Pope Francis’ last homily should be one that we remember for a long time. There are a lot of reasons for this. Shock matters. Grief matters. Timing matters. A life story matters. But so too does the power of the passage itself. In that last regard, the part of the late Holy Father’s Easter homily that is lodged most securely in my mind is a chunk towards the beginning:

This is the message of Easter: we must look for him elsewhere. Christ is risen, he is alive! He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary.  We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.

We must look for him without ceasing. Because if he has risen from the dead, then he is present everywhere, he dwells among us, he hides himself and reveals himself even today in the sisters and brothers we meet along the way, in the most ordinary and unpredictable situations of our lives. He is alive and is with us always, shedding the tears of those who suffer and adding to the beauty of life through the small acts of love carried out by each of us.

Pope Francis is absolutely right to link the Paschal Mystery both to the Christ who permeates all things and to our acts of finding Jesus in others—especially when those others are made poor, needy, vulnerable, and marginalized. His divinity is what gives him the cosmic presence. The fact that he identifies himself with certain people in our world is associated with his death. In Matthew’s Gospel, what happens right before the conspirators decide he needs to die (Mt 26:1–4) is that Jesus says to do good for the poor and vulnerable and that in them we can find him (Mt 25:31–46). There is no denying that, narratively speaking, there is a connection here. Just as Francis’ final homily has some bearing on how we remember him, so too does Jesus’ final parable.

Matthew and Luke, in fact, both have something to say about this. In the Third Gospel, at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus says he is sent to proclaim good news (etymologically, the gospel) to the poor and liberation of the oppressed (Lk 4:18). In the First Gospel, meanwhile, at the very end of his ministry, Jesus delivers the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (also called the Judgment of the Nations). In this discourse, the Lord identifies himself with the same harmed, vulnerable, and marginalized groups that open his ministry in Luke. It would be absurd to pretend that this is something parenthetical to “the Gospel” and “the Paschal Mystery.” They’re not brackets. They’re bookends. Without them, all the pages and their painted-over covers come tumbling off the shelf.

This is the Gospel, and it is itself a component of the Paschal Story. To create some sort of abstract Paschal Mystery theory that doesn’t involve finding Jesus in the poor, vulnerable, marginalized, and oppressed would be to carve for ourselves an idol. Pope Francis was utterly insistent on this. Even his last homily—like Jesus’ last parable—hammered home the notion. The words the Holy Father of blessed memory used were disarmingly simple. But he was holding all these truths together on purpose.

When we say that Christ is risen from the dead and that he is the Lord, that certainly does speak to dimensions of Christian belonging and worship. But it also means that Christ lives now. We find him now—really, truly him. That happens in a lot of settings, because he is Lord of the universe. At the same time, though, Jesus himself told us, right before the conspirators met to decide his fate, where he might be found. If we believe in Jesus, we believe the things he told us in that momentous discourse and find it a weighty point in his story.

The mystery of the risen Christ is made compelling to people today by taking it in its fullness. This absolutely must include the Luke–Matthew bookends of good news to the poor and, especially, finding Christ, after he is killed, in the poor. We don’t find him there because it’s an act of private or collective imagination. No, it’s a question of integral Christology. Initially, that sounds like a radical way to phrase it. But the declaration of Christology was already made by St. John Paul II at the turn of the millennium:

If we have truly started out anew from the contemplation of Christ, we must learn to see him especially in the faces of those with whom he himself wished to be identified: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Mt 25:35-37). This Gospel text is not a simple invitation to charity: it is a page of Christology which sheds a ray of light on the mystery of Christ. (Novo Millennio Ineunte 49)

The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is Christology. It is the Gospel. It is in some sense—a sense that is difficult to define, perhaps, but nonetheless real—part of the Paschal Mystery itself.

And we don’t tire of that. For we will dwell with this Mystery for eternity.