Easter 2026 | To The Cross

Over the past two days we have journeyed to the cross, with the help of the Book of Belonging.

You can find playlists for our Tenebrae and Good Friday services below, as well as the text of our Good Friday reflection.

“It shows us the very worst things in human hearts, all at once.” Good Friday is an apocalypse, a revelation. The curtain is not just pulled back but torn in two, and there can be no hiding from the worst of our humanity. It is not just that an innocent man has been killed, it is that we will destroy goodness if it asks too much of us.

And yet Jesus says “forgive them”. He is not revealing the very worst things so that we can be punished for them, but so that we can be released of them, so that we can see the truth and do better. Because this is how God loves us, that he will choose to die in order that we might truly live. The tattered curtain does not just reveal us, it reveals God too. And it reveals a God who always chooses love above all things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tough love recently. Normally when people use that phrase, they’re talking about being tough on the person they love, as if cruelty could ever mask itself as kindness. But perhaps there is another way of thinking about that phrase. Perhaps tough love is love that endures, love that withstands, love that does the hard stuff and the messy stuff and the painful stuff. And perhaps that kind of tough love can still be gentle.

Jesus shows us this kind of tough love. A love that is not afraid to challenge injustice and get its hands dirty and accept brutality when it comes as the consequence for making good trouble. A love that reaches out to embrace the dispossessed and weeps at the grave of a beloved friend and bends to wash companions’ feet.

But it’s not just Jesus that shows us this kind of tough love. While most of his disciples flee in fear of their own lives, one  has the courage to remain. And so does Jesus’ mother. Mary who said “your will be done” thirty years before Jesus prayed those words in the garden. Mary whose body was broken and whose blood was shed to bring Christ into the world. Mary who in my sanctified imagination taught Jesus to make good trouble as she sang the Magnificat to him as a lullaby.

Because tough love is not just for God. We too are called to show tough love. To endure, to withstand, to do the hard stuff and the messy stuff and the painful stuff. And to do it all with a gentleness that embraces and weeps and bends. We too are called to follow the example of the cross and stretch out our arms with love.