Good Friday's Significance

(and a change of schedule)

There is no day on the Christian calendar quite like Good Friday. It stands apart — somber, stripped, and searingly honest about what love costs. On this day, we do not rush to the resurrection. We linger at the cross.

Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion

of Jesus, the moment when Christians remember that Jesus was handed over, condemned, and executed by the political and religious leaders of his day. It is, by any measure, a day of profound darkness. And yet the church has always called it good. That peculiar word — good — has occupied theologians and poets for centuries. It points us toward the conviction that what appears to be an ending is, in God's hands, a beginning. What looks like abandonment is, in fact, the deepest act of solidarity. God, in Christ, enters fully into human suffering, not to wave it away, but to bear it — and ultimately, to transform it.

Good Friday is not a day for easy consolation. It asks something of us. It asks us to stand where the disciples stood, in the confusion and the grief, and to resist the temptation to skip ahead. The resurrection only means what it means because the crucifixion is real. The empty tomb only shouts its good news because the sealed tomb was first a place of genuine loss.

The ancient church understood this. Before Christianity became culturally comfortable, the keeping of Good Friday was an act of countercultural witness — a refusal to pretend that the world's cruelty had no cost, and a declaration that love does not flee in the face of suffering.

A Change in Our Good Friday Schedule This Year

This year, we are returning to an older and deeply moving tradition for our observance of Good Friday. Rather than our usual two services, Trinity will hold a single, extended service from Noon to 3:00 p.m. — the three hours that, by ancient tradition, mark the time Jesus hung upon the cross.

The service will center on the Seven Last Words of Christ, the seven utterances Jesus speaks from the cross as recorded in the four Gospels. Different clergy will offer meditations on each word, woven together with silence, reflection, and musical meditations from our choir and other musicians. These hours are designed to carry you — through scripture, music, and stillness — into the heart of what this day means.

Throughout the service, you will be invited to light candles at the foot of the cross — a simple, embodied gesture of connection with the sufferings of Christ and with the hope, not yet visible, that lies just beyond them.

The service is designed for you to come and go as you are able. Some will remain for all three hours. Others may come for an hour, or thirty minutes, or slip in quietly for twenty. This, too, will echo what actually happened on that fateful Friday. People came and went. Some stayed. Some fled. And over all of it hangs the haunting question from the Book of Lamentations, which the church has prayed on Good Friday for centuries:

"Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me."

We hope you will pass by — and stay awhile.