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Text of Archbishop Coleridge’s Homily
Among us here this morning Easter voices are sounding. First among them is the Risen Jesus himself who stands among his disciples and says, “You are witnesses to this” – witnesses, he means, to his own death and resurrection. A witness is someone who has seen or heard something and can therefore speak. They had seen Jesus die on the Cross; then, astonishingly, they had seen him risen from the dead, not a ghost but an undeniably physical presence, though now in some new dimension. They had heard or heard tell of his dying words from the Cross, and they now hear the words of the Risen Lord. What they hear will enter the depth of their being, and from there they will speak the Easter word to the world.
This will eventually cost them their life. Like Jesus, they will die as martyrs.
A second Easter voice this morning, therefore, is the apostle Peter speaking in the Temple precinct. “God raised [Jesus] from the dead”, he says, “and we are the witnesses”. In fact, Mary Magdalene was the first witness of the resurrection, the first to encounter the Risen Jesus and utter the oldest and simplest of all Christian creeds, “I have seen the Lord”. Peter, however, was the first public witness, as we have heard in the Acts of the Apostles.
A third proto-Easter voice we hear is the prophet Isaiah, who says he has been anointed by God “to bring good news to the poor, freedom to captives and to the blind new sight”. In a world that says there’s only bad news for the poor, captives never come free and the blind remain sightless forever, this is a prophetic word looking to Easter’s triumph of life over death.
Traditionally the Bishop of Rome has been called the Successor of Peter. This means that the Pope is to be the first public witness to the Resurrection. That’s the heart of the papal ministry, whatever the historical panoply that has surrounded it. That’s why the Pope stands on the balcony of St Peter’s on Easter Sunday and proclaims to the city and the world, “Christ is risen, he is truly risen!” It’s also why when the COVID pandemic was at its worst, Pope Francis stood alone in a damp and dark St Peter’s Square – a silent proclamation of light out of darkness.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that “in our darkest moments, we don’t need advice. What we truly need is presence, someone to sit with us in the shadows, to acknowledge our suffering without trying to fix it. In those moments, silence and understanding speak louder than words, offering a quiet strength that reminds us we’re not alone. It’s not solutions we seek, but connection”. Francis understood that and connected deeply and mysteriously.
As Successor of Peter, he witnessed in many ways to Easter, to the triumph of life over death, peace over violence, mercy over vengeance, truth over lies. His words and actions and silences spoke of what he had seen and heard. They said, “I have seen him, I have heard him”. This was the witnessing we ourselves witnessed through the years of his papal ministry. We saw Francis and we heard him. In seeing and hearing him, we saw and heard the Risen Christ, proclaiming “good news for the poor, freedom for captives and to the blind new sight”.
In Pope Francis, we saw a human being, not some life-denying functionary. He was flesh and blood, down to earth, one of us – like Jesus eating a piece of grilled fish. Francis wasn’t above us or apart from us but was a good companion on the journey. He understood our questions, our perplexities, our failings, our wounds. He didn’t judge or condemn; he accompanied and encouraged.
We saw the humility of a man who didn’t think he had all the answers. He knew he’d been chosen by God but didn’t think he was God. He was humble enough to listen to voices other than his own and to seek God’s glory rather than his own.
He became a celebrity; but he didn’t seek the limelight and there was not a hint of theatricality about him.
We saw the inner freedom of a man who didn’t care much what others said or thought of him. He was also free enough to set aside the powerful protocols of the papal court and simply be himself in the role.
In fact, he seemed to find the papacy liberating, becoming more himself in the role. A former Archbishop of Canterbury was asked in an interview before his appointment, If you were Archbishop, would you find it an imprisonment or a liberation? The same question could be put to a prospective Pope. For some, the papacy has been an imprisonment, but for Pope Francis it seemed a liberation.
I remember speaking to an Argentinian bishop at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, not too long after Francis was elected. He told me they were surprised at how he was turning out as Pope. Back home, he said, Cardinal Bergoglio never smiled in public and never gave interviews. Now, it seems, he can’t stop smiling in public and giving interviews. Something in him had changed. That’s what I mean when I say he became more rather than less himself in the role.
In Francis, we also saw the mercy which knows that every human being is more than their sin, their wrongdoing, even their crime. He saw with the eye of God who sees how wounded we are but sees more, who sees the sin of our life and of the world but still loves us. This required a kind of courage in an often merciless world where empathy is scorned as woke and mercy dismissed as weakness.
We saw a man who was more interested in initiating processes than pushing quickfire solutions. Time and again, especially in the most controversial areas, he started a process, the fruit of which will appear only after his death.
This, he said, required a holy patience and a willingness to start things which others will finish. There’s a kind of humility in that.
For all that he spoke of the need for patience, he was a man with fire in the belly. The fire of the Gospel burned in him till the end, even when he was failing physically. When he returned to the Vatican after his long hospitalisation when he nearly died, the doctors ordered two months of complete rest. Francis, however, visited a prison, appeared in St Peter’s Square a couple of times, then in the basilica, and even gave the urbi et orbi blessing from the balcony on Easter Sunday. He seemed to know he was dying, and he was determined to die with his boots on. The body was breaking down, but the fire blazed on.
At a papal funeral, the celebrants wear red vestments because the papacy is always in some sense a martyrdom, and red is the colour of the martyrs. Certainly it looked like a martyrdom in Francis’ last days, as it did in the last days of John Paul II. But a martyr is not just one who suffers; a martyr is above all a witness to Easter, the word martyr itself meaning witness. The papal ministry brought to Jorge Bergoglio suffering both seen and unseen. But the light of Easter shone through it all.
His first word to the world from the balcony of St Peter’s after his election was simply, “Buona sera, Good evening”. His last word to the world from the same balcony on Easter Sunday was, “Buona Pasqua, Happy Easter”. How right that simple and familiar greeting seems for this Successor of Peter, nothing very grand but it says it all. Eternal rest give to Francis, O Lord, and let the light of Easter shine upon him; may he rest in peace and rise in glory. Amen.