Archbishop of Canterbury Calls for Peace in First Easter Sermon. Is it virtue signaling with no hope of a ceasefire?
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By David W. Virtue, DD
April 14, 2026
Dame Sarah Mullally used her first Easter Day sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to renew calls for peace in the Middle East. "Violence, division and insecurity are affecting the lives of billions of people around the world," she said, adding that "many feel that their heart is in pieces."
"The bereft, the wounded, the refugee — this week our gaze and our prayers have been turned towards the land where Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead."
Noble sentiments. But calling for peace in the Middle East without naming the parties responsible is a gesture that changes nothing.
Vague appeals from progressive church leaders carry little weight when the actors driving the conflict — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Houthi rebels — have no interest in peace on any terms that would be recognizable to the West.
Mullally never identified any of them by name. One suspects her remarks were aimed, implicitly, at Israel and its leadership. After all, we are repeatedly told that Palestinians are the victims of Israeli aggression — that the IDF kills civilians indiscriminately, that Israel practices apartheid, and that Benjamin Netanyahu should face trial for war crimes.
She also made no mention of Vladimir Putin, who has waged more than four years of aggressive war against Ukraine at a cost of over a million lives and minimal territorial gain.
"Today, as we shout with joy that Christ is risen, let us pray and call with renewed urgency for an end to the violence and destruction in the Middle East and the Gulf," she said.
Yet she did not call on Hamas to lay down its arms. She did not ask Hezbollah to stand down and spare the Lebanese people further bloodshed. She said nothing to Iran's leadership about ending its missile strikes against Israel and neighboring Arab states. Her call for peace was stripped of any specific demand — which is to say, it was not really a call for peace at all.
Peace, peace, when there is no peace, cried the prophet Jeremiah. From a Christian perspective, lasting peace is the work of the Prince of Peace — a reality that appears beyond the scope of Dame Sarah's Easter address.
"May our Christian sisters and brothers know and celebrate the hope of the empty tomb — and may all people of the region receive the peace, justice and freedom they long for."
Fine words. The Iranian people would know something about longing for freedom, after five decades under clerical tyranny. Israel's military campaign, whatever one thinks of its methods, is the only force currently attempting to break that grip — and receives no credit for it.
Mullally drew more theologically interesting ground when she spoke of resurrection and darkness: "God's most essential work of resurrection happens in the depths of the earth, while the world is silent and still dark." She reflected that "darkness is also a place for the movement of the Spirit, knowing Jesus is with me."
There is something worth engaging here. Yet there is an irony she didn't acknowledge: the first act of God in Genesis, when the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the deep, was to create light. An Easter sermon might have dwelt on that rather more.
In his Easter Urbi et Orbi, Pope Leo appealed to world leaders to choose "not to dominate others, but to encounter them" — a sentiment that Hamas fighters sheltering in tunnels beneath Gaza are unlikely to find persuasive.
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