From Your Synod Executive...
- Chip Hardwick
- Apr 24
- 2 min read
A blessed Eastertide to you! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! As I write this on Easter Monday afternoon, I’m both still awash in the hope of Jesus’ resurrection and saddened at the death of Pope Francis. Somehow in God’s timing the two are inseparable: new life and death, joy and grief, a faithful servant and his faithful savior.
Pope Francis helped bring to life one of the most important scriptures to Presbyterians, Matthew 25:31-46. In this parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus welcomes those who helped the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned (whom he calls the least of these) into his kingdom, but leaves behind those who refused to show mercy to the disenfranchised and marginalized. The passage is so significant to Presbyterians that congregations, presbyteries, and synods can designate ourselves part of the Matthew 25 movement. The Synod, several presbyteries, and many many many congregations have done so.
I suspect Pope Francis never knew of our Presbyterian Matthew 25 movement, but he certainly knew how to live out Matthew 25. Three days before his death, the pontiff traveled to one of Italy’s most overcrowded prisons, almost exactly a year after he washed 12 female inmates’ feet in 2024. Just this past Ash Wednesday, he asked Christians around the world to consider what it must feel like to be a migrant or foreigner (or, in Jesus’ words, a stranger), In February 2024 he decried the insensitivity of first world food waste, while leaving rural communities in the developing world to go hungry. The list of the Pope’s work to embody Matthew 25 could go on and on.
But, alas, his weakened respiratory system could not. I wonder if, like a grandmother on hospice who waits until everyone has gathered to slip from her family’s arms into Jesus’, the Pope put off his final rest until after he could celebrate Jesus’ resurrection one more time. One more Easter of “Christ is risen!” One more Easter of “Death has been swallowed up in victory!” One more Easter of “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?”
One more Easter before he heard those loving words from the end of Matthew 25: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you form the foundation of the world.”
One of the Pope’ tweets on Easter 2025 was “Sisters, brothers, in the wonder of our Easter faith, carrying in our hearts every expectation of peace and liberation, we can say: with You, O Lord, everything is new. With You, everything begins again. #Easter”
God bless Pope Francis. May everything be new for him, for you, for me, and for the whole world.
Grateful to be your partner in ministry,
Rev. Charles B Hardwick, PhD
Executive
309-530-4578
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