Good Friday 2025

Our Collect for today:
‘Eternal God. In the cross of Jesus we see the cost of our sin and the depth of your love: in humble hope and fear may we place at his feet all that we have and all that we are, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

How could it come to this? Jesus devoted his life to being true to who he was; to living a life of integrity even when that caused him and others pain; to speaking truth even when that placed him in danger; to seeking justice for those who were oppressed; to healing those living in pain and suffering; and to seeking to make known God’s love for all. This was Jesus’ life and ministry. There was never anything insipid about him; he lived with vibrancy, sought truth and righteousness. It was this life that led to this death.

‘In the cross we see the cost of our sin, and the depth of your love.’

I believe in the goodness of humanity; for we are made in the image of God. I believe that most of us are trying to be the best people we can be. And yet we all fall short. And we can be very clever in disguising our shortfalls even to ourselves. So, when we encounter pure goodness, it can make us feel uncomfortable. Perhaps very uncomfortable. When prophets of today speak truth to power, when those around us shine a light on our hypocrisies, our dishonesty, we are disturbed and discomfited.

I recently read a novel by Tracy Chevalier, The Last Runaway. It is set in Ohio, in 1850, and tells the story of a young English Quaker, Honor Bright, who finds herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and unsentimental, and scarred by the continuing injustice of slavery. In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community ostensibly committed to human equality. Silence plays different roles in this novel: communal religious silence at Meeting, individual silent reflection, and the Quaker community's more unsettling silence towards slavery.

Honor's unwavering commitment to the Underground Railroad, a network helping runaway enslaved people escape north to freedom, is too challenging for the local Quaker community, disturbing their sense of who they are, and so Honor is silenced.

Jesus frequently had this effect on those around him, and in particular on those who held positions of power, or honour, or prestige. Those who had most to lose. We often live our sin through the act of turning away from those who are just ‘too good’. We don’t look at them, and refuse to listen to them. After all, we believe ourselves to be ‘good people’. We are doing our best. We care for one another and for creation to the best of our abilities. So, when someone, directly or indirectly, challenges our complacency, our instinct - our sin - is to ignore them, to turn away, and if they simply won’t stop speaking these painful truths, we shut them down.

Jesus’ Passion shows us this being enacted. Pilate, early in the narrative, tells the people to 'Behold the man’. But they can’t bear to behold him, to really look and see the man who has walked among them. He who, even when faced with hatred and violence, and his forthcoming death, continues through it all to look on them with love.

‘In the cross we see the cost of our sin, and the depth of your love.’

Our faith asks of us that we sit at the foot of the cross, in this place of betrayal and abandonment, mockery and violence, suffering and death. This is not a day to turn or run away. This is a day to stop; to be still. To allow the pain, the agony, to be felt.

‘In humble hope and fear may we place at his feet all that we have and all that we are.’

If we dare to sit at the foot of the cross, we are not alone. The Passion according to John tells us who is there. Mary, mother of Jesus. Mary who knew Jesus before anyone else ever did, who felt those first fluttering sensations of God incarnate within her womb. Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, nursed him, let him, first of all, crawl away from her, and later walk away into his adult life, leading him to this hillside, Golgotha, outside the city. Mary is there, now witnessing her son’s execution.

And other women too. Mary, wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. The gospels carry many stories of Jesus and women. Jesus devoted time to Mary and Martha, his mother, the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman with chronic bleeding, Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain, the woman caught in adultery. Jesus was much loved by women, and so it’s not surprising that they are here with us, at the foot of the cross. These women are not turned away. They look at Jesus, eyes filled with tears of sorrow and love. They give to Jesus the love that he gave to them, returning to him the gift of a profound sense of being loved in the midst of his unspeakable agony. The women are there.

And we are told that the disciple Jesus loved is there. This disciple is never named, and so of course there is much scholarly debate over who this is, including a suggestion that they represent each of us who encounter Christ in the gospel of John, and who today sit at the foot of the cross.

‘We place at his feet all that we have and all that we are.’

We, and they, are held together in the pain of this event. We are stripped bare. We can offer only ourselves, and the love we have received. We comfort one another; we dare to gaze on Jesus in his suffering; and we wait. This is a time that must be lived through, the pain must be felt and endured. It cannot be avoided. Jesus’ body is being broken, and the least we can do is be close to him in these hours, for we are united in this brokenness.

And who is not here? There are many we might expect to be here, who have either abandoned Jesus – he turned out to be a false prophet, another disappointment, not the Messiah or King they’d hoped he might be – or who recognise that Jesus is now someone dangerous with whom to be associated, and have fled.

The disciples are missing. Those he had healed, taught, fed, welcomed, have turned away. They are in the shadows, not standing in the shadow of the cross, but turned away. Their backs to the light of the world, they see only their own shadows, no longer able to see the light.

It can feel as though everything here is destructive, a tearing apart of relationships, and hopes, but this act is an act of healing, a building for the future. And even in this time of dying, Jesus offers healing to those who gather. He looks and sees Mary, his mother, and the disciple he loved, and in his last moments works to heal relationships and offer hope for the future. Identifying them only with his eyes, he looks at them, and gestures to them an extraordinarily generous gift of compassion; ‘woman, here is your son’, and to the beloved disciple, ‘here is your mother’.

We too, bring our brokenness to the foot of the cross, and in this place of death Jesus offers us healing. In this suffering place, we can come, in humble hope and fear, and lay down all by which we are burdened. Our shame, self-hatred, bitterness, despair, emptiness. Jesus accepts it all. It is part of what he is bearing on the cross. And he looks on it, and on us, with that same, healing love, even in this place of brokenness. Come, sit at the foot of the cross, lay down your burdens, and be healed.

‘Eternal God. In the cross of Jesus we see the cost of our sin and the depth of your love: in humble hope and fear may we place at his feet all that we have and all that we are, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’