If we have been following our Lord through Holy Week, we find ourselves with him at the lowest point. Jesus is crucified, and dying, and soon Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea and his other friends will come to take his body down and bury it.

This moment is something which we find very hard to face, because it is suffering and death, and we face our own worst nightmares here. We are quite comfortable to have a crucifix hanging in our church, we can even hang the image around our necks; and we can sing about the cross, and pray about it too, but there are few Christians who can face the Crucifixion of Jesus in its terrifying reality. It is really too horrible to imagine, but we are so used to talking about it that it is no longer horrible - it is like a television program, where we see a tsunami sweeping people to their deaths, or where we see a row of slaughtered bodies in Iraq - we see the image before us, but the reality, thank God, is far away, and we are safe. Even if we wanted to, we could not stand alongside those people and share their suffering, even if we wanted to we could not stand and and watch Christ die - that is for his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene - they, of all the characters in the Jesus story, are the ones who went with Jesus down into the pit.

And we cannot.

So where do we look in this story for comfort?

I find the story of Peter most comforting, because Peter was one who, like me, could not go down to the pit with Jesus. Peter is the one who boasts a lot, and talks a lot, and jumps in impulsively, but in the end denies the saviour. After the arrest, Peter followed at a safe distance. He wanted to be there at the trial, but could only bring himself to stand at the gate. As he stood there, three times he was asked, "Are you not one of Jesus followers?" and three times he answered. "No."

And at once a rooster crowed.

St John says no more, but Peter would have remembered his boast to Jesus and Jesus reply, "Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times."

How awful it is to fail and to know that you have failed. How we torture ourselves and blame ourselves when it happens to us. If only I'd said this... or If only I'd done that... If only I had not promised to do that... We look at our own witness as Christians, how often we have failed to do the things we feel we ought to have done, and how bitterly we blame ourselves.

It is good for us to know that we are in the company of Peter. If he could not go down to the pit with Jesus, he can certainly stand alongside us. Peter was no hero. He was not like those superhuman perfect Christians whose achievements, holiness and uprightness make us feel so inferior. We all know people like that, they make us feel judged and found wanting, like second class Christians.

Peter is not like that. He, like most of us, did not make a very good Christian, and the New Testament does not try to pretend otherwise. That is why it is such a marvellous book to read, with its failures and betrayals, its tears and its great sorrows. All these very human failings are entwined with the triumphant story of God.

God's great story begins in the past so distant and so mysterious that the writers of the Bible could only speak of it in parables - the parable of Creation, of Adam and Eve, of Noah's ark - through these parables we try to see God the Creator at work. And so the story begins.

Later we see God at work in human history - specifically in the history of the Israelite people in their struggle for a homeland. They believed that God guided and aided them - but the echoes of the cruelty and violence of that time are with us still in the Holy Land.

Today we tell another part of the story - Jesus, who was a good man, what ever you believe about him - Jesus is killed. The good and the bad are so closely joined that not even God can separate them - the Good News that Jesus brought to the people of Jerusalem is disregarded and its place is taken by division, hatred and violence - which we call sin.

Every time we turn to the cross on Good Friday we are confronted - confronted with the Pit, with Sin and Death, and with the fatal mixture of good and bad in all of us.

But, even in the depths of Good Friday, even at the foot of the Cross, even faced with our own faults, we can take heart. We take heart partly because we know that the resurrection is very close - only a couple of days away - but we also rejoice because our God is with us all the way to the tomb and beyond. God is present and real and with us and for us on Good Friday as much as at any other time. When Judas and Peter and the other disciples betrayed him and denied him and ran away, Jesus loved them no less than when they were walking the roads of Galilee. So when we do these things and more to others, Jesus loves us no less than when we are closest to God. And also when we suffer for things that happen to us - the ordinary everyday crucifixions of life as well as the terrible traumas that afflict us - when we suffer, we can be sure that Christ suffers with us and for us - even if we cannot imagine the crucifixion of Christ and go down into the pit with him, we can imagine that he can be with us when we are crucified - and today, Good Friday, is the day when we know this it is true.