Good Friday 2026

As some of you know, we have this year in our Lent Study group been discussing the Hymns of Holy Week—and, most of what we’ve been talking about has been the hymns we have been singing here today, and I thought it might be apt for me to take these hymns as our theme, not least as they tell the story of Good Friday much more eloquently than I am able. 

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Just as we heard of Jesus’s betrayal, first by Judas and then, perhaps even more painfully, by Peter, we sang together Samuel Crossman’s beloved hymn My Song is Love Unknown. It is clear, from the penultimate verse, that Crossman is here imagining himself—and us—as Joseph of Arimathea, said (as we have just heard in our final reading) to be a secret disciple of Jesus, for fear of getting in trouble. A flawed character, then; who comes into courage in the end. Likewise, this hymn is full of ambivalence, which serves as a mirror to our own half-baked faith. The narrative core of the hymn appears in stanzas 3 through 5. First, we are brought into the events of Palm Sunday: the crowds hail his arrival, singing “Hosanna!”, but then turn on him by Good Friday, crying “Crucify!”. Then we see Jesus offering healing in the course of his earthly ministry; only to have his benevolence thrown back in his face. And finally, we are brought to the trial before Pilate, and the final contrast: this time between Jesus and Barabbas, the Messiah and Murderer—and the people choose the murderer. Crossman would have us, in these verses, consider our own double-mindedness and duplicity, our own rejection of God’s generosity, our own choosing lesser goods over more noble ones. But it is, despite all this, even we who have been the foes of Christ who are, by him, set free.

Charles Wesley’s hymn Jesu, Lover of the Soul picks up where Crossman leaves off, and we sing here not as uncertain and changeable disciples, but as those who are very conscious of our condition, and so who cling on to Jesus who saves us. Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on thee. The images in this hymn are all of dire need: a great tempest in the first stanza, threat of predation in the second, and grave illness in the third—in all of which Wesley reminds us that the condition of our soul is no less real a concern than that of our body, and no less desperate. 

The next hymn, Lord Jesus, Think on Me predates Wesley’s by twelve centuries, and yet reflects much the same theme, and on an even more intimate register. Here, we are no longer the disciples of little faith in Crossman’s hymn nor even Wesley’s desperate one; we are, as is obvious from the first line of each verse, the brigand crucified alongside with Jesus himself, who asks him at the last to “remember me when you come into your kingdom”. The hymn’s English rendering—“think on me”—seems more evocative still, though I cannot quite say why. We are asking Jesus to place us close to him, even at the forefront of his mind. And we can be assured that he does. 

We then move from the mind of Christ to his head, which is a shift towards focusing on the embodied reality of the events of Good Friday. O Sacred Head Sore Wounded is a Victorian translation of part of a 17th-century German hymn, itself based on a 13th-century Latin poem. In full, the original poem addresses several body parts, starting with Jesus’s feet, then knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and finally, his face and head. It is a reminder that what happened to Jesus on Good Friday happened to an actual human being, a person just like you and me, just like the people even now subjected to persecution and violence. The crown of thorns that garlanded his head is no mere ironic symbol of kingship, but a physical device of torture. We are prone—those of us fortunate enough to be far away from real-life instances of violence—to think of Good Friday in exclusively spiritual terms: but there is also a political and physical reality for which these events are directly relevant. 

And these are, besides our own individual sins, among the societal sins and geopolitical sins for which we are to weep. Phineas Fletcher’s powerfully concise poem—Drop, Drop, Slow Tears—contains only six lines, divided into three stanzas, though our hymnals usually cut each line in half. It somehow manages to help us see things from two perspectives at the same time. Its emotional intensity is deeply personal. And yet, talk of the “Prince of Peace” and and “deep floods drown[ing] all” takes things to a broader place, the latter of course being a reference to Noah’s mythic flood, an event on a global scale. The idea that there are such things as societal sins is not always uncontroversial, but it should be. It is not just individual human beings that act in the world, but also institutions and governments, cultures and societies. To be sure, individual human beings are very often the ones implementing institutional policies and manifesting cultural norms: but these policies and norms belong properly to the organisations that enshrine them. And for the saving work of Christ to be complete, it is not just individual souls that must be redeemed, but what we might call “the world”, and not just the natural world but the one that we have constructed around us, our political and economic environment, our social and cultural habitat. 

As we come towards the end and apogee of the reading of St John’s Passion, the scene of the crucifixion itself comes into focus. Quite appropriately, we sing Isaac Watts’s classic hymn of 1707, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. We take for granted now that the cross or crucifix is the primary emblem of the Christian faith: but, in fact, it took several centuries for this to happen—prior to which, it was simply too painful, too traumatising to have crosses depicted everywhere, not least as people were still being tortured and murdered by the imperial state in this manner. It is very odd indeed that we have, as our main symbol, this instrument of death; and we must never forget the oddness, never let it fail to scandalise us, remind us of the profundity, the gravity of its meaning: that, once upon a time, we tortured and killed God, who subjected perfect divinity to sinful humanity, in order to save us from ourselves. 

The last hymn in our series is the most recent. Were You There was first printed in 1899, but had been before that sung for decades in plantations in the American South, by enslaved African-Americans. Whoever wrote this hymn had more insight into the passion of Our Lord than any of us sitting here today will ever have, and certainly much much more than I will ever have. Like our Lord, he or she was incarcerated unjustly. Like him, they were tortured and humiliated. The hymn asks whether we were there when the Lord was crucified—and of course we weren’t. But there is a also a sense in which it asks whether the Lord is with us in our sufferings, and in his willing submission to pain and death, he is. His solidarity with enslaved people was inspirational to them in the antebellum southern United States, and remains so to people in the midst of suffering elsewhere. God does not stand aloof in our pain, but descends into it, and is with us there. At the final analysis, this is the meaning of Good Friday.