminate your holy memory, your most beautiful memory, make your first encounter with Him timely”. He remembers and walks: he finds the grace of God’s resurrection in you! He returns to Galilee!

Brothers, sisters, let us follow Jesus to Galilee, let us meet him and adore him there where he awaits each of us. Let’s revive the beauty of when, after discovering him alive, we proclaimed him Lord of our lives. Let’s go back to Galilee, to the Galilee of first love, everyone goes back to his own Galilee, that of the first encounter, and we rise to new life!