Easter Vigil 2025
Preaching by Sister Elise García, OP

Saturday, April 19, 2025
Luke 24: 1-12

We have been on quite a journey with Jesus this Holy Week – accompanying him, like the women, all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem – as we also struggle with a norovirus infection here on our campus, deaths and other illnesses, and the dreadful national news we all ingest each day.

On Palm Sunday, our Sister Corinne Sanders reminded us of the fiery love that was at the heart of why so many followed Jesus – and why he was put to death. She gave us an encouraging word for these challenging times. Corinne spoke of our call “as faithful followers of Jesus, awakening each morning tending to the fire of love, sustaining the weary with a word of hope, refusing to allow Love to be extinguished.”

Many of you participated in the beautiful Holy Week retreat that our Sister Patty Harvat offered, entering into the Passion journey through the eyes and heart of Mary. Patty invited us to reflect on what that harrowing experience must have been like for Mary, as a mother losing her beloved son to such savage cruelty. Mary, the woman who from the beginning pondered so many things in her heart. How do we, like Mary, meet the finality of the death of loved ones and the loneliness it evokes in our own lives?

As we entered the Triduum, on Holy Thursday, our Sister Sara Fairbanks invited us into an imaginative journey with Jesus stooping down to wash our feet. Would we not respond as Peter did? “Lord, you wash my feet? You will never wash my feet.” She then invited us to imagine what we would ask Jesus to do, if we could. “Jesus, I don’t need you to wash my feet, I need you to …… .”

If you are like me, your imaginings might have expanded as Sara observed, starting by letting Jesus know you need him to restore your health or that of a dear friend – or to rid the Motherhouse of the norovirus infection! You might then have asked him to please restore human kindness and civil discourse in our nation or to end wars and violence around the world or to safeguard our imperiled Earth home.

Sara asked us to then “imagine Jesus kneeling before us with a basin of warm water, tenderly washing our feet and drying them with a towel, as if to say, ‘Welcome home to God’s household of unconditional love.… Savor God’s lifegiving love for you – and pour it out in service to our world.’”

On Good Friday, the solemn day when Jesus was hung on the cross and died, our Sister Fran Nadolny wondered what his followers said to one another that evening when they huddled in fear and anguish? What, Fran asked us, would we say to one another? She then invited us to reflect through the evening and into this morning on what we have learned from our journey as followers of Christ – and on what we might share with one another.

Tomorrow we will hear from our Sister Lorraine Réaume and see what she will invite us to reflect on, as we celebrate Easter Sunday.

Tonight we enter the tomb. We enter the uncovered tomb with the women that Luke names: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James.

These three and the other named and unnamed women – including Mary, the mother of Jesus – who appear in each of the four Gospel narratives of the Passion were present from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee to its horrific end. They were the first to witness new life.

Our Dominican Sister and theologian Barbara Reid, OP, writes, “Luke’s Gospel like all the other Gospel narratives places women as witnesses to the crucifixion of Jesus, as witnesses to the burial of the body in the tomb and as the first to hear of and then to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus.”

And so, Sisters, Associates, and friends, we are now with Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary, peering into the tomb with its rolled away stone. We have brought spices and ointments to tend to the body of Jesus.

But he is not there. Two dazzling angels suddenly appear. We bow our heads, terrified.

As they remind us of words we heard Jesus speak in Galilee, we slowly raise our heads. We remember that he had told us he would be handed over and crucified, and on the third day would rise again. The angels ask: “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised.”

We leave the tomb with the Gospel women and quickly go to “announce all these things to the eleven and to all the others,” as Luke writes.

After more than 2,000 years of patriarchy, the testimony of women is still questioned. But Sisters and friends, the Good News that those valiant women – our sisters in faith – were the first to proclaim has perdured. Our witness and testimony, then and now, to the cruelty of despots and to the beckoning signs of new life will endure.

Whether mocked or ignored, we will watch and pray. As faithful disciples, we will continue to seek truth – and speak it, in love.