Good Friday – 3 April 2026

Today, the Church falls silent. There is no greeting. No sign of triumph. No attempt to explain things away. We are left with the Cross. The reality of suffering. In a world feeling increasingly fragile, when the structures we rely upon are not as secure as we thought, the one answer we are given to the questions that rise within us is a man on a Cross

This is deeply confronting. Because we want resolution. We seek clarity. We want assurance that things will be set right. But Good Friday gives us none of these. Instead, it gives us Jesus in his vulnerability. Stripped. Rejected. Powerless. And yet, we are those who dare to affirm that this is not the absence of God. It is where God chooses to be. Good Friday reminds us then of something we might otherwise struggle to believe, that there is no place of human suffering that God has not entered. Not geopolitical instability. Not economic anxiety. Not the concern about the future. All of it—somehow—is gathered into this moment.

Yet it is not only mirrored, it is also transformed. Because what appears, at first, to be defeat is, in fact, an act of total self-giving. What appears to be powerlessness is, in fact, the deepest form of power. Ordinarily we understand power as the ability to control, to dominate, to secure outcomes. But on the Cross, Jesus reveals something entirely different: power as love that does not withdraw. Jesus remains in the suffering. He remains in the uncertainty. He remains in the darkness until that darkness is filled with the possibility of light and of life.

All of us know already something of this experience:  moments when things do not resolve; answers do not come; the future feels unclear. Moments when life feels, in some way, like standing at the foot of the Cross. The temptation in those moments is to believe that God is absent, that God has withdrawn, that God has lost hold of things. But Good Friday says the opposite. It tells us this is precisely where God is.

And if we dare to remain there with him, as he remains with us in our own suffering, we begin to discover something extraordinary: That even in the darkest moment, love has not ceased. That even when everything feels lost, God is still at work. That even now, the world is not abandoned. In this man’s suffering we see how fear has not extinguished love, how despair has not swallowed hope, how forgiveness has overruled bitterness, and how abandonment has not wavered trust.

The late Australian artist, Michael Leunig wrote of this in an evocative poem he penned in commentary to Jesus’ final words:

It is finished.

So let us share

These dear remaining moments;

A tiny scoop of air

Two more little touches of your hand –

The final touches

And we’ll be there.

It is done

Yet love is here –

Not as it was before

Beneath a world of fear;

For now the world is just a tiny flower:

The light is true

And love is near.

It is gone:

The living pain:

The steady ache for power,

The agony for gain;

Like a fever which has faded now.

And only light

And love remain.

For love was made

In spite of all,

Piece by lonely piece,

Fragments frail and small:

Dearly held when life was cold and dark;

Now love’s the light 

That holds it all.

It is there – 

It is true:

The final touches now

Will see it gently through:

Two more little touches of your hand – 

Love for me

And love for you.

We are redeemed by Jesus, because of his life given over so completely to another even in the face of all that would have him held it back.  To say, then that we are redeemed by the Cross of Jesus is to affirm that even in our own suffering we do not have to go the way of fear, of bitterness, of despair.  One of us has taken the other way and his choice for what leads to a fullness of life has overwhelmed the forces which lead to a living death.In the face of the world’s uncertainty, which way will it be for us? he way of bitterness or of openness?  The way of hope?  Or the way of despair?  The way of fear?  Or the way of love? The way of death?  Or the way of life?