GOOD FRIDAY 2026 - Anne East

This is a week like no other: Jesus’ arrest, trial, beating, death, and burial. The abrupt shift from “Hosanna” to “Crucify him” is very hard to take … we want to wave our palm branches a little longer before folding and twisting them into crosses.

On Good Fridays in my chapel childhood the service was at 11 0’clock in the morning. And in the afternoon we’d do something quiet – well, nothing was open in those days! We’d often go to Lamorran Woods, near Truro, , I have strong memories of that – looking for primroses.

And around three o’clock in the afternoon, my father would point to the sky and say, “See it’s getting dark. This is the hour when Jesus died.” Did he really believe that? As a child I accepted it: ‘The sky has gone dark because this is the hour when Jesus died.’

But later, when I learned about Time Zones round the world, and the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, and the way that the date of Easter shifts each year according to the Jewish Passover . .I thought, “Does he REALLY believe that? “ I never asked him.

Was it a very simple world view? Or was it profound? That nature was reflecting a kind of Cosmic Grief?

Death, any death, often unconsciously brings us anxiety about our own death, or the deaths of those close to us.  The closer to home a death is, the more concern and anxiety it will generate. When a loved one dies our world falls apart. Death breaks down the old reality, loss is a universal experience, grief is cosmic:

“Each man’s death diminishes me / For I am involved in mankind. / Therefore, send not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for thee “  (John Donne – ‘No  man is an island’)

What does this death mean for us? How does our theology of God’s love and grace fit with the  narrative we’ve just heard read?

As we gather with Jesus'mother, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, and the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the cross, we hear those three words:  “It is finished”.

Is that a full stop, or is it a comma? Is Jesus looking backward at this point, or is he looking forward? Is this last word from him a word of defeat or the cry of victory? “It is finished”  . . .it is  accomplished, completed, fulfilled. In those three words, Jesus offers one last sermon which captures the whole Gospel. Not only is Jesus’ unimaginable suffering finished, not only is his obedience finished on the cross but Jesus’ last words resonate with hope in the face of despair.

In his sonnet ‘Death be not proud’ poet and priest John Donne put it this way:

    “One short sleep past, we wake eternally 

    And death shall be no more;  . . . Death, thou shalt die. “

    As Paul, in the first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:55)  exclaims: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

This is Christus Victor, the Victorious Christ ; the message that the world can (and has) changed. In early Christian thought, the cross becomes a throne, from which God reigns. Because of his death and subsequent resurrection, Christ triumphed over - not only the fear of death, but death itself.

In his book ‘The Sign and the Sacrifice’ Rowan Williams draws our attention to an icon at St. Andrew’s Church Holborn. It pictures the risen Christ reaching down to a now mature, older, Adam and Eve, to pull them up from death into life.

On Good Friday the darkness seems to win … shadows lengthen, the light disappears, the sky grows dark. But in Lamorran Woods, on those Good Fridays of childhood, in the cool, damp, shady parts there were carpets of primroses – the flower that Coleridge called “fragrant messenger of Spring”: promises of lighter days, renewal and regrowth.

The world still experiences the darkness: personal and political horrors, broken promises, death, grief, lost hopes. Good Friday is not about wiping out of our history, pain or failure, it is about how pain and failure may be transfigured. 

The passion narrative strengthens our ability to confront evil and not be defeated by it.

May it be so. Amen