Transcript Abbot Clement
=s Holy Saturday Homily, March 26, 2005The first words that came form Jesus
= mouth addressed to the women and to his disciples later on is Shalom. That is peace. We all know that peace means much more than the absence of war. For us peace means the fulness of life. The gift that Jesus is offering us is just that. Not life according to this world but the life of God. In that presence of the Lord we can perfect that expression and expand it and so the Lord imparts to us as we celebrate with faith this Easter resurrection, his peace. This is the ground and the basis for our joy. With that I want to extend my deepest blessed and joyful Easter to all of you. Thank you for coming to worship with us.In the gospel readings there are all kinds of surprises if we have ears to hear them. One that I want to focus on is that Jesus did in fact appear first not to his apostles, disciples or a crowd of believers, but to a woman, Mary Magdalen. Who Mark tells us that seven devils were cast out of her. He is saying that she was subject to every kind of evil. That has to be astonishing. Have you ever met such a person? Perhaps you have read of such person in books or maybe papers but still it is astonishing especially if you
=re the one who is trying to eject those seven devils.Mary Magdalen was a special kind of person. She responded to Jesus
= presence with faith even before she actually met him or spoke to him. He spoke to her. She was ready. She had enough of what the world could offer. She sought to fill her cup with the world=s treasures and she found out that it=s kind of bitter. Indeed in the end quite empty. So she came to seek the Lord thinking only of what he had to offer. What he was. What his presence represented. So she didn=t worry about anything else. She was disgusted with herself. She looked for nothing else from this life on earth and she didn=t care about the opinions of others. She went straight for the Lord. When she found Jesus she found that he was already waiting for her. She was a notorious sinner, an outcast.Once she met the Lord and washed his feet from then on there was only one question for her to fulfill and that is to follow him. She was single minded. And the Lord tells us why. He says that she knew how to love. Then later he added she knew how to love greatly.
In short, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalen first because she was a type of all of us. All of us who are sinners. Who know that in the Lord, Jesus, we have access to God
=s great mercy. We too, have had enough of the world and what it offers in terms of its selfishness. We have decided to look only to God in his service to his love. We ask of him only that we can give him our love, our life, our service, our very self. So in this way Mary is the type of all of us, each of us, at least in what we would like to be, what we hope to be, what we seek to be. To learn how to love greatly and to give our all. If we do this then we will become special persons to the Lord. More special than anyone else. Only those who have learned how to love know that it=s possible for anyone to become special if they learn how to love.This is the message I really want to convey to you this evening, this Easter night, the risen Lord offers us pardon, love, and a new life. This life he gave to us is primarily not filled with rules, and laws to hedge us in if we have really founded the heart of this life we would see that Jesus points out the true life for us. It is eternal because it is divine. Life with God, life in its fulness. Only when we meet in this way with faith and love do we find that he came really to free us for this true life. Until we discover this our life will be burden which we won
=t know how to carry when the chips are down.The Lord has not hesitated to make it clear in the events of this week that the life he came to give us is the narrow way, that it includes suffering sorrow even rejection. But these events cannot possibly bind us if we know how to love. If we really believe, if we turn to him in singleness of heart as he has loved us and we really, on the contrary, see in these events that come to us as a call to give our very self our deepest self to God. That then is really what the resurrection is about. That is what all of us are really made for. All of us will pass away but God in his life abides forever.
So at this Easter night he gives us a pledge of these things. A pledge for those who put their faith in his risen Son for we already share of this undying love and share in the eternal kingdom where his glory, the very essence of his being, the fulness of life is already ours because we have become his children. On this Easter night we need to thank the Lord and to praise him for raising his Son from the dead as a pledge for our glory and for sharing with us in this Eucharist, his life, his love, and the hope of his glory.