Homily for Mass of Easter Tuesday and for the late Pope Francis St Mary’s Basilica, Sydney, 22 April 2025.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” the angels ask Mary Magdalene on Easter day (Jn 20:11-18). Her grief is profound, her tears sincere. With the execution of her Master and Friend, her world had been turned upside down. Now she has come to tend His corpse and her grief is only intensified, for His body is missing. “Who are you looking for?” a stranger asks (Jn 20:15). It is a question Jesus asks many times in the Gospel (e.g. Mt 16:15; Lk 24:5-6,17-27,38; Jn 1:38-39; 18:4,7), asks each of us as we hear His Word, approach His sacraments, face the challenges of life. The Magdalene is baffled.
Then she hears one word in answer to her searching. “Mary,” the name that created her now re-creates her as “apostle to the apostles”—as Pope Francis called her when he raised her status in the liturgical calendar. A title fitting for him also, as the one appointed to confirm the successors of the apostles (Lk 22:32). Like the Magdalene, Pope Francis was so marked by Easter that he made his last appearance and offered his last blessings on Easter Day itself.
Perugino, Christ Commissioning Peter (1481), Sistine Chapel Rome
On Pentecost day, we heard in our first reading, it was Peter who stood up to speak (Acts 2:14). He was the first publicly to proclaim Christ, crucified for the forgiveness of sins and raised to new life as a promise to us all; as a result, 3,000 became Christians that day—a veritable explosion of grace at the birth of the Church (Acts 2:36-41)! Ever since, Peter’s successors have held a special place in the faith and piety of Catholics. Popes are charged by Christ with guarding the Church’s fidelity to the apostolic tradition and ensuring His flock are united rather than scattered (Mt 12:42-48; 16:17-19; Lk 22:31-32; Jn 21:15-19).
Only the miracle of Easter could explain how a simple catcher of fish could become an heroic fisher of men; how one who so regularly got Jesus wrong could end up bedrock and key-keeper for His Church; how one who thrice denied Jesus on the night He was betrayed could three times profess his love to the Risen Lord. His 265th successor, Pope Francis, will also be remembered for a triple profession of love.
In his first words as pope, Francis humbly asked us to pray for him; from his coffin he asks the same today. For this reliance upon God and the Church, this deep and prayerful listening to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit, is the call of baptism to every Christian and Jorge Mario Bergoglio was first and foremost a Christian, a man of faith. So his first profession of love was his baptismal one as a baby and renewed at every Easter: I love you my God.
As a young man Jorge had a profound experience of God’s forgiveness in Confession. Divine pity would be the principal theme of his preaching and teaching. The motto he chose as a pastor was ‘Miserando atque eligendo’—having and choosing Mercy. This, he insisted, is God’s very nature and Christ’s central message: inexhaustible compassion and redeeming forgiveness. So, Pope Francis’ second profession of love was his clerical one: I love you Jesus, Mercy.
Elected as Pope in 2013, he took the name of Francis. St Francis of Assisi created a family of friars and sisters who were self-consciously missionary disciples, and Pope Francis charged us all with that mission in his first great document, Evangelii gaudium (2013). Having encountered the mercy of God themselves, the disciples must share their joy and hope with the world, especially with the most neglected. They must be radically inclusive, calling “todos, todos, todos” (everyone) into the divine embrace, as Pope Francis said at the Lisbon World Youth Day (2023). That requires viewing all humanity as St Francis did, as Fratelli Tutti—all our family—as he wrote in his encyclical of that name (2020). It means repudiating the ‘globalisation of indifference’ towards refugees and the poor, the ‘ideological colonisation’ of the developing world by the secularising West, and the ‘throwaway culture’ that discards those deemed useless, including the unborn and elderly. It assumes instead the tender concern of the Good Samaritan.
Who will forget Pope Francis’ tender gestures, right to his last days, reaching out to those on the poor, refugees and prisoners, the elderly, disabled, unborn and newborn? And in Laudato Si’ (2015) he extended recognition of the inter-dependence of all people to all creation, insisting that we must care both for the human household and for the ‘common home’ that sustains us.
Only hours before his passing, Francis delivered his “Urbi et Orbi” blessing to the city and the world. He said, “From the empty tomb in Jerusalem, we hear unexpected Good News: ‘Jesus, who was crucified, is not here, he has risen.’ Jesus is not in the tomb, he is alive! Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness, truth over falsehood, forgiveness over revenge. Evil no longer has the upper hand; it no longer has power over those who accept the grace of this day.”
The empty tomb of Easter, as Pope Francis expressed so beautifully, upends all our expectations. It’s the dawn of a new hope. It’s the telling of the greatest story ever told, the story of God’s boundless love entering human history and even the depths of the grave to rescue us all. On that first Easter morn, as death gave way to life, tears of grief turned to unimaged joy. We now pray that Pope Francis will enter into the triumph of truth and goodness, the love and hope of the Risen Lord he served so well.