Thursday 30 April 2015

Harald Buchinger: Easter Sunday - a homiletic vacuum?

Originally Easter Sunday was not an independent feast, but the conclusion of the Paschal Vig-il. The need for a relatively discrete profile arose only when the celebration of Easter was de-veloped into a festal cycle in the later 4th century, converting Easter Sunday into one date among others. Therefore homilists of that age had no received traditions for the creation of festal sermons on the newly established feast. The proposed short communication will explore how they filled that vacuum: by drawing on commonplaces of earlier Paschal theology, by addressing particularly the newly baptized with a mystagogical sermon, by considering the prologue of the Gospel of John read during Eastertide, by expounding specific Easter gospel narratives, and by musing upon the resurrection as such.

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