It was the great poet T.S. Eliot who said, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”[1] Good Friday is ostensibly the end. It is the end of the long, torturous walk to the cross. It is the end of a Lenten journey. It is the end of Jesus’s earthly life.
But today is also the beginning. Eliot understood the circularity of liturgical time, the non-linear trajectory of God’s time. Our sense of time was utterly confused on Palm Sunday after we acclaimed Jesus as king and then called for him to be crucified. We waited through the long, painful hours of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, a bit ashamed, perhaps, to find Christ washing our feet last night on Maundy Thursday. Despite our fickleness and penchant for betrayal, Christ nevertheless washed our feet and fed us with his Body and Blood, and he commanded us to love as he loves. Which is why we have come to this day.
Today is the end, but it is also the beginning. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” For some, Good Friday is just an end. It was an end for the soldiers and religious authorities who consigned Jesus to a brutal state execution. Today is only an end for contemporary purveyors of violence in authoritarian governments and modern-day religious figures who claim a monopoly on truth. It is an end for them because in controlling regimes, violence is how order is maintained. Violence is how truth is suppressed. Violence is how power is wielded. A mandated execution is an easy way to make the problem go away. Death is the end.
This strand of brutal violence has been consistently threaded throughout this Holy Week, looming underneath every act of love, lurking in every dark corner, away from the light. But for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, the end—today—is also the beginning. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” And that’s precisely what happens on Good Friday.
This is why St. John’s account of Jesus’s Passion is essential for this day. John tells a story that is artistically subtle, literarily complex, and theologically profound. John knows that the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. John also knows that only those who are seeking truth and are open to Jesus as Truth itself will understand this.
Do we understand it? After waiting with Jesus in his trial and passion this week, can we finally see on this day how God in Christ has waited patiently and lovingly with us all these many years? Through betrayals and spiritual amnesia and ungratefulness, God has always been with us, never forsaking us, never taking away God’s eternal love.
In case we missed it, John reminds us. After praying a long prayer to God the Father on behalf of his disciples, Jesus the Great High Priest goes to his death. And across the Kidron valley from the holy city of Jerusalem, in a garden, Jesus starts his final journey to the cross. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” God in Christ returns to the garden, that place of primordial betrayal when Adam and Eve refused to accept the limitations of their humanity and went their own way. For those who can only speak the language of violence, the garden is a place of doom. It is the end. But for those of us who have waited with Christ and learned something of God’s patience, the garden is the appropriate place for the end to make a beginning.
Christ continues to show us that his end is the beginning of something new. He refuses to return violence for violence. He doesn’t shirk his fate. He goes willingly to his death, carrying his own cross, completely in control of his destiny as it accords with the will of the Father. His trial is a sham because it’s based on deception and falsehood. But Love incarnate goes steadily and confidently to the cross to show that “to make an end is to make a beginning.”
Even in that last searing moment of human sin and evil, as Jesus is mocked as a king, even as the religious authorities and Pilate argue back and forth about Jesus’s fate, even as soldiers at the foot of the cross divide up Jesus’s seamless garment, God speaks truth plainly, quietly, and boldly, if we have ears to hear.
Throughout the many centuries leading up to this point, God’s saving acts have been evident but so often interpreted through the lens of human constructs of violence and retribution. But now, in Christ, God shows the perfect image of truth and love. Before he breathes his last, and as pure chaos happens at the foot of the cross among those who have crucified him, Jesus reverses it all and makes a beginning from an ending. From out of chaos, a new creation is born.
To the Blessed Mother, Jesus entrusts John the Beloved Disciple. To the Beloved Disciple, Jesus entrusts his dear mother. As an earthly life nears its end, eternal life continues. As Jesus is handed over to death, Jesus hands over his mission and his Spirit to the Church, formed there at the foot of the cross. And only after this has been done is Jesus able to announce the consummation of God’s saving work. It is finished. It is complete. It is perfected. The ending has become a beginning.
Just as when God began to create the heavens and the earth from out of pure chaos, God in Christ unleashes a new creation as the cross shines forth in glory. What is divided becomes united in the beginning of the Church, and death becomes the means to new life. A breath taken away by death becomes a life-giving Spirit to animate the Church to be Christ for the world.
And that is where we stand right now. We are at the foot of the cross. Christ has given us his Spirit. Christ has given us a command last night as he washed our feet, and perhaps we can begin to understand something of what this means. We must go and wash the feet of all—the dispossessed, the lonely the suffering, the forsaken. We must love them all, even our enemies, just as Christ loved us.
But before we can do that, there is something we must do. Christ has taught us how. Just as he, the Great High Priest, interceded for the salvation and wholeness of the world, we, too, must now move into the place he has prepared for us, as we pray, first, selflessly, for the whole world and its inhabitants whom Christ came to love and save. And only then do we pray for ourselves, “for the grace of a holy life,” that “we may be accounted worthy to enter into the fullness of the joy of our Lord.”[2]
Even on this somber day, we can now begin to taste the joy of our Lord. T.S. Eliot said it so well: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” And today is when we start.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 3, 2026
[1] From “Little Gidding’ in Four Quartets
[2] Book of Common Prayer, p. 280