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Gospel reading Mark 16:1-7
vs.1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, brought spices with which to go and anoint him.
vs.2 And very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, just as the sun was rising.
vs.3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”
vs.4 But when they looked they could see that the stone – which was very big – had already been rolled back.
vs.5 On entering the tomb they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right had side, and they were struck with amazement.
vs.6 But he said to them, “There is no need for alarm. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he has risen, he is not here. See, here is the place where they laid him.
vs.7 But you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going before you to Galilee; it is there you will see him, just as he told you.”
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Michel DeVerteuil
Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels
www.columba.ie
General Textual Reflection
The gospels all tell us that Jesus rose from the dead. They give us, however, two different accounts of this central moment of his life. – In St Mark 9:19, St Luke (gospel and Acts of the Apostles), and St John, the apparitions of Jesus after his resurrection take place in Jerusalem. This was the place where he had recently been crucified and put to death.- In St Matthew and in this section of St Mark, Jesus is said to return to Galilee after his death. It is there that the later apparitions take place. Each of the two accounts has its own greatness and richness. In our meditation then, we should concentrate on the text before us; for the time being we ignore the other accounts, even though we may be more familiar with them.
St Mark tells his story from the perspective of the women who went to the tomb. We naturally follow them and interpret the story from their point of view. This also happens to be ours at certain moments in our lives. We can also read it from another point of view – from the perspective of the disciples who, in contrast to the women, remained indoors. They happened to be there at this time and they received the good news about the risen Jesus from the women who spoke from their experience.
Textual Comments
Verses 1 and 2. The women in the story are all three symbols of people who know how to go out and watch faithfully over someone who has died. The text tells us that they “brought spices with which to anoint him”; they did not, therefore, expect any resurrection from the dead. This is important for us as very often we too have no indication that we can expect a dead person to start a new life. We do 
not expect them to give rise to a fresh beginning. The text gives us three expressions symbolizing new life: “very early in the morning”, “on the first day of the week, they went to the tomb”, “and the sun was rising.” All three remind us that the day of great darkness mentioned in St Mark’s gospel did not last “forever”. The events on this morning, very early the next day, brought a new dawn. It was truly a time of new light.
Verses 3 and 4. The stone in front of the tomb is symbolic. It symbolizes the many obstacles which we know can lie between us here and now and the working out of the new story of grace. We think of examples:
– persons who hold us back because they do not want us to go forward with some kind of newness;
– objects which we know will stand in our way unless we take active steps to get rid of them and move to a new kind of relationship;
– God himself is often experienced as someone who distracts us from giving ourselves fully to others. We think for example of people we feel naturally attached to – a spouse, children, friends, fellow-workers, people who share in our political platform. We react to them as if our being close to God means that we should love them less.
Verse 5 and 6. The words of the young man in the white robe express the heart of the mystery of the empty tomb. With him, therefore, we enter into the dramatic contrast between the two attitudes of the women:
– a fear of things or objects that we know still stand in the way of our future progress;
– the reality of the risen Jesus; he is now totally free of what limits us to the here and now.
Verse 7. This text gives us the striking commission given to the women. It tells us to remember that we need to go back to the place where we started our great adventure. After the loss of some glorious person, we need to return to that place. When we go back to our first search, we will truly understand the significance of the seemingly dead Jesus who has risen again.
Prayer Reflection
Lord, we thank you for faithful people:
* friends who stay with us when we let them down;
* members of our parish who persevere in the community in times of discord;
* those in our movement who are not discouraged by corruption and betrayal within it;
* people in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland who continue to work for peace.
While most of us looked on past hopes as dead and gone, they, like the women at the tomb of Jesus, continued to mourn for what they had lost.
So they were there very early in the morning, when a new day had dawned and the sun had started rising again. They were able to announce to us who had lost hope the good news that it was the first day of a new beginning.
Lord, we remember a time when we were in some bondage:
* we were in the grip of some addiction;
* our family life was in deep crisis;
* unemployment had us totally discouraged.
Now, looking back, we remember how we worried about something that turned out to be no problem at all:
* what our friends would say;
* how one particular child would react;
* whether our health would stand up to work.
We were the women on Easter morning asking themselves who would toll away the great stone from the entrance to the tomb,
when the moment of grace had already come
and the stone was quite irrelevant to their situation. Thank you, Lord.
“Walk the dark ways of faith and you will attain the vision of God.” …St Augustine
Lord, forgive us for continuing to focus on the past:
* we harp on wrongs done to us by parents or teachers;
* we regret mistakes we made, opportunities we missed;
* we want to prove we are better than others;
* we try to rebuild relationships that have ended;
* we resent getting old or sickly.
Send us someone like the young man in the white robe who spoke to the women at the tomb of Jesus to tell us that crucifixion is not the end.
We must not look for Jesus in a tomb, because he has risen, he is not there.
Your will is that we go back to Galilee to resume our lives because he is going before us there and it is there that we will see him, just as he told us.
“All nations have opportunities which they may grasp if only they can summon up the courage and the will.” …Sir Arthur Lewis, West Indian economist
Lord, there are nations today that are trapped in an endless cycle of racial, ethnic or religious conflict – the Middle East, the Basque Country, The Sudan. Gaza and Israel.
We thank you for the women of these nations who, like Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome, have seen with their own eyes that life cannot be contained in a tomb, And have gone to tell their leaders that they must move forward to a new place
Where they will find life, just as you told them.
Lord, sometimes the good news of resurrection from the dead is so overpowering that all we can do is to run away, frightened out of our wits. Even though we have a wonderful message to transmit, for a long time we may not have shared our good news.
Now is the acceptable time.
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Thomas O’Loughlin
Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew
www.columba.ie
General remarks
This vigil is the centre of the liturgical year. The fact that it is peripheral to many normally active in the liturgy indicates how little the renewal of theology and liturgy begun in the 1960s has sunk into our consciousness.
The Missal describes it as ‘the mother of all vigils’ (n 20, p. 202) and sees the readings as its core: ‘it must always be borne in mind that the reading of the word of God is the fundamental element of the Easter Vigil’ (n 21). In practice, it is almost the exact reverse. The readings get squeezed (almost squeezed out) between the opening drama of the paschal fire, and the excitement of the baptism liturgy.
The assumption of the liturgy is that all nine readings are used: they are not offered as options from which to make a selection. An individual community can reduce the number ‘for special reasons’ (Lectionary, vol 1, p. 399) to five; and ‘more serious reasons‘ are needed if only four are used (Missal, n 21). However, if the reason for dropping any reading is the time factor, then the question must be asked as to why bother with the vigil at all? If any of the readings are dropped, then the purpose of the whole sequence becomes invisible: the idea is that there is a long sequence of texts and that we ‘listen … to the word of God, recalling how he saved his people throughout history, and in the fullness of time sent his Son to be our Redeemer’ (Missal). The notion of a long sequence of steps, ‘again and again you offered covenant to us,‘ cannot be conveyed with just two or three readings as that number is simply not large enough to give a sense of God’s continual steadfast love.
Given that people have come out specially and on this night are more closely attuned to the liturgy than usual, it is worth taking the extra time (it takes 10-15 minutes max.) to read all nine passages. Doing this well, with a variety of readers, and styles of music for the psalms, can let the vigil’s message sink home better that any homily.
Unlike Christmas Midnight Mass, after almost fifty years this vigil has failed to capture the Christian imagination. Indeed, the introduction of the Saturday vigil Mass has often meant that this night has just become an ordinary vigil Mass with ‘bits‘ tacked on. The liturgy tonight uses four great signs in succession (fire, word, water, and food) to convey the message that we have been remade as a people through the resurrection.
Fire breaks out in darkness – so it useless to begin before nightfall – and becomes ‘our light our joy.’ The great candle is the beacon of the risen Christ.
‘Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God’ (Jn 3:5); we rise in Christ through being buried with him in baptism (Col 2:12) so Water and baptisms are central to this night. This is the ideal time for the community to welcome new members and, in doing so, to remember that we are there because we are the baptised.
Lastly, there is the Lord’s banquet. We encounter the Lord in food and we thank the Father through a food ritual. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed and, therefore, we now celebrate the feast (cf 1 Cor 5:7f) and ‘the cup of blessing which we bless is … a participation in the blood of Christ, the bread we break is … a participation in the body of Christ’ — we are made into a new people through this sharing (1 Cor 10:16f).
Giving real ritual significance – the opposite of tokenism – to the various parts of this liturgy may be the key to establishing this as ‘the night’ with all its associations, as listed in the Exultet.
Gospel Notes
In the original form of Mark, this passage (with v. 8 which has been omitted as jarring with the liturgy’s theme of surprise-joy while Mark has surprise-fear) was the gospel’s concluding scene and the sole reference to the risen Jesus. Its force is that a sealed tomb has been opened, a tomb that should contain someone waiting for the resurrection at the end is already empty.
Mark’s stark ending has troubled readers down the centuries — hence the addition of other endings such as the one commonly found in our editions (vv. 9-20) — but it is the dramatic riposte to the long passion narrative. All that intrigue and wickedness to inflict death, destroy Jesus, his message, and his movement has ended in failure: only hours later the tomb is empty, his promises are being fulfilled.
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Sean Goan
Let the reader understand
www.columba.ie
Gospel Commentary : John 20:1-9
This account of the first Easter Sunday morning is significant in that it highlights how each of us as believers must come to terms with the mystery of the resurrection. Mary reports to Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty. They in turn run to investigate and, while the disciple reaches the tomb first, he holds back in deference to Peter, the leader of the twelve. It is only when the beloved disciple enters the tomb that we are told an appropriate response to the event –’He saw and he believed.’ The beloved disciple is unnamed but in John’s gospel he is present and close to Jesus at all the key moments: the Last Supper, Calvary and now the tomb. In a sense he symbolises where all true believers should be, for each of us is called to be a beloved disciple who accompanies Jesus on his way: ‘Where I am there also my servant will be.’ Jn 12:26
Reflection
Our readings today bring home to us with tremendous enthusiasm and fervour how our faith life is meaningless if not rooted in the resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is not merely a story in which we are offered the good example of a man who lived a life of love. It is much more, for it shows us that God has renewed our life totally from within through the Spirit of the Risen Christ who now lives in us. In the world of the New Testament many doubted the resurrection and poured scorn on the idea. 
The same is true today and perhaps this is not an unreasonable response when confronted with the apparent finality of death. Yet the entire New Testament is a witness to the faith of those who affirmed the resurrection as much more than an historical fact. For them it was the ultimate transforming truth and it remains so for those who celebrate it today. This explains why, ‘We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song.’ (St Augustine)
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Donal Neary SJ
Gospel Reflections
www.messenger.ie/bookshop/
Our Celebration
If we have a look around the Church we notice colour, nature, ions, water and oil. We hear joyful music and uplifting prayer. This is our Easter – our celebration.
The next bit of Easter is to go and tell. Like he appeared in an ordinary garden and appeared to unexpected women. Who would of thought he would do that? He would still do the same!
The divine Jesus also looks ordinary. They take a while to recognise it is the same Jesus, the one they knew and loved. We sometimes meet people who got a promotion (or something big happened to them) and deep down thy are still the same person. Jesus was new but then they realised that for now and forever he would still be the same, finding us and loving us in the ordinary, on our good days and bad days, in goodness and weakness.
On our bad days he can bring out the best in us. Like his bad days brought out the best in him. When we can say little he sings Alleluia in us. He is doing us a world of good in us so that we can do the world a world of good.
His words of resurrection echo today in all that is in this church, its colour, sounds, and above all in the humanity here. We will always have the echo of Jesus, he is risen today: alleluia, alleluia
Allow the joy of Jesus to fill your heart
as your breath fills your body.
Risen Jesus, be joyful in me, in all.
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Gospel Reading: John 20:1-10
vs.1 It was very early on the first day of the week, and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb
vs.2 and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb” she said “and we don’t know where they have put him.”
vs.3 So Peter set out with the other disciple to go to the tomb.
vs.4 They ran together, but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first;
vs.5 he bent down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground, but did not go it.
vs.6 Simon Peter who was following now came up,
went right into the tomb, saw the linen cloths on the ground,
vs.7 and also the cloth that had been over his head; this was not with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself.
vs.8 then the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in; he saw and he believed.
vs.9 Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead.
vs.10 The disciples then went home again.
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Michel DeVerteuil
Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels
www.columba.ie
Textual Comments
John’s account of the resurrection is in two stages:
– verses 1-2 are about Mary of Magdala’s experience;
– verses 3 to 10 tell us about the experience of the two disciples.
In verses 1 and 2 you might like to focus on the symbolism of it being “still dark” and yet a “first day” of a new time. The large stone symbolizes all the forces, human and other, that keep God’s grace in the bondage of the tomb.
Your experience will help you interpret how Mary responded. Did she run in confusion? Or in fear?
The story of Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved can be read from various points of view. You can take them together as experiencing the resurrection, focusing on the details, especially the cloths lying on the ground, useless now since Jesus was alive, but also on the fact that until they saw the empty tomb they did not believe the teaching of the scriptures.
St John makes a point of contrasting the two apostles. If you would like to meditate on this aspect of the story, see Peter as symbol of the Church leader, while “the other disciple” is the one who, while having no position of authority, is specially loved by Jesus and, perhaps as a result, is first in faith.
Prayer Reflection
Lord, we thank you for moment of grace.
We had been in a situation of death
– a relationship that meant a lot to us seemed dead
– an addiction held us in its grip
– our country was locked in civil strife.
Then the day came that would turn out to be the first of a new era.
We were mourning as usual,
Like Mary of Magdala making a routine visit to the tomb of Jesus,
But saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb.
Naturally, we looked for some simple explanation,
“they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him,”
but it wasn’t anything like that,
it was what the scriptures teach us, that your work must always rise again.
“They can kill a bishop, but they cannot kill the Church which is the people.” ….Archbishop Romero, some days before he was martyred
Lord we thank you for people of faith.
They believe the teaching of the scriptures
That your work may lie in the tomb for some days But it must rise again.
“When the underprivileged unite and struggle for justice, is that not a sign of the presence and action of God in our time?” …Musumi Kanyaro, Committee of Women in Church and Society, Lutheran World Federation
Lord as we look around the world today
we see what Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved saw
as they entered his tomb.
Cloths are lying on the ground that we can recognize for what they are
– attitudes of passivity that look like fine linen
but in fact kept your chosen ones in the tomb.
Whereas you have once more fulfilled what you taught us in all the scriptures
and we had not really believed until this moment:
that you will always raise up your chosen ones when the world imprisons them in a tomb.
Lord we pray today for those who were baptized last night:
today they have enthusiasm, for them you are alive and present;
but there will certainly come a time when they will experience you absent,
when prayer will be like Mary of Magdala going in the gloom of early morning
to visit the tomb of Jesus.
In fact, they will be like people who mourn for a spouse or a child
without even having the comfort of the dead body to look at.
This is the way they will have to pass
because until they have had experiences like this they will not really believe
the teaching of the scriptures that your grace cannot be overpowered by evil
and that your presence within us must always, like Jesus,
rise again from the tomb.
Lord, we like to feel that we have you within our grasp:
* that our prayers are always answered;
* that we are living in a way that is pleasing to you;
* that the times, gestures and words of our prayers are just right.
Teach us that we must be prepared to lose that security
and experience being abandoned, until we live in trust only
and see all those things that we considered important
like the cloths in the empty tomb of Jesus –
fine linen cloths, but they were keeping him in the tomb.
Now we see them on the ground and also the cloth that had been over his head not with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself.
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Thomas O’Loughlin
Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew
www.columba.ie
Homily Notes
1. The resurrection is the source of Christian hope: our lives are not circumscribed by life as we know it now, but can open onto a new life in the presence of God. This is the mystery beyond words, yet somehow today it has to be the subject of our preaching.
However, there are two widely held misconceptions which prevent people hearing what the liturgy says about the resurrection today in its symbols, prayers, and readings. A useful task in the homily is to draw attention to these mistaken ideas.
The first is that it was some sort of resuscitation, a trick to prove that Jesus was right, an event which you either believe happened or did not happen back then. This misconception distracts from a hope in our resurrection in the future. The resurrection is not about resuscitation, but our future transformation.
The second, and far more widespread notion, is that resurrection is just a fancy terms for a belief in an afterlife of some sort or other — the number of practising Christians who think that re-incarnation can be squared with Christian faith is an indication of this confusion’s prevalence. Our faith is not about some kind of postmortem survival, but in God’s gift of the fullness of life.
2. So, the first point is to avoid ‘explaining ‘ the mystery as if it were a series of ‘facts’ that can just be acknowledged as having happened so-and-so many years ago. In earlier times each item in the resurrection accounts was studied like the clues in a detective story with the aim of building an apologetic that would explain the ‘how‘ of the resurrection and the ‘what‘ of the risen body of Jesus. But the kerygma of the resurrection lies not in the details of ‘the first Easter,’ but in the reality that those who join their lives with the Christ shall share a fuller, glorious, transformed life as the gift of the Father. We can inherit the Father’s gift of glory as the final fulfilment of human life. It is worth pointing out that the disciple today must not be distracted by the ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions of ‘the first Easter’ from remembering that Christian faith strains onward to the future: the cost of discipleship now and tomorrow is worth it for the path of righteousness does not end with a grave. Many wonder whether or not they ‘can believe’ in the empty tomb, but this misses the point. Belief in the resurrection is seen when someone, even in the face of death, still follows the path of love with the confidence that the Father will ‘not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let his Holy One see corruption‘ (Acts 2:27 [Ps 16:10]).
3. Second, belief in the resurrection is not some christianised version of a belief in the immortality of the soul. A belief in immortality is a human sense that a bit, some sort of spiritual residue, can survive without a body. The belief in the resurrection is that we are each creatures willed by God, in whose histories God is interested as the loving Father, and into whose history he has sent his Son sharing our humanity, and therefore whose whole existence ‘spirit, soul, and body’ can be transformed to become part of his Son’s glorious body. Easter is not a celebration of a ‘survival factor’ in humanity, but of the Father’s love so that nothing good shall perish, but be given even fuller life.
4. To believe in the message of Easter is not a matter of tombs long ago in Palestine, but having the conviction that it is worthwhile to seek to bring light in darkness, to oppose lies with truth, to work for justice in the face of human corruption, and to say that death does not have the last word.
5. When we profess our faith in the resurrection of Jesus we are not setting out something with the intention that our understandings should grasp it and comprehend it. Jesus has been transformed to a new kind of existence by the Father beyond our understanding and we can only express it in symbols such as that of the empty tomb — tombs, after all, are designed to hold their remains indefinitely. By contrast, the proclamation Jesus is Risen’ is an invitation to share in a new way of seeing God and the universe, and it is only from within this new vision (faith) that it makes sense. Hence, the ancient theological dictum, based in Isaiah 7:9, ‘unless you believe, you will not understand.’ The message of Acts and the gospel is that we are invited to live, to live in a new way, to live in Christ — and that in living in this way we discover in the midst of suffering and death that the Father will raise us as he raised the Christ.
6. If we join with those who accept the invitation to new life in Christ, which is what we say we are doing in accepting baptism commits us to a way of living. The early followers were referred to as being on ‘The Way’ (see Acts 9:2; 18:26; 19:9 and 23; 22:4,14 and 22) and our oldest extant teaching manual (The Didache) begins by contrasting ‘The Way of Life’ (to be followed by disciples) with ‘The Way of Death.’
7. The thought of resurrection may fill us with joy, but the life-demands that accepting it makes on us can be great: we must do as we would be done to (cf Didache 1:2; Mt 7:12; Lk 6:31), we must practice the forgiveness we desire from the Father (cf the ‘Our Father’), and we must act with gentleness. Only in constant effort to live life in this way can we glimpse the truth of the empty tomb.
8. To live this life demands patience, a waiting for the good things to be revealed — the practice of the virtue of hope: we must always be of good courage … for we walk by faith, not by sight (cf 2 Cor 5:6f). Today is our day for rejoicing in the risen Christ, for thanking the Father for his love, and for reminding ourselves of that to which we have committed ourselves: The Way. Death has contended with Life, yet despite tombs and symbols of death all around us, we proceed to commit ourselves to life, confident that as the Father transformed the existence of Jesus, so he will transform the whole creation.
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Sean Goan
Let the reader understand
www.columba.ie
Gospel Commentary : John 20:1-9
This account of the first Easter Sunday morning is significant in that it highlights how each of us as believers must come to terms with the mystery of the resurrection. Mary reports to Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty. They in turn run to investigate and, while the disciple reaches the tomb first, he holds back in deference to Peter, the leader of the twelve. It is only when the beloved disciple enters the tomb that we are told an appropriate response to the event –’He saw and he believed.’ The beloved disciple is unnamed but in John’s gospel he is present and close to Jesus at all the key moments: the Last Supper, Calvary and now the tomb. In a sense he symbolises where all true believers should be, for each of us is called to be a beloved disciple who accompanies Jesus on his way: ‘Where I am there also my servant will be.‘ Jn 12:26
Reflection
Our readings today bring home to us with tremendous enthusiasm and fervour how our faith life is meaningless if not rooted in the resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is not merely a story in which we are offered the good example of a man who lived a life of love. It is much more, for it shows us that God has renewed our life totally from within through the Spirit of the Risen Christ who now lives in us.
In the world of the New Testament many doubted the resurrection and poured scorn on the idea. The same is true today and perhaps this is not an unreasonable response when confronted with the apparent finality of death. Yet the entire New Testament is a witness to the faith of those who affirmed the resurrection as much more than an historical fact. For them it was the ultimate transforming truth and it remains so for those who celebrate it today. This explains why, ‘We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song.’ (St Augustine)
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What took you so long?
