Good Friday

Wisdom 2:1, 12-24; Psalm 22

Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

April 3, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1180209375

When I was growing up, in something like fifth grade, I was acquainted with a girl I’ll call Ellen. She was smart, sarcastic, charismatic, and popular. She was in fact part of what I thought of as “the popular group” in my grade. Perhaps you encountered such cliques when you were growing up. Perhaps you’re familiar with them now, whether you’re a younger person or an older one observing how such groups can persist far beyond adolescence. As one who was never among the popular kids growing up, a genderqueer kid who was at times teased or bullied by them, I learned as a basic survival skill that it was important to be aware of such groups and their tendencies. You may not always be able to anticipate what they would do, and you may not want to spend too much energy wondering, but it helped not to be completely naïve. Ellen, as far as I can remember, was nice to me. We weren’t exactly friends, but there was mutual respect. One day as I made my way through classes and other activities, I was astounded to observe that something had happened between Ellen and the rest of the popular group. It was like a switch had flipped. Ellen was out. Her demeanor was completely changed, her confidence gone. I saw her quietly crying. None of my studious popular group observations had prepared me for such a turn. I felt awful for her. Awful, bewildered, and powerless. I checked in to ask what had happened; she wouldn’t say. I resolved in myself to be pointedly nice, to show respect and compassion in the face of her collective rejection. When at some point she thanked me for being kind, it actually made me feel worse; that she had come to expect more cruelty held up the mirror to what her rejecting peers had suggested humanity truly was.

How can human beings be and become cruel? How do people turn on one another? Year by year, Good Friday lifts these questions to the fore. Our first reading from the Wisdom of Solmon delves into the interpersonal dynamics of a rejection, the turning of a group against someone they perceive as “a righteous man.” There is something about him that seems to hold up a mirror to them, a quality that causes them to be uncomfortable. “His manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange,” we hear (Wisdom 2:12, 15). Though like them, indeed as one of them, his difference from them, and his avoidance of some of their ways, makes him intolerable. It is as if his combination of similarity and difference causes a kind of internal disturbance, and rather than pause, explore, and understand that disturbance, they instinctively refuse it, concluding that the only way to restore their internal sense of order is to reject him. And not simply to reject but ridicule, insult and torture him (2:19-20).

This cascade of horror is by no means limited to the ancient world. We have seen it again and again in human history, indeed all too often carried out by Christians who ignore Jesus’ own refusal of violence and his teaching of his followers to do the same (e.g. Matthew 5:39). We see such horrors in the history of Christian persecution of Jewish people, blaming Jesus’ crucifixion upon a community that Jesus very much claimed as his own, to the very end. Particularly on Good Friday and in this moment of rising, violent antisemitism, it is crucial for us to be clear that it was Rome that was responsible for Jesus’ execution. Roman imperialism created a domino effect of pressure upon various minoritized groups, including the vibrant, multivalent Jewish culture of the ancient Near East which had a range of subcommunities – such as the Essenes, the Saduccees, the Scribes, and the Pharisees – whose conflicts emerge in the gospel accounts. The Gospel of John’s Passion Narrative with its frequent reference to οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, often translated as “the Jews,” becomes “the Judeans” in our narrative to emphasize regional, inter-communal dynamics, exacerbated and in the case of Jesus’s death driven, again, by Roman Imperialism. Our rendition of this narrative also does not call upon the whole congregation to play the role of the crowd, which has been historically associated with an oppressive narrative of “the Jews.”^[1] Instead, the role all of us play – inspired by a suggestion from Charles Rus – it that of Jesus. To step into his shoes in this way is meant to remind us of the experience of being rejected. It is to embrace the one who withstood rejection in order to stand with humanity, “sympathizing with our weakness” (Hebrews 4:15) with us in the worst of the experiences we inflict upon one another, to remind us in radical empathy of all those who have been, are being, and will be oppressed.

The sacred stories we share on this day – the Passion Narrative, our first reading, our Psalm, spoken and sung – surely wrestle with the unsettling and brutal reality of humanity at its worst. In so doing they remind us that God not only sees the terrible ways we are capable of making use of our divinely given freedom and agency; God also refuses to abandon us to the nightmares of our own making.^[2] God in Jesus Christ pitched the divine tent among us and walked our path as a human being among other humans, a creature among other creatures, and as God in divine fullness, staying with and finally redeeming the wondrously vulnerable creation God had made. Teaching and healing, suffering and dying, rising and ascending, God in Jesus Christ invites us into another way of life, a way of liberation and healing, of truth telling and repair. In the Paschal Mystery, Christ died our death, standing with the least, the last, and the lost. He destroyed the power of death, exposing all the ways our reactive fear of death, our loss of control, our creaturely limitation, our refusal of vulnerability, inspire the worst in humanity. In his teaching and in his rising, the last became first. The pioneer of our salvation gave us the gift of resurrection not only at the end of our mortal existence but even here and now as we respond to his call to carry out risen lives. Good Friday is in fact good for this reason: it reminds us of the radical redemption impressed upon our very skin even as the world around us fails to perceive it and actively distorts it. And in that reminder, it calls us once again into the mystery of life that emerges out of death. Good Friday invites us to stand in the place of Jesus in sorrow and in gratitude, in compassionate determination to see the world as it truly is, watchful for our worst tendencies and determined to harness the best of humanity, our ability to change and be changed, to be agents of transformation in this broken, beautiful world.

I never knew what happened to cause the rejection of my schoolmate Ellen. Nor did I figure out how she somehow came back into the good graces of the popular group in the weeks that followed. I only know that I learned something along the way. Something more than I had quite understood before about vulnerability and fragility, about rejection and acceptance, about the tenuous perception of human beings, the fearsome power of groups, and the constant call to compassionate community. On this Good Friday, may we receive with joy the one who sympathizes with us in our weakness, who reveals to us the power of the Paschal Mystery and invites us to be transformed by it.

^[1] “Additional Directions for the Reading of the Passion Gospel” https://www.diomass.org/sites/diomass/files/Altnerate%20Rite%20for%20Palm%20Sunday_0.pdf and additional resources for Holy Week: https://www.diomass.org/liturgy-and-music-resources.

^[2] Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has long preached of shifting from the nightmare to God’s dream for all creation. One example: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/easter-2017-message-from-presiding-bishop-michael-curry-go-forth-to-be-people-of-the-resurrection-follow-in-the-way-of-jesus-dont-be-ashamed-to-love-dont-be-ashamed-to/