A Good Friday Reflection on the Death of Jesus (John 18-19)
On this day, we stop at the death of Jesus. We do not jump ahead to resurrection. We stay here, at the cross, and let it speak—not as a placeholder for Easter, but as the place where something is accomplished.
“It is finished.” The words are not ones of exhaustion or defeat. St John (the Gospel’s writer) gives us no cry of abandonment. Instead, we hear a declaration—not of mere ending, but of fulfilment. The goal is reached. But what is this goal? And what does it mean that Jesus’ death—this sign of humiliation, failure, cruelty, violence and abuse—can be seen as an act of ‘glory’?
We often avoid the sharp edge of Good Friday. We are at risk of spiritualising, justifying and beautifying the suffering, violence and injustice. We turn it into a divine transaction. But John’s Gospel pushes us into deeper waters. John tells us that the death of Jesus is not a step toward victory—it is the moment of divine glory itself.
This is not because death is good. Jesus’ crucifixion remains a sin, an act of betrayal and oppression. But what the authorities meant to shame, God transfigures. What the crowd intended as public humiliation, John reveals as offering and sacrifice.
The death of Jesus is not the satisfaction of God’s wrath. It does not mean the brutality of God thirsting for blood and death either. It is love, exposed and revealed.
What John, the beloved disciple, reminds us today is that Jesus is not just one who heals or teaches but the one who dies on the cross. Because here, at the end, we see the truth: that God meets us not by bypassing human suffering, but by inhabiting it fully. Jesus doesn’t die to endorse suffering—he dies to rob it of its power. And to do that, he has to go all the way into it.
In Jesus, none of our suffering will be erased immediately like doing magic. But all our tears, pains, angers, loss, weakness, guilt, grief, and addiction are gathered up. None of it is passed over. However, in the death of Jesus, all of it is lifted up,
In Jesus, the inescapable and seemingly meaningless suffering of our lives is not erased, but gathered up. That private grief that won’t let go, that guilt that runs so deep it feels part of us, that endless repetition of weakness or addiction, that fate or loss we can’t understand—none of it is passed over. In the death of Jesus, all of it is lifted up, handed over, and shot through with a glory that doesn’t remove the pain—but transfigures its place in the story.
This does not mean that pain is good, or that suffering is something to seek. On the contrary, to say the cross is glory is not to glorify suffering—it is to say that God’s love does not stop where suffering begins.
There is something unspeakably hard in this: that the very place we would most like to escape—our brokenness, our helplessness, our hopelessness, our dying—is the place where God meets me. And not to fix it, necessarily. Not to make it feel better. But to be present in it.
Rowan Williams once said that “what’s pleasing in obedience is that God sees in the world a reflection of his own selfless love.” That’s what happens on the cross. In Jesus’ death, God sees mirrored back the very love God has poured into the world. A love that gives itself away entirely. A love that endures even betrayal, abandonment, and humiliation.
In Jesus, sacrifice is no longer the transaction of appeasement—it becomes the full expression of divine love. The perfect gift to God is God himself—God’s own life, given and received in radical trust. That’s what “It is finished” means. The gift has been made. The life has been given. Nothing held back.
And so, in this dark hour, we stand where words fail. No tidy moral lesson or theology to wrap it up. Just the body of Jesus, hanging on the cross. And somehow, even in this dead time, we are invited to place our hope—not in what we feel, but in what has already been done.
We often cannot see it. We are overwhelmed by our own pain, our own sin, and the suffering of the world. Yet in the still place at the centre of the storm, something has already shifted. Something is already accomplished.
This is the mystery of Good Friday. That salvation does not come by violence, but through the refusal of violence. That power is not proven by domination, but by love stretched out, nailed down, poured out. That death itself is not ended, but transformed.
And if we listen closely, we may hear what John has always been telling us: that the crucified Jesus, in this moment of apparent failure, reveals the face of God.
He bows his head. He gives up his spirit. And in that final breath, the world is changed. This afternoon, we do not come to explain the cross, but to venerate it—to honour the work accomplished by God in Jesus’s death, and to let it speak. To let its silence speak more loudly than all our words. As we proclaimed in the Stations of the Cross: We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.