Homily for Good Friday, Celebration of the Passion of the Lord

April 3, 2026
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 31:2, 6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42

The celebration of the Passion of the Lord, with all of the prayers and liturgical actions attached to this ceremony, is the Church’s way of displaying the fundamental battle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between love and sin. This is the battle that Christ has definitively won through His surrendering Himself to death and His Resurrection from the dead, putting death to death. Yet it is a battle that remains in the interiority of our souls and in our responsibilities in this world. The heart of our part of this battle is the willingness to decide to place our hope only in God’s power manifest in Christ’s loving action on the Cross and to act accordingly.

Forty days of Lent have reminded us that we are completely powerless over sin, and without placing ourselves in God’s merciful hands, we repeatedly attach ourselves to sin and death. The season of Lent has prepared us for this day, an outwardly dark day because of the gravest sin of rejection of God’s love and the death of Christ, but the day whose true brightness will shine with its full significance revealed in the empty tomb. Today is the day of the Cross. Today is the day of hope. Today is the day for a decision to accept our part in Christ’s Cross and to reject the temptation to live with a heart divided between light and darkness, good and evil, love and sin.

Reflecting on this in 2005, the theologian Joseph Ratzinger preached on Good Friday, “Pilate is not utterly evil. He knows that the condemned man is innocent, and he looks for a way to free him. But his heart is divided. And in the end, he lets his own position, his own self-interest, prevail over what is right. Nor are the men who are shouting and demanding the death of Jesus utterly evil. Many of them, on the day of Pentecost, will feel ‘cut to the heart,’ when Peter will say to them: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God… you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.’ But at that moment they are caught up in the crowd. They are shouting because everyone else is shouting, and they are shouting the same thing that everyone else is shouting. And in this way, justice is trampled underfoot by weakness, cowardice, and fear of the dictate of the ruling mindset. The quiet voice of conscience is drowned out by the cries of the crowd. Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”

We mark this Good Friday as people who are not utterly evil but as people with divided hearts. We mark this Good Friday as people who live today when everybody is shouting angry epithets and drowning out not only faith but reason. We mark this Good Friday as people who are indecisive, cowardly, and driven by passion and self-interest. But we mark this Good Friday as people of hope, as the People of God. Today we behold the Cross, our only hope, on which hung the Savior of the World. Come let us adore.