April 4, 2026
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The Easter Vigil •
The Mother of All Vigils • Year A • Beads of Joy Blog II
🕯️ The Vigil Readings
Reading 1: Genesis 1:1 - 2:2
In the beginning
Reading 2: Genesis 22:1-18
Abraham and Isaac
Reading 3: Exodus 14:15 - 15:1
Through the Red Sea
Reading 4: Isaiah 54:5-14
The Lord calls you back
Reading 5: Isaiah 55:1-11
Come to the water
Reading 6: Baruch 3:9-15, 32 - 4:4
Walk in His ways
Reading 7: Ezekiel 36:16-28
I will give you a new
heart
Epistle: Romans 6:3-11
Raised with Him
Gospel: Matthew 28:1-10
He is not here. He is
risen.
🔥 It Begins In Darkness
No lights. No
candles. No music.
Just darkness and
silence and a congregation standing outside in the night around a pile of wood
waiting for a spark.
And then: FIRE!!!
A single flame struck from the darkness. The
Paschal Candle lit from that flame. The priest lifts it high and sings into the
dark: Lumen Christi. The Light of Christ. And someone in the front row tips
their small candle toward the flame. And the person next to them does the same.
And the next. And the next. Until that one spark has traveled through every
hand in that dark church and the whole place is blazing with light from a
thousand small flames all lit from one.
That is tonight. That is the Easter Vigil. That
is the whole story of salvation in one image.
Welcome to the greatest night of the year.
📖 The Story God Tells Tonight
The Church does
something extraordinary at this Vigil. She tells the whole story. Not just the
ending, the whole magnificent sweep of it from the very first word.
In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth. We start there. Before sin. Before death. Before the need for
rescue. Just God and the raw material of everything that would ever exist, and
He looks at it and calls it good. Light from darkness. Order from chaos. Life
from nothing. Sound familiar? It should. Because that is exactly what is about
to happen again tonight in that tomb.
Then Abraham on the mountain with Isaac, a
father who loves his son so completely that he trusts God even when he cannot
understand. A ram caught in the thicket at the last possible moment. A life
spared, because a sacrifice was provided. If you are not yet seeing the shape
of what is coming, look again. It has been written into every story God ever
told.
Then Moses. The Red Sea. Pharaoh's army
behind them, water in front of them, nowhere to go. And God says, move forward.
The sea splits. They walk through on dry ground. On the other side they sing,
horse and rider He has thrown into the sea. That song, the oldest song in all
of Scripture, echoes tonight across every baptismal font in every Catholic
church in the world. Because tonight people walk through the waters too. And
they come out the other side completely new.
Then Isaiah stops everything and says, come.
All you who are thirsty. Come to the water. You don't need money. You don't
need credentials. You don't need to have it all figured out. Just come. That
invitation has been hanging in the air for twenty-seven centuries, and it is
still ringing out tonight in every church where the Vigil fire is burning.
Then Ezekiel, with such a powerful message.
God says, I will give you a new heart. I will remove the heart of stone from
your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you. Not:
I will help you try harder with the heart you have. Not: I will patch the
cracks. A new heart. Brand new. Given freely. Tonight.
And then Paul in Romans says the thing that
ties every one of those readings together with one breathtaking thread, we were
baptized into His death so that just as Jesus Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, we too might live in that same newness of life. The
Red Sea and the font. The new heart and the resurrection. Abraham's ram and the
Lamb of God. Every story tonight is the same story told in a different key,
death swallowed up by life, darkness overcome by light, the stone rolled back
and the tomb standing empty.
🔔 Then The Bells Ring
After seven readings
and seven psalms, silence for a moment. And then the Gloria begins. And the
bells that have been silent since Holy Thursday, three days of silence: RING.
Every bell in the church at once. And the lights blaze on. And the flowers that
were hidden are suddenly everywhere. And the organ that has been silent through
all of Holy Week fills the building with rejoicing. And something happens in
the chest of every person in that church that is almost impossible to describe.
He is Risen!
He is actually risen. And everything!! I mean
Everything is different now.
📖 The Gospel - Matthew 28:1-10
Mary Magdalene and
the other Mary come to the tomb at dawn. There is a great earthquake. An angel
descends like lightning, rolls back the stone, sits on it. The guards shake
with fear and become like dead men. And the angel says:
Do not be afraid. I know you are looking for
Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He has been raised just as He said.
Come and see the place where He lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples, He
has been raised from the dead.
He is NOT Here!
Four words. The most world-shattering four
words ever spoken. Everything the enemies of Jesus thought they had
accomplished, sealed, guarded, finished, undone in a single earthquake before
dawn on a Sunday morning. The stone is not rolled back to let Jesus out. He is
already gone. The stone is rolled back to let us look in and see that the tomb
could not hold Him.
He is not here. He is risen. Just as He said.
🙏 Reflection
Forty-six days ago,
we stood at the beginning of Lent with ashes on our foreheads and a long road
in front of us.
We chose life over drift. We received mercy
and tried to give it. We let God transform us from the inside out. We asked Him
to open our eyes. We said yes to new life. We surrendered. We poured out our
jar. We named our Judas and Peter moments. We kept one holy hour. We washed
someone's feet. We stopped at three o'clock on Friday and just said thank You.
We sat in Holy Saturday silence and waited.
And now here we are. Standing outside an
empty tomb in the dark before dawn with two women who came to anoint a body and
found an angel instead.
He is not here. He is
risen.
All of it, every reading of this Lent, every
Rosary bead, every Fatima connection, every sacrifice, every honest prayer,
every act of extravagant love, all of it was pointing here. To this night. To
this tomb. To this blazing, impossible, magnificent truth that death is not the
last word. The stone always moves. That the Light of Christ cannot be
extinguished by any darkness, any enemy, any sin, any grave.
Lumen Christi. The Light of Christ.
And it is traveling, right now, tonight, from
candle to candle to candle through every hand in every dark church in the world
until the whole place is blazing.
Including yours.
🌟 EASTER VIGIL CHALLENGE - Pour
It Out
Remember that paper
you have been carrying in your pocket since Monday? Tonight is the night.
Take it out. Read what you wrote. The
alabaster jar you identified. The act of extravagant love you promised. Look at
it in the light of the Easter candle, literally or in your heart, and pour it
out. Do what you said you would do. Give that financial gift that will change the
life of someone you love or a ministry you deeply support. Make the call and
hear the voice of someone you miss and love. Write that letter you said you
wanted to write. Extend the forgiveness; your heart is aching, and it will heal
both of you. Take the step you have been circling all week.
The tomb is empty. There is nothing left to
be afraid of.
Pour it all out.
📿 Rosary - Tonight We Begin Something New
The Glorious
Mysteries - First Time Since Lent Began
Tonight we put the
Sorrowful Mysteries down, reverently, gratefully, having walked every step of
that road with Him, and we pick up the Glorious Mysteries for the first time
since Lent began.
The Resurrection. The Ascension. Pentecost.
The Assumption. The Coronation.
Pray for them tonight like someone who just ran
from an empty tomb and can barely catch their breath. Because that is exactly
what you are.
🌹 Our Lady of Fatima - She Always Knew
On that first Holy
Saturday, she sat in silence and held the faith for everyone.
She knew the tomb
would not hold Him. She had pondered it all in her heart since the angel first
said, “The Lord is with you.” She had carried the promise through Bethlehem and
Egypt and Nazareth and Cana and Calvary and the sealed tomb and this longest
Saturday, and she never let it go.
At Fatima, she came back to tell us what she
never stopped believing, that her Son is risen, that His mercy is real, that
the Rosary is the rope that connects heaven to earth, that in the end her
Immaculate Heart will triumph.
Tonight: She is smiling. 🌹
🕊️ Closing Prayer
He is risen. He is actually, really,
historically, gloriously, impossibly risen. And I am standing here at the empty
tomb with nothing left to say except Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
Thank You, Lord Jesus. Thank You for every step
of this Lent. Thank You for the cross. Thank You for the silence of Holy
Saturday. Thank You for the stone that moved. Thank You for the angel. Thank you to the women who ran.
And thank You for Our Lady who never stopped
believing even when everyone else did. I am Yours. All of it, every bead, every day, every word, every
sacrifice, poured out at Your feet. He is risen. Alleluia!! 🔥📿🌹✝️
