Good Friday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Simeon’s prophetic words to Mary follow immediately upon his prophecy about Jesus. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” It speaks to the meaning of Good Friday not just for “many in Israel” but also for the Gentiles, as the Nunc Dimittis makes clear. Christ is “a light to lighten the Gentiles,/and the glory of thy people Israel.” Holy Week has presented us with the spectacle of all human sin and cruelty as visited upon Jesus Christ. It is a week in which “the thoughts of many hearts” are brought to light, and if we have hearts to feel what we see and hear, our souls are surely doubly pierced: in grief and sorrow for our sins, and in joy and gladness for the love of God in Christ. But only because he is pierced by us and for us on the Cross. The question is whether we will be pierced inwardly by what we behold and see. If so, then this day will rightly be “Good” Friday for us individually and collectively.
We behold Christ crucified and we hear the last words of Christ on the Cross. In the devotional tradition of The Seven Last Words of Christ Crucified as developed in Lima, Peru, in the 17th century by an indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, and transported from there to Europe and then back again to the Americas, the last words begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the bond of their mutual and eternal love in the Spirit, words found in Luke’s account of the Passion. Tonight in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, we hear and participate in The Passion according to St. John.
John provides three of Christ’s last words just as Luke gives us three words of Christ. Matthew and Mark give us the same one word, Christ’s cry of dereliction. In Bedoya’s ordering, Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh word; John, the third, fifth and sixth word, Matthew and Mark, the fourth word. Tonight we hear the last word of Christ in John’s account: “It is finished.” It is the only word from the Cross without reference to anyone personally, without a personal pronoun, as it were. It is a kind of objective summary or conclusion. The Greek makes it clear that it signals the sense of accomplishment, an end or purpose achieved; a telos.
What is finished then? Simply the whole purpose of going up to Jerusalem, namely the work of human redemption through the Passion of Christ understood as accomplishing the divine will for our good, the good that belongs to the goodness of God himself. All that belongs to the work of human redemption has been accomplished in Christ’s sacrifice. It is simply done and done for all time, for all and for all of suffering creation.
What is finished is at once cosmic and individual, universal and personal, for all who will it, meaning all who seek what God seeks for us. “Salvation to all that will is nigh,” as John Donne puts it, “that all, which always is all everywhere.” He is playing on the different senses of all – “all that will” meaning human beings, and “all” meaning the omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternity of God, the “all” that is God himself. “It is finished” means that Christ has gathered all the fragments of our broken lives and world into unity in himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit. All is complete.
There is nothing left to be done. The divine will for our salvation is accomplished fully and completely in Christ’s sacrifice. As one of the Good Friday anthems puts it: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” What greater good could there be? Yet we only see this darkly through the Passion and Death of Christ. It is all there but we aren’t all there in a spiritual and metaphorical sense. Though fully accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice, it is not yet fully realised in us. Justified in Christ we are not fully perfected or sanctified in Christ.
“It is finished”, Jesus says, and dies, but are we finished? John tells us that after Jesus dies he is pierced by the soldier’s spear to confirm his death. But then out of his side flows water and blood signifying life and resurrection. The life of God experiences the full reality of sin and death in Christ crucified out of whose death comes eternal life. The divine life embraces our death and already makes it a means of life.
One of John Donne’s poems, perhaps one of his last, though probably written in 1623 during a time of serious illness, subsequently set to music by his contemporary, John Hilton, is entitled “A Hymn to God the Father.” A slightly different version is entitled “To Christ.” A meditation on prayer and suffering, it partly plays on his name ‘Donne/done’ and on his wife’s name, Ann More, ‘More/more’. “Wilt thou forgive that sin, where I begun … though it were done before? … that sin, through which I run, And do run still? … that sin which I have won others to sin, and made my sin their door? … that sin which I did shun a year or two; but wallowed in, a score?” he asks God precisely out of his consciousness of sin and suffering. For “when thou hast done, thou hast not done/ For I have more,” meaning more sins.
Our sins, it seems, are endless and ongoing, a kind of schlechte unendlichkeit, a bad infinity of desires in endless disarray. But the radical point of Good Friday is that Christ’s sacrifice embraces and overcomes all sin and suffering – past, present, and future – as such nothing more can be done than that which has been done. It is all. Christ’s suffering embraces all the sufferings of our world in all times and places. Thus Donne seeks God’s mercy at his own end when he can envision and pray “that at my death thy son/ Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore:/ And, having done that, thou hast done,/ I fear no more.” What underlies the Passion is already the life of the Resurrection, the life of God which knows no end.
He is pierced on the Cross that we may be pierced in sorrow for our sins and pierced in love for the love of Christ made visible on the Cross. To see and feel this is the good of Good Friday. We are pierced and moved to repentance and love.
“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2026