THE COFFIN OF SIMPLICITY—A LESSON FROM THIS PONTIFF

THE COFFIN OF SIMPLICITY—A LESSON FROM THIS PONTIFF

THEME: POPE FRANCIS—AN EPITOME OF HUMILITY

BY: Fr Ernest Cross

My dear brothers and sisters , let us solemnly ponder today the humble pine box that cradles the mortal remains of our dear Pope Francis. It is not enamored with gold or adorned with jewels, it is not embellished with pearls but carved from plain wood. What divine irony that the successor of Peter, he who holds the keys to the Kingdom, should choose to meet his Creator in a coffin fit for a man less-than-average! Yet here lies a sermon without words, a parable whispered to a world drunk on excess and more and more.

There are lessons we can learn, I am sure. Let’s look at a few.

1. The Poverty of the Cross:
Many of us have become worldly clamouring for monuments here and there, but Christ built His Church on a fisherman – how we have forgotten. The coffin’s simplicity thunders the scandal of the Cross—rough-hewn, splintered, and unadorned. In rejecting grandeur, Francis reminds us that salvation was won not by a king in a palace, but by a Carpenter on a tree. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Christ taught, and here, the Vicar of Christ proclaims: To possess nothing is to be free for everything.

2. The Vanity of Earthly Glory:
It is no news that Kings and emperors entomb themselves in marble, their names etched in stone and stories -true or false. Yet dust claims them all. The pope’s plain coffin laughs softly at the folly of human pride. It asks: What shall it profit a man to gain the world, yet lose his soul? (Mark 8:36). The saints understood this—Francis of Assisi stripped naked in the square; Mother Teresa wore a sari worth 30 cents. The coffin whispers: This too is ‘Francis’.

3. The Triumph of Love:
A coffin so simple as this is not a rejection of beauty, but an amplification of it. For true beauty contrary to the opinions of so many lies not in the vessel, but in the life it carried. Francis, who washed the feet of prisoners and kissed the scarred faces of the sick, knew that love alone sanctifies. The wood of that coffin will rot, but the seeds he planted globally—mercy for the marginalized, courage for the forgotten, hope for the downtrodden—will bloom here and in eternity.

4. The Final Homily:
In his last act, the pope preaches a final homily:
Do not fear poverty; fear indifference.
Do not fear right worship; fear utter waste of time.
Do not fear faith; fear not trusting Jesus totally.
Do not fear simplicity; fear the emptiness of a life not poured out.
Do not fear humility; fear not living up to Christ’s Cross.

The coffin is a mirror, reflecting back to us our own disordered loves. Do we cling to trinkets, titles, and trophies? Or do we, like Paul, “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” (Philippians 3:8)?

Now the Challenge to the Modern Soul is simple:

The world will call this coffin a scandal—a “lack of respect” for the office. But the Cross was a scandal too. To the proud, humility is offensive; to the greedy, generosity is irrational. Yet Francis, in life and death, dares us to ask: What if we are wrong? What if the path to heaven is not paved with gold, but with the splinters of a manger, a Cross, and a simple wooden box?

Let us then go forth, not to build bigger barns (Luke 12:18), but to store up treasures in heaven where moth and rust cannot destroy. For in the end, only three things matter: faith that moves mountains, hope that outlives the grave, and love— so plain yet everlasting—that even a wooden coffin such as this cannot contain.

PEACE BE WITH YOU.

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