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GOOD FRIDAY has been free to date of the tendency to commercialise and secularise religious holidays. So far, there are no noticeable efforts by card makers to cash in on it nor have the windows of the best department stores been decorated with Good Friday themes. For the message of Good Friday is stark and challenging: it asks questions to which there are no easy, slick, commercial or profitable answers.

The mainstream churches share a lengthy but common reading today from Saint John's Gospel (John 18:1 - 19:42). It is a desolate story of isolation, betrayal, false accusation, miscarriage of justice, denial, abdication of responsibility, rejection of ambition, questioning of values, torture, vilification, crass power play, humiliation, dehumanisation, abandonment and - ultimately - cruel death. And yet it is a story in which gentle tenderness and compassionate love continually break through the walls of hatred and in which light persistently pierces through the dark. It is a story for today for it is the story of our world.