Good Friday - 2025

Sermon for Good Friday - 2025
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty

When I was in seminary, the seminary and undergraduate college combined to have a large Maundy Thursday service in All Saints Chapel at Sewanee—a grand, sacred space filled with music, prayer, and the gathered Body of Christ. At the end of the service, as was the custom, the altar was stripped. The lights dimmed. The ministers processed out in silence. And when it was time for me to leave, I did what I had been taught to do: I turned toward the altar and bowed—a small gesture of reverence for the cross, for the presence of Christ.

But that night, I bowed to nothing.

The cross was gone. The sacrament was removed. The space was empty.

It hit me like a gut punch.

Christ was gone.

(Or at least, it felt that way. We know, of course, that Christ is never truly gone—but in that moment, the absence was palpable, even painful.)

I saw that same reaction last night in the face of one of our acolytes when I removed the brass cross from the altar. There was a flicker of panic—Not that. Leave that up, at least!

Last night, one of our altar guild did the same thing I had done, bowed to the emptiness and caught herself amid confused feelings.

We don’t like emptiness. We don’t like absence. We want something—anything—to hold onto.

It's OK to Sit

Good Friday is the day we sit with that emptiness.

We stand at the foot of the cross and watch as Jesus breathes his last. We hear him cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—words that echo the deepest human fear: Have I been abandoned?

And then—silence.

The body is taken down. The tomb is sealed. The disciples scatter.

God seems absent.

This is the mystery (and the honesty) of our faith. Christianity does not rush to fill the silence with easy answers. It does not paper over grief with platitudes. Instead, it enters the emptiness. It names the loss. It sits with the disciples in their fear, with Mary in her sorrow, with all of us in our moments of doubt and despair.

Because absence is real. Grief is real. The cross is real.

Why Stay Seated?

We know how the story ends. We know that Sunday is coming. But tonight, we resist the urge to fast-forward.

Why?

Because grief cannot be skipped. Love cannot be rushed. And God does not redeem us around our suffering but through it.

When we bow to an empty space—when we face the absence—we are not just acknowledging loss. We are also acknowledging love. We would not feel the emptiness so deeply if we did not first know the presence.

The disciples did not yet understand that the empty cross would lead to an empty tomb. But we do. And so we let today be what it is: a day of sorrow, of waiting, of trust in the God who—even in absence—is still at work.

The Absence That Speaks

In the end, the emptiness is not nothing.

It is the space where God’s silence becomes a kind of speech.

It is the void that makes room for resurrection.

This afternoon, we do not bow to nothing. We bow to the love that was so real, its absence aches. We bow to the God who, in Christ, entered even into godforsakenness—so that no emptiness, no grief, no death could ever separate us from Him again.

So let us keep watch. Let us grieve. Let us wait.

And let us trust that the One who seems absent is, even now, preparing the dawn.

Amen.