Wivelsfield & St Richard, Haywards Heath St Francis 4.10.23

I have always been fascinated by today’s Saint - here he is in a picture that makes a 13th century face and life immediately real to us. It's from around 1278 and it's by the great early Renaissance Italian artist Cimabue who is thought to have best represented the Saint. 

As Cimabue’s portrait brings Francis alive to us so Francis himself brings Christ alive to us. One of the prayers that captures to my mind the power of today’s Saint begins ‘Lord Jesus Christ, when the world was growing cold, you renewed the sacred marks of your passion in the flesh of the most blessed Francis, to inflame our hearts with the fire of your love’. 

The centre of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is Our Lord’s suffering for us upon the Cross. We represent that suffering day by day at the altar and try to understand our own sufferings with a eye to his which are life-giving through Our Lord’s resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Just as his words ‘This is my body which is given for you… my blood which is shed for you’ are at the centre of the eucharist, whenever Christianity is refreshed in people or in cultures it is through the appreciation of just what God did in letting his Son bear the suffering of the Cross for each and for all. Though God’s love extends back to creation and forward to heaven it has found its focus in the wounds it bore on Mount Calvary almost 2000 years ago. 2033 will be a big year for Christianity across the world.

So was the 13th century and the early 1220s when one man was privileged to be made a fresh focus of the love of God shown in the crucifixion of Our Lord by receiving the wound prints of Christ’s passion on Mount La Verna. Show Pietro Lorenzetti’s fresco Francis, close to the end of his life, told of seeing an angel or seraph with six wings hovering above him, whose outstretched hands and closed feet were fixed to the Cross. Suddenly, he relates, traces of wound prints, so-called ‘stigmata’ began to be visible on his hands and feet as he had seen them shortly before on the crucified image above him, an extraordinary gift which continued to the end of his life about which Francis spoke little but which are well attested from the 13th century.

One of the mysteries of Christianity is its timespan. Over 2000 years Christian faith has waxed and waned across the world. Wherever faith has grown and spread you can always trace it back to the preaching of the Cross in some way and Francis, as you can see from what I am sharing, has become to us a very great visual aid if I dare say that. 

St John Henry Newman admitted that, though regular contemplation of the sufferings of Christ was essential to living in God’s love, it was for him more a discipline and less a joy for him to dwell upon them. The life of St Francis is an encouragement here, and an invitation to have cold hearts rekindled in love towards God, through pondering regularly the wounds of Christ borne on our behalf and to invoke the prayers of a great lover of God.

There is a coldness towards Jesus Christ in post-Christian culture. May the prayer and example of St Francis, who received the sacred marks of his passion in his flesh 800 years ago, inflame our hearts with the fire of God’s love shown to us in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.