Sermon preached at the Solemn Liturgy of the Passion and Death of Our Lord, Good Friday 2025

I will never forget my first night in Jerusalem, over two decades ago. We arrived into the city from Ben Gurion airport, and although it was late, a friend and I were determined to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that remarkable complex of buildings which contains the sites of Calvary and the Lord’s tomb. We ran from our hotel through the dark streets, until we reached the Church which was soon to close. As so many millions had done before us, as we entered the Church, we fell to our knees at the Stone of the Anointing: the large slab which marks the spot where, by tradition, Jesus’s lifeless body was laid out, anointed and prepared for burial. The stone is regularly sprinkled with scented oils of rose and myrrh as pilgrims venerate this sacred spot. We rested our hands and heads on this stone as we prayed in adoration and gratitude at the beginning of a pilgrimage. That night, once I returned to my hotel to sleep, I couldn’t wash my hands, but instead fell asleep holding my palms by my face, sleeping with the scent of this sacred space seeping into my nostrils throughout the night. I will never forget that night. 

How do we approach the story we are part of this week? How do we engage with this mystery which is at the very centre of our faith, and the very centre of the world’s life, without which the Christian story means nothing? Today, in this liturgy, we do not need more words. We perhaps sense what is happening on Calvary before we can describe it, with its contradictions and bitter ironies. Our emotions, love, wonder, shock, perhaps, begin to articulate the truth. We know that this is a real death, of a real human being, tortured, humiliated, scapegoated; and yet we sense that here, too, is the most vibrant kind of life. Forgiveness, reconciliation, Jesus creating new community between his mother and his beloved disciple: fellowship and communion forged by Jesus, even at the very moment that it seems he is being broken and extinguished. We use oppositional categories in an attempt to say that which can’t quite be said: ‘hideous and dreadful, lovely and sweet’, as Julian of Norwich puts it, wounds which are flowers, the stab of a spear which opens the well of life, gushing forth from a dead body. This is a terrible, violent, and devastating sight – look, and see what sin does, how lethal it can be; and yet, Golgotha is also a scene of victory, the crowning of a ministry, the triumph of love.

These seeming contradictions begin to tell us the whole truth about the Cross. They belong to the imaginal world – not the imaginary world, that is something quite different - the imaginal world relies on images, signs, poems, pictures, senses, these modes often set up in dialogue with each other, to teach us deep truth. The dead body laid out on the Stone of Anointing, bloodied, but fragrant with myrrh and aloes before its burial, is the Ground Zero of the New Creation. We sense this, somehow, before we can properly describe it; a mystery to be loved, and contemplated in awe and wonder, before we ever attempt to define it.

The Shroud of Turin, believed by many to be the burial cloth which wrapped Christ’s body, is a deeply mysterious object. The carbon dating is still confused as to its dating and origin, and no one can tell for sure how the imprint of the body was left on the Shroud. Some scientists believe that what we can say with assurance already takes us beyond what we currently know of the laws of physics, and that the three-dimensional nature of the image and the subsequent nature of the imprint on the cloth comes from trillions of watts of UV radiation applied in a very short space of time. Some have argued this discussion takes us into an entirely new realm of quantum physics. As one scholar has risked putting it, ‘we have nothing less in the tomb of Christ than the beginning of a new universe.’

I do not say this to argue straightforwardly for the authenticity or otherwise of the Shroud. It certainly is stained with human blood, and bears an image which currently is unexplained by contemporary science. Whatever its origin, it is at the very least an icon which stirs devotion to Christ’s passion in the hearts of millions of believers, and allows us to contemplate Christ’s death through the imaginal world. We sense what has happened on Calvary, that site at once blooded and blazing, which moves the heart and animates our prayer. We sense that what has happened here stands in judgement on us all, as Jesus’s whole life and ministry comes to its fruition on this rocky execution site, his lifeless body lovingly anointed by his devastated friends in preparation for his burial. We sense that what has happened here is for us, and for our salvation. A death which sanctifies even death, a lifeless body prepared for burial, the very scent of which will rob the grave of its victory. 

Some of you may know the famous Issenheim Altarpiece, by Matthias Grunewald, made in the early sixteenth century. The depiction of the crucified Christ is twisted and wracked, covered with sores as he hangs from a sagging cross. The monks for whom this altarpiece was made were famed for their treatment of skin diseases and plague. Jesus’s body is pitted with these kinds of sores. The sick onlooker would have recognised those marks, and sensed Jesus’s own bearing of their sufferings. At the foot of the cross is Mary Magdalene, contemplating this hideous image, whilst a pot of anointing oil rests next to her, unopened at this stage, awaiting to offer a final dignity to the broken body of this unique man whose every action and every word spoke of a life and a love which were stronger than death.

Today, as we look at the cross, this symbol of torture and death, we also sense the victory of an uncontrollable and relentlessly creative life. It is this, and only this, which allows us to perceive ourselves differently, to know our own fallenness, and yet also to sense the love, forgiveness, and peace which flows from Christ’s wounds. It is this cross which allows us to look at the terrifying violence of the world, at innocent life so wickedly taken in Gaza, at the almost overwhelming cycles of human greed and exploitation which litter our newsfeeds, and still to perceive that these dark realities cannot and will not have the final victory, because Christ has borne the wounds of the world. 

For now, let us allow ourselves to be drawn both by the scandal of this day, and by the scent of this victory. At the Cross, let us again learn humility and wonder. At the Cross, let us again learn true thankfulness, as in the words of St Leo the Great, we sense that here we are given ‘honours for insults, health for pain, life for death.’ Christ has received our state, and given us his own.