Good Friday, 2026

Good Friday, 2026 homily, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

One of my diaconal ordination charges is to "make Christ and his redemptive love known” to the world, and one way I do that is to volunteer with the St. Joseph of Arimathea Society. I attend funerals every Thursday, and I can confidently say that I have been to more funerals of people I didn’t know than of people I have known. More than half of our funerals have no one in attendance other than the volunteers, with the remaining funerals having family and/or friends present. Beyond addressing the loss and grief of those present, there is a recognition that a relationship has ended at death. And even when no one is present, there is awareness that relationships ended some time ago, whether through estrangement or being the last of the family to die. I experience brief sadness when I think of those relationships that have ended, things said that shouldn’t have been said, and things that needed to be said but weren’t. This adds to the darkness of death and sharpens it with regret, on top of the grief and sadness already present. Our experience of death in this world is that it is final, that once it happens, the relationship we had is gone and the opportunities to build, rebuild, or strengthen relationships disappear. This finality of death is non-negotiable.

This is where the disciples and followers of Jesus are on Good Friday, the day we mark Jesus’ death on the cross. There were so many more questions they had, so many more answers to be given, and looking at Jesus dying on the cross they saw the end of their relationship with God dying as well. The despair over a loss of purpose and direction that I have seen at funerals was likely much stronger among the disciples. They didn’t expect this to happen to Jesus, not like this and not so soon, not when there seemed to be time to spread Jesus’ message to the world. Regret from unfinished business between the living and the dead can last for years and makes accepting death and starting to live life again difficult. One by one, or maybe in groups of two or three, Jesus’ followers drifted away from Calvary and into a world that could not separate its concept of sin from Jesus’ message of forgiveness and reconciliation with a loving God. I have to wonder what died that day; was it Jesus? Or his followers’ hope? Or was it the iron grip on who was to be counted among the righteous and among the unredeemable?

I have resisted the idea that we are holding a funeral for Jesus today, because we know what happens next. We know how the story ends in the Gospels. It seems inappropriate to say goodbye to someone who rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples, and whose presence we still feel today. But how do we get from the grief and despair that we feel, and that the disciples felt to the quiet comfort of faith in eternal life through Jesus? How can I help families and friends see the good in the flawed, troubled life of the deceased who we bury, someone who may have made decisions that hurt themselves and others? At one recent funeral I realized that when we live with someone who is so hard to love, that is when we can find and show the purest form of love, even when it is at arm’s length. That is when our grip on who is a sinner and who is saved dies, and our hope for ourselves and the world survives. Jesus’ resurrection is when we understand that death is not the end of the story, or of our story. His resurrection gave the disciples a second chance to say goodbye to him on their terms. The reality is that we don’t get that second, physical opportunity to say goodbye to our loved ones. But, we can resurrect them in our minds, emotions, and soul, and have that same opportunity to say goodbye, to say what we always wanted to but didn’t. We have the opportunity to find peace, to find God’s presence, to find our way, in death when we hold onto hope from the resurrection, hope in the face of death.