[Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury] The Most Rev. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, has offered an ecumenical Easter letter to Anglican partners and to heads of churches around the world.

In it he referenced John 21:15-17, in which the risen Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves him and then tells him to “feed my lambs” and “tend my sheep.” Welby said, “So the master commanded, and so the church has, in his footsteps, tried to do these last two millennia, and so it will continue to do.”

But in contrast, he said, “how complicated, incomplete and unsatisfactory that pastoral witness and care of the church has often proved to be! We have, time and again, turned bread into stones, wine into bitter gall, fire into torture and death. We have, over the centuries, turned on each other. We have neglected, ignored and persecuted in the name of love.”

Welby noted the special suffering he had witnessed during visits to Jerusalem in October and Ukraine in January, adding, “For all the people caught up in these conflicts, just as for anyone injured and traumatized by violence, it must seem as if there can no end to it all, no resurrection.”

He concluded, “But still, even in the midst of all of this, there is hope, because we know that God is there before us, in Jesus Christ, that great shepherd of the sheep. Christians live the realism of knowing that human ambitions, time and again, run into sand, and yet at the same time they also share profoundly the vision of hope Christ’s triumph over death brings to all people. So we cannot allow despair to poison our outlook on the world. It is a time of terrible conflict and danger, but our faith is in Christ the peacemaker and reconciler.”

Read the entire message here.