A reading from the holy Gospel according to Matthew (28:1-10)
After the Sabbath, and towards dawn on the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala and the other Mary went to visit the sepulchre. And suddenly there was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, his robe white as snow. The guards were so shaken by fear of him that they became like dead men. But the angel spoke; and he said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, 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 and see, he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” Look! I have told you.’ They came quickly away from the tomb, filled with awe and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.
And see, coming to meet them, was Jesus, saying, ‘Greetings!’ And the women came up to him and, clasping his feet, they worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers that they must leave for Galilee; there they will see me.’
The proclamation of the gospel at the Easter Vigil is the high point of the Liturgy of the Word. This is truly the ‘night of salvation’. While John’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb, in which Mary of Magdala becomes a messenger for the apostles, is read on Easter morning, the three synoptic gospels take turns at the Vigil Mass. In each gospel a messenger, or two in the case of Luke, announces the Easter kerygma ‘he has been raised’ (egerthe). While in Mark and Luke the women simply discover that the stone closing the tomb has been rolled away, Matthew dramatizes events with a great earthquake and the descent of ‘an angel of the Lord’ who rolls back the stone and sits on it. As he did at the moment of the death of Jesus this evangelist introduces features of apocalyptic drama to underline the significance of these events. Uniquely too, the passage concludes with Jesus himself coming to greet the women, who grasp his feet and ‘worship’ him, just as the Gentile wise men had done at the start of the gospel (2:18).