My Homily for Good Friday

Gave this homily at All Saints Mission in the Diocese of Niagara on Good Friday 2025

Today we reach the climax of Holy Week. Today we find ourselves at the foot of the Cross. The shadow has fallen. The sky has darkened. God The Word, the Logos, the promised Messian that spoke all things into being is now silent. And here we are, standing with Mary and John, with the unnamed disciple and the women, with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. We are standing in Golgotha - at the place of the skull. And every year on this day, we emotionally take up this place observing the travesty of this unjust death full of grief.

John’s Gospel tells this Passion story differently than the other three. Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of Jesus’ suffering in terms of agony and forsakenness, John’s account is quieter, more composed. Jesus does not cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He simply says, “It is finished.” He does not fall under the weight of the Cross; he carries it. When the soldiers come to arrest him, it is they who fall to the ground. When Pilate interrogates him, it is Pilate who appears confused. And when he dies, it is not with violence, but with an offering: “He gave up his spirit.”

John wants us to see something profound here. Jesus is not pacifying a raging upstairs father God, No Johns understanding of atonement is quite different. Yes, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tortured, mocked, and killed. But none of this takes him by surprise. None of it is outside his will. He is not a victim caught up in events beyond his control. He is the Lamb of God who lays down his life. He chooses this way, the way of love to the end. No in John’s Gospel, a strong Jesus goes to the Cross and quite quickly dies, because for John, the significance of the Crucifixion is that Jesus is breaking down all injustice, all brutality, all institutional racism, misogyny, homophobia and classism, yes Jesus by dying is ending all that is wrong in the world.

And yet—let us not rush too quickly into abstract theology. Let us not move too fast into victory or redemption without first standing in the silence. Because Good Friday is not something to be explained away. It is something to be entered into. A mystery to be lived.

There is a rawness and deep emotion to today. A bareness. We strip the altar, extinguish the candles, take away the colour and light. Not out of despair, but out of reverence. Out of honesty. Because this is the day when we acknowledge just how much the world is broken—and how deep God’s love goes. A day of paradox where Jesus God the Son ceases to be alive, the paradox of one of the persons of the Holy Trinity ceasing to live.

So what do we see when we look at the Cross?

We see the worst of humanity exposed. A friend betrays him. A disciple denies him. The religious authorities plot against him. The empire executes him. The crowd mocks him. And even those who love him can do nothing but watch from afar.

But we also see something else. We see a love that does not flinch. A love that does not retaliate. A love that holds the pain of the world, takes it into itself, and says, even to the end: “Father, forgive them.”

We are not looking today at an abstract symbol of redemption. We are instead looking at the body of God, broken by human violence, and yet filled with divine mercy. The Cross is not what God inflicts on Jesus. The Cross is what we inflict on God—and God still chooses to love us. This is what makes it good. Not the suffering. But the love that holds steady in the face of it all. Only this makes it Good, Good Friday.

John tells us that when Jesus dies, they pierce his side, and blood and water flow out. That detail has captivated theologians and mystics for centuries. From his side comes blood and water—the signs of baptism and Eucharist, the sacraments of the Church. The Church is born from the wounded side of Christ. New life begins not in triumph, but in surrender. In death, God begins something new.

We remember that when Jesus comes before Pilate and he Jesus says “I am not of this world” he is saying I am not of this Kosmos - meaning I am not of this domination system. So this sounds profound than the translation into English which sounds quite weak, but rather Jesus says this to the representative of the Roman Empire, the biggest Empire at the time. So Jesus ties to challenge the domination systems of this world.

But we must resist the urge to skip to resurrection too quickly. Good Friday teaches us to stay. To wait. To keep vigil in the darkness. To sit with what is broken, unresolved, unfinished.

Many of us carry wounds that never seem to heal. Griefs that remain raw. I still carry the deaths of both my parents last year where my heart still remains broken and in pain. Questions that go unanswered. Injustice that continues. Good Friday doesn’t pretend those things aren’t real. It says: God is with us in them. God enters into the very heart of suffering—not to make it magically disappear, but to transform it from within. To suffer with us. To suffer for us. To show us that even in death, love will not let go.

In this Gospel, Jesus’ final words are, “It is finished.” Not “I am finished.” Not a cry of defeat, but a declaration. It is finished. Completed. Accomplished. The work of love has reached its fullness. Not because the suffering is good, but because God refuses to meet violence with more violence. Instead, God takes it in—and returns only grace.

The Cross reveals the very heart of God: not a distant, wrathful judge, but a suffering servant, a crucified Messiah, a wounded healer. This is the God who is with the abandoned, the forgotten, the abused. This is the God who bears the weight of the world and who meets us, even in the tombs of our lives, with love. In this moment Jesus suffers like one of us, and because of this, I can trust this God, as he knows exactly how we suffer.

And so today, we kneel at the foot of the Cross. Not because we understand it fully. But because we recognise it as holy ground. We bring our wounds, our sorrows, our griefs—and we find that Christ is already there.

My favourite Welsh Anglican poet and priest R. S. Thomas once wrote of this moment in his spare, haunting poem The Coming. In it, God the Father holds the world in his hand and shows it to the Son. And the Son, seeing all its suffering, says only: “Let me go there.” I finish you with his words:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The Son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

Amen.