Good Friday 2026

Welcoming and a few thoughts on Unity

Welcome (new space, bathrooms, etc)

We are grateful to be gathered together again for what is the fourth time we as City Chapel of Bremerton and Seaside (church) have remembering Good Friday together. There have been a few other times where we gathered together with other churches in our area to remember Good Friday, but this being the fourth time together for the two of us.

Each time we gather in an event like this I’m reminded of joy that the Lord must have when His people, who are called by His name come together, to worship Him. This is a beautiful picture of the unity that I believe Jesus prayed for in John 17. Not that we are the same or are doing the same things, for that would be uniformity, but that what brings us here together this evening (along with many other churches in our county) is the purpose to remember what Jesus did almost 2000 yrs ago… “For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame… that God made Him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God; who then Jesus, went and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

It’s this time of the cross and the in between time before the resurrection that we are intentionally putting ourselves in. We want to run to Sunday morning, but it’s this practice of waiting, this discipline of sitting in the darkness before the third day where we seek to meet God. Often times there derives comfort for who you are with in these difficult times, and so for that, thank you Seaside for walking with us as we remember and reflect what took place on the day that Jesus was betrayed and crucified.

I now want to invite Pastor Jon from Seaside to share with us how we will enter in on this Good Friday service.

The Trustworthy Hands of the Father

A reflection on Jesus’ words, “Father, into Your hands, I commit my spirit.” from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 23, verse 46.

There are things we hold onto when everything else falls away.

When we find ourselves at the end of our rope — truly at the end — what we reach for tells us everything about what we actually trust. Some reach for money, or the comfort of a plan. Some reach for their own intellect, their willpower, their track record. Some reach for the people they love most, or the systems they've built their lives around. None of these are bad things. But they were never meant to hold the full weight of a human soul.

Jesus, in his final moments, reached for none of them.

"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."

That's it. That's the last thing he said. And the simplicity of it should stop us cold.

Luke tells us he said it loudly. This wasn't a whisper, a last gasp of breath. It was a declaration. A man dying in agony, speaking with intention and clarity — quoting from Psalm 31, a hymn written for exactly the kind of moment where everything is falling apart and the only thing left to do is trust.

Read Psalm 31 sometime this weekend. It's not a triumphant psalm. It's a psalm of a man hemmed in on every side — surrounded by enemies, abandoned by friends, described as a broken vessel, a man whose strength is failing. And yet running through the whole thing is this stubborn, almost defiant thread of trust. "My times are in your hands." Not my best times. Not my comfortable times. My times. All of them.

That's the prayer Jesus borrows on the cross. He doesn't write a new one. He reaches back into the deep well of Israel's suffering and trust, and he makes it his own.

The word "Father" is worth pausing on. For most Jews in the first century, calling God "Father" in personal prayer was almost unheard of. It was too intimate, too presumptuous. But Jesus always addressed God this way — almost certainly in Aramaic: Abba. Not a distant title. The word a child uses.

In the middle of crucifixion, Jesus calls God Abba.

That's not detachment. That's not stoic resignation. That's the deepest possible act of relational trust — the kind of trust that doesn't evaporate when the circumstances become unbearable.

And when he says "my spirit" — he doesn't mean some disembodied ghost floating free of his body. He means himself. All of himself. This is the language of total relinquishment. It's the language of Exodus — of a people standing at the edge of the Red Sea, water parting on both sides, Pharaoh's army thundering up from behind. To step into that corridor is not a small thing. The water is still moving. Will it hold? What if it falls back before we're through? What if the very provision God gave us becomes the instrument of our undoing?

That's what it means to commit. Not a tidy transaction. Not a calculated risk. A whole person, walking forward, with no guarantee except the character of the One who called them into the water.

Jesus, on the cross, steps all the way in.

Luke has been building to this moment since chapter 9, when Moses and Elijah appeared at the transfiguration and spoke of Jesus' exodus — the departure he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. The path of the Son of God, from the very beginning, ran through suffering. There was no shortcut around the cross. And Jesus knew it. He embraced it. He drank the cup.

This final prayer is the completion of that journey. Total submission. Complete peace. Not peace because the pain is over — the pain is not over. Not peace because the story has resolved — the tomb hasn't opened yet. Peace because the Father's hands are trustworthy, even here. Especially here.

Psalm 31 ends with this: "Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord."

The psalmist doesn't say the waiting is easy. He doesn't promise the darkness lifts quickly. He says: be strong. take courage. wait.

If you are in a hard season right now — if you are at your own edge of the water, if the walls feel like they're closing in — this is the word for you tonight. The same hands Jesus trusted are the hands that hold you. Not because the pain is over. Not because the story has resolved. But because those hands are trustworthy, even here. Especially here.

So we wait. We don't rush past this night. We sit with the darkness, with the silence, with the sealed tomb — and we trust the hands.

We leave in darkness and in silence. We return to the tomb Easter morning.

Please respect this time and make your way to your cars in silence. You are dismissed.