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April 8, 2023Abu Dhabi.
His Excellency Bishop Paolo Martinelli presided over the Easter Vigil services at St. Joseph's Cathedral Abu Dhabi.
Below is the full text of the homily delivered during the occasion.
Easter has finally arrived. The Easter announcement resounds in the world and our hearts: Christ is risen. He has truly risen. He conquered evil and death, opening our way to a new life.
In this vigil Mass, we retraced the history of salvation through the various readings. We started from the book of Genesis and listened to the story of creation. It is beautiful to contemplate, above all, the beauty of all creatures, of the universe, and all things. God saw that it was good.
Finally, God creates man, male and female; they are created in the image and likeness of God. The task of man and woman is to take care of creation and make all that God has placed in the world grow and cultivate. The human person is called to name things. The entire story of creation expresses harmony, peace, and serenity. At the root of everything is the relationship with God. Man's good relationship with God makes man capable of a good relationship with other people and things. We, too, can look at creation today, but we realize that the harmony and care of which the book of Genesis speaks to us is often lacking because man has broken communion with God. Our sin not only distances us from God but also makes us incapable of having the right relationship with people and things. Sin brings disorder to the heart and relationships.
But God does not abandon man to his sin. He enters the history of humanity and offers man the covenant, a pact that rebuilds the relationship with God.
The first liberation from the evil the Bible tells us about is from the slavery of Egypt that oppressed Israel. The ancient people of God experience the first Passover: The passage from slavery to freedom through the passage in the red sea. We have heard the story of this passage characterized by the sacrifice of the lambs. For this reason, the people of Israel celebrated Easter every year with the immolation of lambs to commemorate the liberation from Egypt.
However, Israel soon realized that this liberation had not been sufficient. It had not been definitive. Israel had broken the covenant with God and had experienced other dominations, including the humiliating experience of exile from their homeland to Babylon, due to foreign powers.
This experience, however, does not concern only the ancient people of the covenant but all peoples and all of us. The heaviest slavery is, in fact, that of sin: whoever sins is a slave to sin. It's not enough to break the external chains. We need to break the chains that bind the heart and make us lose our freedom.
This is why Ezekiel's prophecy we have heard speaks to us of another Passover, of another passage. “I shall cleanse you of all your defilement and all your idols. I shall give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead”.
Here liberation is no longer only external but profoundly internal: passing from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh: the gift of a new heart and spirit. It is liberation from sin, the inability to love, closure in ourselves, selfishness, and our false plans for success.
Thus, we arrive at the Passover of Jesus, who brings about this change by fulfilling the ancient prophecies. Jesus passes from death to life and defeats death forever. He is the true lamb that takes away the sins of the world; he establishes in himself the new and eternal covenant between God and humanity.
As the Gospel tells us, Mary of Magdala and the other women go to the tomb and find it empty. Death could not hold back Jesus. He conquered evil forever and gave us the Holy Spirit in abundance to be the first fruits of a new creation.
Dear brothers and sisters, we too are called to celebrate Passover with Christ, that is, to pass from the old man to the new man and be new creatures. For this reason, we now celebrate the baptism of those who want to become Christians. In fact, baptism itself unites us to the death and resurrection of Christ and makes us children of God. Together with them, we, too, renew the promises of our baptism and rediscover the joy of being Christians.
Let us allow our lives to be flooded with the light of this solemnity, of this celebration that gives rise to all other celebrations. We carry this joy into our families. Let us not only keep this immense joy to ourselves but let us bear witness to all of Easter joy; Christ is risen. He has truly risen.