Hail, brothers and sisters, on this day, in remembrance of the day on which Jesus Christ entered willingly into His Passion, and gave Himself up to His captors and tormentors to be put to death.

Obviously nobody that reads my work regularly needs to be told this, but Christian tradition teaches us that Christ’s death upon the Cross was done as an act of holy sacrifice, to redeem the sins of Man in the eyes of the Lord and Father. And all who believe that Christ is Lord and redeemer, and that He died for our sins, are therefore redeemed as well.

Contrary to what atheists might like you to think, this is actually very, very difficult to believe. It is even more difficult to live up to – because believing in Christ does not give the believer a Get Out of Hell Free card for life. The believer is required to behave in accordance with the teachings of Christ, as laid out in the Gospels and in His sermons – and this is an exceptionally difficult path to follow.

Pretty much nobody, not even the most holy and righteous of priests and monks, can stay on that path.

And that is how it should be. Nobody ever said that the righteous path would be an easy one to walk.

Christianity is not easy. It is not trivial. It is not the quick way out. It is bloody hard to be a good Christian – which is why so many Christians themselves freely admit that they are not good exemplars of their own faith.

With that in mind – may all of you have a peaceful and holy Good Friday, as we remember the sacrifice of Christ, and strive to live up to the example that He gave us.

A reading from the Gospel of St. John 19:16, ESV:

The Crucifixion

So they took Jesus,
17 and ^ohe went out, ^pbearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha.
18 ^qThere they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.
19 Pilate ^ralso wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, for ^sthe place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.
21 So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’”
22 Pilate answered, ^t“What I have written I have written.”