Good Friday Homily (2025)

1 Peter 1:17–21 CSB

If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers. For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was revealed in these last times for you. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.

Maybe the most perplexing aspect of following Jesus is the symbol we most often use to identify ourselves.

A cross.

Nothing sophisticated. No feat of engineering...no marvel of the ancient world.

In fact, the the vast majority of anyone who's ever seen a real one...would see nothing more than a brutal form of torture and execution, best suited for a long forgotten world - having no real place in a modern, sophisticated society as our own.

And yet...

Through the last 2000 years, Followers of Jesus have stubbornly refused to move on from the symbol of cross. No other form of execution is paraded around, worn, tattooed, painted, sung about and celebrated quite like this one.

It’s odd, right?

PAUSE

Add to this, that the time of the year, when FoJ around the world gather to celebrate a moment in time to reflect on the crucifixion and we, for some reason, call this Friday - good.

Why?

PAUSE

Because Jesus’ death on a cross is the moment in time when God began the long foreknown work of setting the world as we know it - right. Jesus’ death on the cross is, in the most real sense, living theology...the point in time when all of the abstract threads about a Creator come together to reveal a God who is at the same time just, all-powerful, and all-loving. A moment in time, when God himself, in the Person of Jesus, endured - suffered, and died...and none of this by accident. Not because it just happened to play out this way...but because God set out, before the foundations of the world, to redeem His people! To give His life - and by His death, give US life!

And so, in this way, the cross has become more than a symbol. It’s become more than a monument we look back to and say, “wasn’t that nice of Him?”

No, the cross, friends, is a movement...of those who follow him...to give our lives away...a movement of those who follow Him to no longer fear the sting of death - a movement of those who follow Him to the death of ourselves, so that we take hold of life that is truly life.