Good Friday 2026
Divine Pity: Homily by Abbot Brendan
The Roman historian Tacitus, justifying the Emperor’s persecution of the early Christians, described the spread of Christianity as a kind of infection—a dangerous superstition. We can understand it from their perspective. It was a society that honoured strength and power, that maintained order through fear and force.
With such a mindset, the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would later say that there was nothing more unhealthy than Christian compassion. “Christianity,” he said, “is the religion of pity…Think of the case of the death of the Nazarene.” Pity, for him, was weakness.
He meant this seriously. Christianity stands with the weak, the suffering, the rejected—the poor, the sick, the marginalised. It dares to say that suffering with others is not failure but virtue. In other words, compassion is at the very heart of it. And the death of Jesus on that first Good Friday is its clearest expression.
Brothers and sisters, we are here because of the death of the Nazarene. And so we must ask ourselves, honestly: as we look at our world today, do we really believe that the pursuit of power, force, and aggression is the answer? History tells the same story again and again: the strong crush the weak, nations rise and fall, and still the violence continues. “Even now, men and women are sent to their deaths in the pursuit of power.”
No—on this day, we stand somewhere else.
We stand on the side of compassion.
We stand with the Nazarene.
We stand at the foot of the Cross.
Hannah Arendt wrote that “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Barbarism does not begin with open violence. It begins quietly—when we stop seeing the other as human, when we no longer try to understand, when we no longer allow ourselves to feel. Her warning, born from the experience of the Holocuast, feels disturbingly close to us now, in a world where enemies are easily dehumanised and the bonds of our common humanity begin to fray.
Jesus goes to his death doing the opposite.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Even in the moment of violence, he seeks to understand. Even as he is rejected, he refuses to reject. Even as he is destroyed, he does not abandon love.
This is divine compassion—not weakness,
but a strength the world does not recognise.
Compassion is not a failure. It is not naïve. It is not a cultural weakness. It is the very heart of Christ’s life and teaching. His life overflowed with compassion for others. “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.” To stand at the Cross is to stand in that truth.
The Lord God said to Israel: “You shall not oppress the stranger; you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” To know the heart of the other—to feel something of their burden, even when they are not like us, even when they oppose us—is to begin to live differently. Compassion breaks the cycle. It opens another way.
Empathy is not tribal. It reaches beyond loyalties and likeness. It sees every person as made in the image of God.
Think of that great hymn of the Passion, the Stabat Mater. Mary stands by the Cross. At first, we simply look. But slowly, the prayer draws us in. We begin to ask not just to observe, but to share: fac, ut tecum lúgeam—make me mourn with you. The Christian does not stand at a distance. The Christian asks for the grace to feel, to suffer with, to love.
One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Poemen, was once found in deep prayer. When asked where he had been, he answered simply: “My thoughts were with Mary, the Mother of God, as she wept by the Cross of the Saviour; and I thought—if only I could always weep like that.” Not despair—but love. Not weakness—but a heart made alive.
Saint Paul tells us: “Weep with those who weep.” The Fathers of the Church spoke of the gift of tears—what the Greeks called penthos—compunction, mourning, a heart opened by suffering. Simeon the New Theologian teaches that such tears are not only for our own sins, but for the world—for others.
And in a beautiful image he says that:
“Tears are a second baptism, repeating and perfecting the first.”
They are not sterile. They are life-giving.
They cleanse, they renew, they open the heart to God.
They flow for the world’s healing and give us hope.
So we come to the Cross today with our tears.
Not explanations. Not solutions. But tears.
If our hearts have grown hard, if suffering no longer moves us,
if we have learned to look away — then today we ask for one gift:
compassion.
God grant us the grace to stand with the Nazarene. To remain at the Cross.
To refuse the logic of violence and indifference.
Because in the end, it will not be power that saves the world.
It will be this: a love that suffers, a love that remains, a love that forgives —
even here, even now.
