Good Friday - 2026

Sermon for Good Friday 2026
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This past Sunday, I mentioned the oddity of reading the Passion at the beginning of Holy Week, because it’s really the focus of today. I also mentioned that people naturally enjoy a story with a resolution, so much so that we can often guess how the main character of a book of movie will resolve the conflict or overcome the antagonist by them end, and how the supporting characters will get back to life as normal. We like to move quickly toward full answers, who want to make sense of things before we have fully felt them.

But today, our hero is dead. Our God bleeds. And those words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This is where we are asked to remain.

Not because we do not know what comes next. We do. We know the story. We know the shouts of praise and celebration will return. But if we move too quickly, we risk missing what love looks like when it is poured out completely. We risk turning the cross into a mere stepping stone, instead of seeing it for what it is: the place where God refuses to stand at a distance from human suffering.

Because this is not just the death of Jesus. This is God entering into the deepest places we fear to go, the places of abandonment, of grief, of apparent silence. Nothing is held back.

Good Friday shows us there is no place we can fall where God has not already been. No darkness so deep that Christ has not entered it. No silence so complete that it is empty of His presence.

Today, we feel the weight of it. We let the silence stretch. We allow the absence to be real. Because love, when it is real, leaves a mark. It creates a space when it is gone. The depth of the emptiness tells the truth about the depth of the love.

So we stay.

We keep watch with those who had no idea what was coming. We stand with Mary, who can only grieve. We sit with the disciples, who can only scatter and wonder what has become of everything they trusted.

Because the silence of this day is not the silence of abandonment. It is the silence of God at work in ways we cannot yet perceive. It is the hidden movement of redemption, unfolding in the dark.

And we trust, and we hold in faith that the God who seems far is not absent.

The story is not over.

But for now, we wait.

Amen.