Sermon preached at the Solemn Liturgy on Good Friday 2026

There is so much noise in those hours preceding Christ’s crucifixion. The rush of soldiers and police which propels Jesus first to the High Priest and then to Pilate; violence as Jesus is struck and bludgeoned; the accusing crow of a cockerel in Simon Peter’s ear; the shouted accusations of a trail and the exasperation of Pilate; the cry of the crowd for Barabbas’s freedom and for Jesus’s crucifixion, and the noisy, competitive collusion of the chief priests in claiming their loyalty to the Emperor. Layer upon layer of noise, as the crescendo builds, until they finally arrive at the Place of the Skull, that blood-soaked site of death which was to become the place of life. 

And yet, at the heart of the noise, there is a silence. During his trial, Jesus has evaded questions about his Kingship as he declines to answer Pilate’s questions on their own grounds; this is no standard interrogation of a normal prisoner. And then, just before Pilate sends him away to be crucified Jesus is silent, not because he cannot answer but because he refuses to engage in the back and forth of these verbal games. His silence refrains from fuelling the cycles of evil and scapegoating; he will not follow the logic of violence, even (perhaps especially) in the presence of the figure who has the power of life and death, the power to release and the power to crucify. ‘Jesus gave him – Pilate – no answer.’ 

Back at the beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus was described as the Word, that perfect expression of God’s will and life through whom all things came into being. When Jesus speaks, creation happens; signs and healings occur, life-giving teaching is imparted, liberation is offered, the new world breaks through, Lazarus is raised. But not here, in this parody of justice, which exposes the chaos of sin for what it really is. These words, this chatter of carnage, cannot bear the weight of the incarnate Word. And so from the centre of this noisy, desperate scene of increasingly inevitable violence and devastation, we are offered a world which is almost unimaginable by our sin-determined fantasies and addictions. Yes, this new world is beginning to emerge with every step towards Calvary until Jesus’s final cry that all is accomplished. We hear its premonition in Christ’s silence before Pilate, just at the very moment when he might have presented his defence. Christ’s silence reminding us that for God there is no need for self-justification, there are no frontiers which need to be defended. Jesus’s silence is freedom, and it is an opening to new life for the world. 

Rowan Williams has written that ‘God is in the connections we cannot make.’ That is to say that sometimes when logic ceases to operate, when the codes we have carefully committed ourselves to stop working or fail to make sense, when language runs dry and concepts seem to have run their course, there we encounter the mystery of God. But there is a paradox here, too. An incarnate God is also always connecting, healing, liberating, enriching the bonds of love between us. In the very scene when Jesus is finally being extinguished from the world, just before the moment of his death, he is actually building new community, entrusting Mary and John to one another, breathing out his own spirit upon them constituting his Body, giving them a new language of loving care and unity. Jesus’s silence in the face of his accusers, one of those ‘connections we cannot make’, is a silence which reveals how his world is larger, not smaller than theirs. Refusing to be connected into the fabric of a narrative they keep attempting to weave him into, Jesus breaks the seeming inescapability of their fallen logic. A new world is emerging from this bloody scene, where the instruments of death will be considered holy only because they testify to the ultimate victory of a love which holds and connects more deeply than we can easily perceive. So, in this scene, Christ’s silence is truth-telling. His enlargement of the world, as he refuses to be woven into that narrative where might-is-right, and where survival at any cost is a victory, allows us to see the true dignity of a widow’s mite, of one repentant sinner, of a man beaten by the side of a road dependent on the goodness of an outcast Samaritan. Jesus’s silence stands in solidarity with those who are voiceless in our world, articulating and embracing their suffering, highlighting their dignity. 

The noisy charade of Jesus’s trial shows us how easily power can be corrupted. Now, as then, forms of politics and forms of religion can amplify one other in hideous and dangerous ways. When unconstrained might or power over others is professed as holy, that is blasphemy and it is deceit. When the violent rule of the strong fails to protect the dignity of the vulnerable, the rights of the poor, or the voice of the voiceless, that is not leadership but tyranny. Jesus’s refusal to collude with that seemingly inevitable rhetoric of victimisation, violence and revenge on Good Friday, stands in judgement over all who have the arrogance to believe that their own success is predicated upon the crushing of others. 

That hideous self-replicating cacophony which can so often surround power caught up in itself, was undone by Jesus’s serene and abundant gift of himself on the Cross. This gift is the power which can transform the way we live, the way we relate, and the way we die. This is the power which is expressed in a cup of water to the thirsty, in hidden acts of love and service, or in the embrace of forgiveness for those who believe themselves to be unlovable. 

This year, in particular, our attention is drawn again to Jerusalem, to the West Bank, and to the churches and people of the Holy Land and Middle East. The Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, Archbishop Hosam Naoum, gave us these words on Palm Sunday, just a few days ago,

‘The true entry into Jerusalem is the entry of the heart into the mystery of redemption. It is to allow Christ to enter into our depths—our thoughts, our decisions, our relationships. It is to live the kenosis in our own lives—to let go of our selfishness, our pride, our attachment to self, so that we may be filled with the love of God. In this context, we cannot ignore our reality here in Jerusalem… It may seem as though the voice of joy has quieted, as though outward expressions have fallen silent.

But can praise truly be silenced? The Gospel answers clearly. When the Pharisees asked Jesus to silence His disciples, He said: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out!” 

… nothing can extinguish the love of God or halt His saving work. If human voices are silenced, creation itself will bear witness. For what takes place in Jerusalem is not merely a human event, but a divine act that transcends all limits. The stones of Jerusalem’s streets, the hills that surround it, the olive trees that fill its land—all bear witness that God entered this city, suffered within it, and rose from it.’ 

Jesus was silent before Pilate, refusing to contribute to that hollow grammar of self-justifying power and violence. To this creative and abundant silence of the Eternal Word, which spoke creation and which sings the New Creation from the cold silence of death itself: to this, we Christians bear witness. We can now speak and sing and act in a way which testifies to a restored humanity emerging from the horrors of Golgotha, in a world so desperately in need of its life-giving peace. The strength of Jesus’s silence is our message, and its power is the power which has faced down death.