Good Friday 2026

One of the great privileges of parish ministry is that of walking alongside families who are mourning the death of a loved one. In Episcopal “last rites”, which the prayer book calls “Ministration at the Time of Death”, the opening prayer recalls to us the resurrection: “Almighty God, look on this your servant, lying in great weakness, and comfort her with the promise of life everlasting, given in the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

In the words of this prayer, we are reminded of the small space between death and life eternal as we then begin the Litany at the time of Death - which is recommended, when possible, to be prayed by a group of people, not just the priest alone. It is a beautiful experience when family members and friends are there to pray the responses and help usher their loved one into the arms of Jesus.

Today, we have the opportunity to be that loving community to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To come face to face with his suffering and death. To know that, while Sunday is on the way, we have a need to acknowledge Friday. There is no resurrection without death. Good Friday gives us the opportunity to live in that acknowledgement. Last year, as my then-five year old was processing the events of Holy Week, she was trying to figure out why Jesus died. She said to me, “why would anyone want to kill Jesus? He’s the best!” and then she paused for a beat before saying, “then pop! He came back.” That is reasonable theology for a five-year-old, but eventually, as she grows and deepens her understanding, it won’t be enough for her just like it isn’t enough for me.

In the words of Gary Alan Taylor, the co-founder of the post-Evangelical organization Holy Heretics, he writes “To rush past the cross on our way to the empty tomb is like opening a gift without the heart to embrace it. This is precisely the danger Jürgen Moltmann names in The Crucified God. We prefer a God who conquers decisively over a God who suffers openly. To skip the cross, and all that lead(s) to it, is not only bad theology—it is spiritual malpractice. A Christianity that bypasses the crucified Christ inevitably becomes a religion of triumph, power, and nationalism. It produces people equipped for celebration but not for solidarity, fluent in hope but ill‑prepared to remain proximate to suffering. In a world still marked by violence and abandonment, such theology leaves us alone at precisely the moment we need a God with us.”

New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham NT Wright preached a series of sermons at Easington Colliery in 2007. Easington Colliery was a mining town that had transformed for the worse since the mine closed in the mid-90s. It had gone from a quintessential bustling “small town” where everyone knew everyone and kept their doors unlocked to a main street with boarded up storefronts and a closed school which had become a large, ugly shell which served as a reminder to the whole town of what it once was and is no longer. On top of that sorrow were the ghosts of the 1951 explosion that had killed 83 people in that same mine. As their bishop, NT Wright decided that, “it was worth spending some time in facing the multiple bereavements of Easington Colliery and in weaving them together with the story of all stories, the story of Jesus on his way to the cross.” It is fitting, too, with Wright’s theology that he would locate trouble within the stories of Holy Week and Easter. If you hear him speak on the crucifixion, odds are you will hear him say some variation of “take your pain, your struggles, and leave it at the foot of the cross”. As early as the introduction of the book where he published that collection of sermons, he wrote, “I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God’s own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us and new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.”

So today, I invite you to do just that: leave your troubles at the foot of the cross. You received a slip of paper with your bulletin to write your thoughts on and there will be a basket at the foot of the cross when it’s brought in for veneration. There’s something holy and healing about the practice of putting our thoughts in writing and then physically letting them go. What you write is between you and Jesus; I won’t read them. They’ll go into the new fire at the Easter Vigil.

Christ’s incarnation is oftentimes described as a kenosis, that is, the emptying of himself to take on human form. The New Testament doesn’t use the noun form of kenosis, but as we heard in our Epistle on Sunday, the word is used in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, describing Jesus having “emptied himself” to take on human form. This kenosis, this humbling, continues throughout Jesus’ life, all the way to the cross. We are invited to follow him there and to empty ourselves to our crucified Lord. Amen.

What we left at the foot of the cross, waiting next to the Paschal Candle