Dear brothers and sisters, we gather for these Vigil rites as a people of faith, all prepared to share in the adventure of a Communion of Life with God Himself, in His Risen Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.
This Night, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God the Father presents to us His Risen Son. The Lord Jesus, our New Adam, stands before us, His Church, as our Spouse, finely dressed and all prepared for our Great Heavenly Marriage and the longed for consummation of His Covenant with us, His Bride and People. He, Who is Life Eternal, calls us to share that life with Him forever. He, Who is Christ our Light, the Light of our World, calls us out of our long darkness and into the radiance of His Presence. He, Who is the Promise of the Father, His Word Incarnate, comes to fulfil God’s ancient Covenant with His People. Our Risen Lord invites us to rebirth with Him, joining Him in procession at His side to the Wedding Banquet and then the Bridal Chamber, made ready for us as our home in Him and with Him forever.
The Risen One stands before us, offering everything He has and is, and awaits our response. This Night we are no spectators of a scene but centre stage participants in a primordial drama, face to face with Him. The Lord Jesus has returned to make His great proposal and Creation holds its breath in anticipation of our response in faith, and our Yes!
Already this Night, while we stood radiant before the Divine Fire of His love, we acknowledged Him as Christ Our Light. There, in the Paschal Candle light, we professed Him to be our Yesterday and Today, our Beginning and End, our Alpha and Omega, and we declared that the whole of our lives - past, present and to come - now belong to Him to Whom belongs all glory and sovereignty.
But now we must make our Yes to His offer of life with Him and in Him and we do so in that part of this dramatic Night which is proper and exclusive to us alone, that one part which Jesus cannot accomplish for us. It is our Yes to HimijmHim, our promise, and it is made in the form of our
Credo, in a response that says: ‘I Believe!’ Christ, our only Light, our true Word and Promise, awaits our confession of faith in Him so that we can together breathe in the fresh morning air of Easter, bathe with Him in the Baptismal consummation of our union and share together with Him the wedding breakfast of the Eucharist.
This Profession of Faith we make in Him this Night, going back as it does to the first century, is the original
Credo professed by our newborn Church in its earliest Rite of Baptism. Like wedding vows our
Credo is framed in proposal and response: Do you renounce your former life lived in the darkness of the Devil’s rule? And we respond,
Renuncio, I do! Then, do you believe in God Who made Himself known to you, in what He has done for you, and in what He calls you to be? And we respond,
Credo, I do! In our Easter promises we give ourselves to our Living God in a confident profession of trust in the great Mystery He calls us to live with Him as our One and Only God, Whose love created all that is good in us. We give ourselves to Him professing gratitude to our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose loving mercy redeemed all that had fallen away in us. And we give ourselves to Him by trusting in His Holy Spirit to make us gracious and holy in our lives in Him. Finally we give ourselves to His mission by professing our belief in the mystery of His Body and Family, the Church, where He forgives our sins in order to raise us up to Eternal communion with Him and the Angels and Saints in glory forever.
Every Sunday Mass we renew these same vows in our Creed or Profession of Faith. As in every relationship that matters to us we try to fan into a flame our love so that our outward expressions avoid descent into mere force of habit or the drudgery of empty routine. Faithful love knows how to
ponder and treasureprecious things in the heart. So, too, we want, this Night, to reflect upon the precious treasure that is the promises we make in our Creed, so that they can shed fresh light on our daily lives lived in faith. Recited prayerfully with each passing Sunday our promises to the Living God really can transform our lives in Him.
It is our profession of our faith in Mysteries revealed to us by God Himself, intimate things between us that would never have been known apart from His telling. Our Creed points to something greater than all of us and ends in our very encounter with the Almighty God Himself. The early Church called the Creed a Symbol, like a wedding ring that represents the lives of spouses, who cherish their wedding bands for somehow keeping faithful and true their love for each other. Our Creed is our wedding ring, our profession of union with that Someone we love, that Someone responsible for making us all that we are, by means of His divine love, truth and grace.
No path of true love ever ran easy and Christians know our
Credo, too, bears blemishes that tell their tale of trials and tribulations in our history with God through the centuries. The honeymoon of our life in Christ and the mystery of His Passion, Death and Resurrection, soon experienced persecutions from the world outside and divisions from the Church within that threatened and upset us for a while. There were the doubts as to whether Jesus was truly our God, or really a Man like us, whether His Holy Spirit was Divine, or where and how His true Church was to be found, whether our world was good and lovable as it stood and whether our eternal life with Him really could involve a resurrection of our flesh beyond the mere living on of our souls.
But now, these wounds healed, our Confession of Faith is more precious to us than at its beginning, testifying as it does to how we grew in our understanding of our Lord and in our love of our life in Him. Through the centuries our Profession our Faith has protected, deepened and transformed our relationship with God and formed us more perfectly in His likeness through union with His Son’ suffering, death and Resurrection.
The Profession of Faith, a precious touchstone of our love of God and faith in His power to guide us, has given new life to our Church in every age. May it do so again even in these turbulent times so threatened by temptations and caught up in a culture of skepticism about God and cynicism over faith. In such ambiguous times may the Risen Lord raise us up with Him on the rock of our
Credo that has been, and ever will be, the rule and measure of our hope in Him and our confident trust in His power to be our Light, our Promise, our Life and our Salvation.
We turn to Mary, our Mother, the New Eve, the one blessed because She believed that the promises made Her by Her Lord would be fulfilled, and Who stands before us now, even more blessed for having believed firmly and fervently in that final glory which yet awaits our perfect happiness and delight.