Good Friday18 April 2025

Saint Margaret’s

Anglican Church

Budapest, Hungary

Good Friday

18 April 2025

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the of Holy Spirit.  Amen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  These simple words and the simple gesture which accompanies them, are a part of the prayer life of most Christians, no matter their persuasion, from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholic, from Anglican to many branches and parts of evangelical Protestantism.  

The Sign of the Cross, as it is often called, can be traced back in history to the late second century, or in other words, the late 100s.  No one knows who first came up with the idea, but the gesture seems to have preceded the words.  Already around the year 200, one Church Father, or sage, commented with only a little exaggeration that the Christians of his area were wearing out the skin of their foreheads with the sign of the Cross.

The Sign of the Cross of course occurs in many forms from a small Cross usually traced with the thumb or first three fingers of the right hand on the forehead to the larger gesture from forehead to heart and from shoulder to shoulder, right to left or left to right depending upon one’s spiritual tradition.  The gesture of course cannot help but remind us of the essential truth of our faith, the Cross of Christ and his death at Calvary for our redemption, which we commemorate this and every Good Friday.  

The words, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” seem to have come later in Church history.  But they represent in essence just about the shortest of all the Creeds of the Church; the essential truths of the Trinity as elaborated in the profound, if sometimes arcane, words of the Nicene Creed which we have been studying during this Lenten season under the capable tutelage of Deacon Dan.  Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  What more is there to say, when you get right down to it…?

So, the Sign of the Cross in a simple gesture and in sixteen simple words tells us just about everything we need to know about our Christian faith, everything we need to know about Good Friday.  A loving and eternal God, creator of all, extended his infinite love to sinful, mortal humankind.  To us. At the Cross, at the crossbeams of the eternal and the ephemeral, we are reunited with God and made one with God forever and sustained there in the Spirit.

And as our season of Lent began weeks ago with ash and dust, apt symbols of our transience, so it now ends in the full and transcendent meaning of that Cross traced upon our brows at Ash Wednesday.  As followers of Christ, we find our bearings, our signpost, in the Sign of the Cross.   The pain of the Cross is of course still very much with us today in the violence and suffering of our world and its peoples.  Children and the elderly are neglected and abused.  People lose their lives to terror and fanaticism.  War and racism infect nations all over the world.  Families are torn apart by differences peculiar to themselves. 

How can one find meaning, or even hope, amid such suffering?  Perhaps it only really does come in remembering the Sign of the Cross.  In remembering that the contradiction of the Cross is in essence the paradox of life, that it is only in giving of oneself fully, as Christ did for us, that one finds any meaning to existence at all.  Our broken mortal world probably cannot be fixed, but in the Cross, it can be healed.  And we can be a part of the healing.  But again, only in the Sign of the Cross.

Like the early Christians, my friends, let us wear out our thumbs and foreheads with the Sign of the Cross, with the sign of God’s abiding love, with the sign of hope. Start and end each day, each project, each chore or task, in the Cross, in the Sign of the Cross. Teach it to your children for generations to come.  And may these words and this gesture be among the last we say and do as our lives draw to a close, and the Father calls us home in the Spirit.  As Christ himself was lifted up for our sake at Calvary, he now draws us with him to greater things to come, to the Kingdom he came to proclaim.  

The Sign of the Cross is ultimately what Good Friday is all about, a day for questions of life or death, love or indifference, sin and redemption, the mortal and the eternal.  In the Sign of the Cross, we are guided along the journey which lies ahead of us, a journey which itself will surely take us through times of pain and sorrow, but one which ends, finally, not in death, but in life.  Not in corruption, but in resurrection.   One which ends, in other words, in the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.   

Amen.

The Revd Canon Dr Frank Hegedűs