From “Good Friday” – Right Rev Brian Burgess. From the Anglican Digest, Spring, 2024
A childhood friend reached out to Burgess close to a weekend. The friend was serving as a sheriff. At the time the friend was 2 hours away. He asked if the priest could get away for the weekend to catch up. It was not the usual weekend, however. It was the Triduum, the last days of Easter. The priest could not slip away. So his friend came to his church. Although not part of any church, he came to the priest’s Good Friday service. The priests reflected in an article about Good Friday.
He described the church as “tomb-like in an intentional way”. What my friend experienced was the church – “stripped, cold, and bare.” “It was a place where death goes in order to be prepared for the resurrected glory in Christ.” The priest wrote that Good Friday is the one service essential for those unchurched. “I believe we lose sight of the essence of Easter when we have no concept of what it is we are being saved from. We can become distracted from the cross of Christ. To merely survive is to shoot too low.”
“The goal of our Christian lives is our death and resurrection in Jesus Christ.” He noted the sheriff has “experienced the worst of the worst when it comes to the human condition, and who by default has been given secular responsibility for broken and fractured lives.” On Good Friday, “the very worst of our secular lives is turned into sacred” “Eternal life begins now.”
With Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter “are an expression of God that demands to be told as well as experienced, in one, complete, ongoing story.” “Our dying in Christ while being stretched out on the hardwood of the cross is integral to that story.”