Good Friday Homily 18th April
Transcript of Good Friday homily 2025. ‘Holy Failures- thank God it’s not just me.’
This year, during Holy Week, we've been looking at the theme ‘Holy failures thank God, it's not just me.’
We've examined the tendency, exacerbated by social media, to only ever present the best bits of life, to curate joys and gladnesses and put them on the internet for other people's inspection and to ignore the things which are hard or difficult or bad or disheartening or which cause us grief or sorrow or disappointment or despair.
As a society I think we’re getting used to ignoring failure, and yet the reality of life for so many people is not like that. For every person that ‘makes it’, how many just as talented are working as child labourers in a mine in the DRC? For each person happy at work, how many more are dissatisfied, unfulfilled, marking time? For every picture of happy families we might see on a sit-com, how many people watching know the reality of strained relationships, broken promises, love gone cold? And no matter how we get there, the reality that faces us at the end of all our lives is the ultimate failure, the great taboo in modern life- death. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 103, ‘our days are but as grass, we flourish as a flower in the field, and as soon as the wind blows over it, it is gone.
And so this week we've examined the reality of failure in Scripture and in the lives of some of the saints. We’ve explored the failure of Moses, that great prophet of the people of Israel, and the failures in the relationship of covenant between the people of Israel and God.
We’ve reflected on the failures of some saints who have not made it where they hoped to. Charles de Foucault murdered in a North African fort. St Paulinus of York, who, at the end of his ministry, looked at the ruins of all he'd tried to build and must’ve wondered what on earth God had called him to. Where was the power of the resurrection in the burning ruins of the churches he had built, the hastily discarded faith of those he had nurtured?
The ‘happiness only’ model then cannot be a model that we buy into if we are to call ourselves a church. And that is because in Holy Week, the most important week in the church’s year, we are preparing to follow the footsteps of a profound failure.
If we are to be true as a Christian church, then we have to be honest about failure, because we are a church founded on the failure of Jesus. When we look at the cross on Good Friday we look at the most profound image of failure.
And it is a failure, the cross. The hopes of the disciples, the promises of Jesus, the power of the miracles, all turned to dust when he breathed his last.
We have had 2000 years, (ish) of this story, which is why it's so easy to look past the cross, to be inured to its bleak forlorn-ness and to say, ‘Oh, well, Good Friday will soon be over. Easter is on its way, and even in this sad moment, there are seeds of new life on the cross, if only we can see them.’
But the trouble is, this underplays the total failure of the cross.
Christ is not just pretending to be dead. He's not in sleep mode. He's not knocked out but will come around later. The point we have to get here is that he is totally and utterly devoid of life. The soldier's spear pierces his side, punctures lungs, heart, and proves that there is no life left in him. This man who said he was one with God, all the promises that the disciples had just started to trust, just started to believe, just started to hope in; all that is failed.
On Good Friday, we are looking at project failure, and it's only when we acknowledge the total failure that is the cross that we can take seriously what comes next.
Because as we look to Easter Day, we don't hope that Christ will come back having hidden away somewhere for a while. If his suffering were a simulation, if his death and passion were fake, well frankly that would not be worth our attention, our yearning, our faith.
No, on Easter Day we are looking at something that is totally new. Not an old creation that looks a bit different. Not Jesus as a sort-of human boomerang. On Easter Day we glimpse a new thing, because it will spring out of nothingness, from the reality of the failure of death, starting something radically, completely, totally, new.
In Christ, after the fullness of failure comes the fullness of new life. Easter Day celebrates a new creation that only God can make and that only His Son, Jesus Christ, can share with us.
But that is for another day and another time. Today is for sorrow, and for now we look at the failure of Christ hanging on his cross.
And we look at the failure, because there is nothing else to see.