Good Friday by Fr Jack

Holy Week 2026 sermon series

Holy Week and our day to day life now:

The events of salvation,
the font of Grace,
the sacramental life of the Church today.

Love, Sacrifice and Marriage
Suffering and Comfort: The Anointing of the Sick and Dying

Good Friday 1 of 3

Each of the sermons stepping through this Holy Week is trying to help the events of this week speak to the reality of Christian life today, and vice versa. I’ve called this week of sermons:

Holy Week and our day to day life now:

The events of salvation, the font of Grace, the sacramental life of the Church today.

Because the sacraments are the rites of passage (some daily, weekly, and others once in a lifetime defining moments) that carry us through life. We said on Palm Sunday that the sacraments of the church are gifts from God, that hold and carry a Christian life from birth to death, like concrete pillars of grace holding up a bridge.

These sermons intend for the events of Holy Week and the sacraments to mutually illuminate and interpret one another. What do they say about each other? What do they say together about God, about me, about us?

We have already considered Ordination, Confirmation and Confession and Eucharist. Those sermons are on the website should you wish to read them.

Today, our Three Hours’ agony have two more sacraments to give us across the three reflections in the next few hours. First marriage, and then anointing of the sick and dying. It may seem bizarre to turn to marriage at this point on Good Friday. But it is not so. Let me explain.

I hope together we will see things that are real and good and important about the death of Jesus and marriage that are nourishing for all of us, no matter our manner of life: married, single, relationships of every kind.

St Giles’ Church would once have had a rood screen here, between these pillars. There is still evidence of its edges, against the pillars. A wooden or stone screen, double my height. Ornately carved, probably. Separating the body of the church from the ‘holy of holies’. And above it was the rood itself, that gives the screen its name. ‘Rood’, coming from the Germanic for ‘rod’ or ‘pole’, being an old English word for ‘cross’. Every time we passed from the world, through the veil of the rood screen and into the sanctuary, into the nearer presence of heaven, to receive Holy Communion, our predecessors here would have passed under the rood, the cross.

This is a beautiful and truthful symbolism. It is by the cross of Jesus, that we go through death into everlasting life. It is in the shadow of the cross, in the light of this sacrifice that we feast on Christ. In Holy Communion, His body broken for us, His blood poured out. The great and final sacrifice, as the Letter to the Hebrews told us just a short time ago.

It is also here, that countless weddings would have been solemnised. Couples stand beneath the cross to give their lives to each other, under God.

The first marriages I conducted were in the Parish Church of St Martin of Tours in Ruislip, a western suburb of London. That church had lost its rood screen too. But in the 1950s they had put in a beautiful rood beam. A rough simple oak beam right across between the pillars of the chancel, with a large, unpainted beautiful carved wooden crucifix, with the Mother of God and St John standing beside him. Just like we have in our east window. And one of my vicar’s wedding sermons was how appropriate it was that couples stood here to do this, to say the words of the Marriage Service and make these vows, beneath the cross. Because this, he said, is what love looks like. Love looks like sacrifice. Love looks like gift.

After the Ascension of Jesus, Pentecost and the emergence of the Early Church, it took a long time for the Church to think marriage was a good idea. But eventually, we came to say that marriage is an icon. Marriage is like a stained glass window. Through it, coloured and translucent, we can see something of God’s life and grace. Specifically, through the love of two people, committed to one another in life, we see Christ and His bride, us, the Church.

One gives themselves to the other, that the other might have abundant life. And the other, gives themselves to the one, just as fully. A total mutual gift of self. Human love (of course) does this falteringly, imperfectly, always learning; two steps forward, three steps back. But even this is an image of the perfect love of Christ. Every marriage is cross shaped. We might say that every true friendship is cross-shaped too. Every sibling relationship, every parent and child, every true neighbour.

As someone who isn’t married, I have never had to ask myself if I could make such costly vows. Honestly, I don’t know if I could. To seek to love someone truly, for the rest of our lives, for their good before my own. Trusting that they are doing the same.

Oxford Dominican priest and scholar Fr Herbert McCabe in his essay ‘faith within reason’ famously, somewhat shockingly simply, writes: “If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.”

Our love is imperfect. Our love for God, for our loved ones, for ourselves, for the world. Christ’s love is perfect, that is why it cost Him His life. He loves us today to the depths of the human experience. To the depths of misunderstanding, slander and false imprisonment. To the depths of scourging and beating. To the depths of rejection and loneliness. To the depths of doubt and fear. To the depths of frailty and loss of agency, loss of bodily control. To even the depths of death, and, tonight and tomorrow: hell.

His love, being perfect, took Him to these places. Such that when we are slandered and imprisoned, beaten and hated, when we are doubting and fearful, when we are frail and incapable, when we fear hell, and when we die, we will find Christ there waiting for us.

In marriage two people promise to do life’s journey together. Christ, our bridegroom, has made a perfect promise: ‘I am with you always, even to the end of the world’ (St Matthew 28.20). Jesus our friend, our bridegroom, and His rood, His cross set before us today, under whose shadow we walk, in whose light we stand, whose wood we will shortly touch and kiss. Like the icon of marriage, the cross of Jesus inspires us to see that the more we give ourselves away in love for God and all that God has made and given us, the more we will find that we do not have less, cannot have less, but only more.

God is not silent in answer to this perfect self-gift today by Christ for us, His bride. No, God’s answer is life. Christ’s faithfulness and love are of such magnitude that death is broken by them. Death and hell are rendered speechless and toothless in the face of such goodness, such love, such a sacrifice. As we sang just a short while ago: ‘But oh, my Friend, my Friend indeed, who at my need His life did spend!’

Good Friday 2 of 3

Between two pieces of music: Amanda Dean’s ‘Mary and John at the Cross’ and ‘Comfort Ye'

We have come to the cross. In Holy Communion we have taken into our bodies the substance of what we see and do here. His body, broken, given, poured out; and we have tenderly gathered His body, like His mother and the others will do as they take Him down from the cross in a couple of hours time. We have cradled and held His body, and then laid it in the sepulchre of our own bodies. Our bodies, holding His body, and in eating Holy Communion, become part of His body.

It is purposefully physical, real, intimate, near. And yet, for all the richness of this encounter His suffering is not ended. For three long hours the Saviour of the World hangs on the tree. This tree is the horrific mirror image of the tree in the Garden of Eden. The first tree bore the fruits of our disobedience.

The first tree reflects Adam and Eve pretending to themselves that they do not need God, that His gifts are not enough, that they can go their own way, be their own gods: independence, self-reliance, what sounds like freedom, but is in fact only death.

The first tree speaks of humanity’s inbuilt propensity to destroy that which is good, spurn all that has been given, and run into the terrifyingly seductive arms of self-made isolation, my way, my path, my world. Death.

I imagine the first tree was beautiful, but all we brought ourselves by it was death.

This tree, is not beautiful. But for all its horror, it is become the tree of life for us. It is horrible though. How many other men’s blood is on its surface already? Those who met their death on it before Jesus of Nazareth. The spit of soldiers, straining at the nails and ropes. The sweat of the Lord. And, as you would expect as his lungs and muscles give way, as His body fails, his bladder and bowls don’t hold either. It is horrific. And we mustn’t look away.

We have just stood with Mary and John in Amanda’s anthem. The Greek word in the New Testament used to describe Mary standing here, is not neutral. The sense it carries is standing with courage, faith, tenacity. She stood by the one she loves most in the world, as she watched Him die. Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, mother of suffering. She stood. And we stand with her, and St John.

At times in our Christian family story it has been as if being a Christian means putting on a plastic smile. Being a Christian means you aren’t supposed to suffer or be sad or disappointed, or doubting or fearful. As if being a Christian is about easy answers and ‘happily ever after’s. But today we learn a different way. Today, the Church, embodied in Blessed Mary and St John is a body that stands in suffering, without laminated answers or plastic simplicities.

And because that is the case here, that is always the case.

The sacramental reality that springs to mind here is the Anointing of the Sick. Through the grace of the sacraments, Christ the crucified continues to accompany his suffering children. The sacrament of anointing is sometimes called Last Rites. And it can be, last Holy Communion and anointing in preparation for death, sometimes called Viaticum, which literally means ‘food for the journey’, meaning the final journey of course.

But it doesn’t have to be only before death. The anointing of the sick happens before and after medical procedures, before difficult moments in relationships and life, in the course of on-going suffering or treatment, for healing and wholeness in every sense. Christ the crucified accompanies us every step of the way. We began this week with Mary anointing Jesus and wiping His feet with her hair, in the Gospel at Mass on Monday. Oil was an expensive and luxurious sign. The sick and suffering are anointed, baptism and confirmation and ordination candidates are anointed, kings and queens of ancient Israel and England today are anointed, all as a sign of the lavishness of God’s love and tenderness.

This cross, this tree of death, covered in Jesus’ bodily fluids, bearing such loneliness and anguish is not tender, it does not look very loving. But because Jesus has loved us here, whatever we are suffering, He is with us there too. He has gone before us, and will never leave us.

Jesus does not promise bad things won’t happen, quite the opposite, in fact. (St John 16.33)

He does not promise that we and those we love will be well and able-bodied forever. (St John 21.19)

But He does promise to be with us always. His healing and wholeness is sometimes physical, sometimes restoring us to relationship or community. Sometimes His healing and wholeness is about our mindset - acceptance, readiness, faith, or surrender. It comes in myriad shapes and sizes.

His presence is balm. His comfort is not a saccharine ‘there-there’ pat on the head, but a com-fortis, as in strength. One who comes to strengthen by His presence. Sacraments are a gift and ministry of the Holy Spirit, of course; including the sacrament of anointing. And the Holy Spirit Herself also called the ‘paraclete’, παράκλητος, para: beside, from kalein: to call. The one who is alongside us, the Comforter, fortis, the strengthener alongside us.

That is God’s promise. We are alongside Jesus now with Our Lady Mary and St John. But how much more, how much more is Jesus alongside us, in joy and sorrow, when we are striding through life, and when we are not sure we can make one more step.

He has called us by name (Isaiah 43.1), we are His, and He can never leave us.

God so loved the world….(St John 3.16)

Comfort Ye. Comfort Ye. (Isaiah 40)

Good Friday 3 - Burial and bodily Resurrection, Anointing

We noticed a little while ago that oil is a lavish symbol of God’s love, and tender honouring of our bodies. In baptism, confirmation, ordination, and, ultimately, in the anointing of the sick and dying. The expense and beauty of oil is no accident.

Shortly we will hear of them coming to take away the body that has hung before us these last three hours. The women will come, the myrrhbearers as our Orthodox sisters and brothers have wonderfully named them. They will come to complete what the Magi began thirty years before, to anoint Him for burial. To lavish care and love and beautiful oil on His disfigured body. To clean and tend and smooth his flesh. To caress and wash the wounds we have inflicted. These wounds cannot be undone, He is dead. But their love is not fruitless, not vain. Because love can never be in vain, love is the meaning of everything that has meaning.

In our world so preoccupied by that which cane be counted, measured, priced, traded, made to have an effect, or secure some measure of productivity, these women will show us how much we have to learn. Their love is expensive in time, money, care, and even the danger of being outside the walls, on the rubbish dump, as darkness comes, in the company of a condemned and executed criminal.

And yet, they (unknowingly) are not on the fringes, they are at the centre of the universe, in the loving service of the Maker of the stars and sea, who’s lifeless body they tend. And nothing will be the result of their costly efforts. Nothing. And everything. Because God does not count as we do, see as we do, measure and judge and plan as we do.

All this is true of every time a person is anointed by a priest. It may be for death. It may be for physical or mental unwellness, for healing and wholeness of a million different kinds. The reasons, the fruit, the effect. These are all in God’s hands. Does it do anything? Nothing and everything.

Christina Rossetti knew it when she prayed to God to smite the rock of her heart, as we heard a short while ago. (Poem: Good Friday)

A little after that we heard from the Dream of the Rood. The earliest Christian poem in English, 8th Century Saxon words - a reflection on the death of Jesus from the perspective of the cross, the rood, itself.

‘And I may heal [says the wood of the cross] all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruelest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men’ [sic]

In the cross we see God’s answer to a world of violence and exploitation. God’s answer to all our schemes and plans, that only ever seem to consume others for our convenience.

In the cross we see God’s answer to our ego and ambition. God’s answer to our need to fix everything and rule everything. He takes it all with Him to the cross, to free us from it all, if only we would hear the voice of the Rood. If only we would learn from the love of the myrrhbearers about what really matters, what is real, and what is not.

This body that hangs on the tree will soon be taken down and buried, and you and I will enter into the terrible silence of the remains of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. We may fidget, and seek respite. The world will go to the pub on a long weekend. But we are stuck, between. It is the only honest place to be. God has died, and the silence is cosmic.

During the next twelve or so hours, Jesus descends into hell. The devil thinks he has won, of course, but even death cannot hold our Jesus; because as man He died, and as God, well… Satan, hell, death, all will collapse like a house of cards, in the face of Christ, because His love is more powerful than any of their schemes. And Jesus will walk out of hell, bringing Adam and Eve and all their children with Him, until, quietly, in the night, alone and unnoticed, 30 hours from now, He walks out the tomb.

His body, still bearing the wounds by which He died, now glorified with endless life. The myrrh bearers thought they were anointing a corpse, and they were. But truly, also, they were anointing a king for His kingdom. As you and I are anointed in sickness, and for death, we are being prepared for this same journey that Jesus lives today, from life, through death, and hand in hand with Jesus into life again.

St John Henry Newman says it all in the words we will sing now. And then it will be over, and we will go with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and lay Him to rest.

It is over. And it is just beginning.