I’ve just not got that Good Friday feeling this year. Normally, I’m looking forward to the Good Friday services, polishing off my highly honed sense of sin and guilt, and bringing out the hair shirt and the whip. This year, none of that is stirring my footsteps. I have no interest in my usual morbid indulgences in self-flagellation, which can be so easily justified at a time like this in the Church year.

I’m not going to apologise for not feeling it this year, either. It’s no sin to not bring out the scourge at a time like this. Many people seem to manage quite well without their own personal crown of thorns. So why, year after year, have I proceeded to nail myself up on the cross next to Christ?

Good Friday is the beginning of Easter, in many ways. The three day countdown. God hung high on the cross. In some traditions, the Maundy Thursday masses contain as part of them the stripping of the vestments from the altar, and an utter denudement of the church itself. Even the church is stripped, in memory. And this carries with it the feeling that God is … gone. God is on the cross, again and again, Every Good Friday, Christ is tortured, hung on the cross, and dies again, and the church is empty, bereft. It’s all symbolism, of course, but there is a very real feeling behind it.

And on the Easter vigil, Christ rises again, the vestments are put back for Easter Morning, the lights are turned back on again, and everything is glorious in white and gold. Christ is risen again. He is risen in deed, Hallelujah.

As I said, I’m not in Good Friday mood this year. This is because I’m still in Easter Mood. The low masses of Good Friday are not stirring my soul quite like the high masses of Easter. Last year was my Good Friday. Last year, I was beaten, pilloried, mocked and hung upon the cross. Last year, I walked through Hell, and beside me all the way, Christ walked too. And so, as I walked out of that valley of death, as I arose anew, alive, from the tomb with Christ, I walked forward into the dawn of my own Easter.

That’s why Good Friday isn’t pulling me down this year. Every year before, seeing beyond Good Friday has been hard. But now, I can see the open tomb beyond, I can see the sunlight shining in the East – the Easter sunlight. Now, in my head are not the dirges of Lent and Good Friday, but the high triumphalist Easter hymns. Thine Be The Glory, resounding and reechoing in my head, its notes reaching up to heaven.

I am in Easter mood, even now. This year is the first in many years where I won’t be able to take advantage of the high mass on Easter Day. The first piece of Sunday work in a long time. But Easter will still be there, its glorious tones propelling me forward.