Good Friday, April 3, 2026
Matthew 27:45–54 | Christopher Ingram
At noon the sky goes dark.
Not at midnight. Not at dusk. At noon, when the sun is highest and shadows have nowhere to hide, the light fails over Jerusalem and remains for three hours. Matthew uses the same word for this darkness that Genesis uses for the chaos before creation. Something is being unmade.
This is where the series has been heading since Ash Wednesday. Every shadow we named across six weeks arrives here at once. The secret appetite. The hesitation. The buried shame. The defended blindness. The sealed grief. The violence that needed a legal framework to feel respectable. All of it, the full accumulated weight of what human beings do when they turn away from God, lands on one person, at noon, in the dark.
And from the cross comes a cry that has no bottom. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46).
He is praying Psalm 22. He knows the whole psalm. He knows where it ends. And he still prays the first verse out loud, because the darkness is real and the forsakenness is real and he will not perform a courage he doesn’t feel. This is not a moment of doubt. It is the deepest possible act of trust, a Son bringing his whole broken experience to his Father without softening it.
At the center of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a character who has absorbed so much pain across so many versions of a broken world that she concludes nothing matters. The film’s answer to her is not an argument. It is a person who chooses to love her anyway, across every version of everything, without conditions. God’s answer to our despair is the same. There is not a rebuttal, but a cross.
The veil in the temple tears from top to bottom, which is Matthew’s way of telling us the barrier is not removed by human hands (Matt 27:51). God tears open the boundary that religion maintained between the holy God and everyone else. That rupture cost the life of God’s Son. Then a Roman soldier, an instrument of the empire that just carried out the execution, looks up and says what the chief priests could not bring themselves to say. “Truly this man was God’s Son” (Matt 27:54). The people with the most to gain from seeing it missed it. The one with no category for it saw it clearly. That is still how it tends to work.
There is no tidy ending today. But the soldier saw something real, and the veil is still torn, and the cry from the cross was heard by the same Father who has never once failed to hear.
Sunday is coming. But we are not there yet.
Prayer:God who heard the cry from the cross, I bring you the places in my life where it still feels like Friday. The prayers that haven’t been answered. The hurts that haven’t lifted. There are things I cannot fix no matter how hard I try. Your Son brought his whole broken heart to you from that cross and you did not look away. I trust you are not looking away now. Hold me here until Sunday comes. Amen.