Good Friday 2025: The Cross as Mission

Good Friday 2025: The Cross as Mission

The Rev. Paul D. Allick, Church of the Advent, April 18, 2025

There are many collects in the Book of Common Prayer that

strike a chord with me. One of them is one of the prayers for

mission at Morning Prayer. It was composed by the Charles

Henry Brent, bishop of the Philippines and Western New

York who died in 1929. He was both a missionary and a

leader in the ecumenical movement.

Let us pray the collect: Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out

your arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross that

everyone might come within the reach of your saving

embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth

our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to

the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name.

Amen. (BCP, p.101)

In this prayer we acknowledge, directly, to Jesus what he

endured on the cross. He stretched out his arms of love on

the cold, chaffing, hard wood of the Cross. There our

Savior’s love was pierced with the brutality of humankind.

Christ did not have to die. As he reminds us in the Gospel of

John, he lays down his life on his own accord, “...I have the

power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it up

again.” (10:18)

We did not have to die either. We choose to die: in the

Garden of Eden eating from the Tree of Knowledge, in the

Wilderness with our Golden Calf, in our countless

wanderings from God and his eternal Goodness. We choose

to die and, yet, Christ chooses to give us life.

His Cross, a symbol of death and defeat, becomes for us a

symbol of new life and a surrender to God’s will.

This is the Christian paradox which leads us into the mystery

of our salvation: in order to live we must die. We die to our

misplaced desires and worries and start living for something

so much larger. As we gaze upon the Cross, we remember

to live for God and for each other.

The Cross of Christ calls us to our ministry. In the collect, we

ask Jesus to clothe us in his Spirit so that we can reach out

our hands in love and bring others to the knowledge and

love of him.

The Spirit we are clothed in is a spirit of selflessness, of

gentleness, of respect. We are clothed in this Spirit at our

baptism. As this Spirit becomes our clothing, we reach out to

a world which stands trembling before the prospect of

eternal death.

Our hands of love are the hands that reach out to give the

Good News: you can find peace; you no longer need to fear

death.

Death no longer has dominion over our living. We are free to

give generously and to openly receive. We are free to live as

if we were eternal, because Christ’s Death and Resurrection

shows us once and for all that we are eternal.

Our Mission from the Cross is to reconcile all people to God

and each other through Christ. Our mission is Catholic: to

proclaim the whole Faith to all people, to the end of time.

Our mission is Apostolic: to continue in the teaching and

fellowship of the Apostles so that we can be sent out to

proclaim the Gospel. (BCP, Catechism pp. 854-855)

3

We conquer our own crosses by joining them with Christ’s

Cross. As we pray in the Morning Prayer Collect for Fridays

“...mercifully grant that we walking in the way of the cross,

may find it none other that the way of life and peace.” (BCP, p.99)

It is only through dying with Christ that we understand our

resurrection. In that daily process we find true joy, true life,

and true peace.