South Africa: Good Friday in a Time of War

Cape Town — Holy Week stands as the period when the church deliberately steps into the heart of human suffering: the pain of betrayal, the sting of abandonment, the injustice of judicial murder, and the haunting silence of God. The significance of this week lies in the enormity of what it represents. In the Eastern tradition, it is called Megale Hebdomas, the Great Week, precisely because it confronts the most profound events in the Christian story.

This year, the Great Week unfolds beneath the shadow of war.

The bombs falling on the ancient cities of Iran — on Isfahan, on Tehran, on Shiraz — fall on a people of poets and mystics, of Rumi’s reed bed and Hafiz’s wine, of a civilisation that has carried the name of God in Persian for longer than most of our traditions can remember.

We are required, as people of faith, to hold a distinction the gospel itself demands: between those who govern in the name of God while suppressing their own people, and those who have borne the weight of that governance — the women who have marched unveiled into the guns, the young who have died in the streets, the families driven into exile by a theocracy that has waged its own long war upon them.

This Holy Week, my thoughts turn to Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, who now serves as the Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford. Born in Isfahan in 1966, she is the daughter of Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the first Persian Anglican bishop. Her family’s story is marked by tragedy and resilience: in 1980, her brother Bahram was murdered, and her parents narrowly survived an assassination attempt. When Guli was only fourteen, her family was forced to flee their homeland, driven into exile by violence and persecution. Bishop Francis-Dehqani embodies a rich and inseparable dual identity—she is Iranian, and she is Anglican, wholly and without remainder. The bombs that descend upon Iran this Holy Week do not target the regime responsible for her family’s suffering; instead, they fall upon her people, the very community from which she comes. Her story reminds us that the toll of conflict is borne not in abstraction, but by individuals and families whose lives are forever shaped by the violence that surrounds them.

It is a bitter irony that Iran and Iraq, the very geo-biblical heartland of ancient Christianity—the land where the Magi once journeyed, where Daniel prophesied, and where the earliest apostolic missions ventured eastward from Jerusalem—have become, in our time, regions marked by violent dislocation for the people of God. These lands, so central to the Christian story, now witness the suffering and upheaval of communities that have carried the faith across centuries.

Among those who embody this enduring witness is His Beatitude Cardinal Louis Raphaël I Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon. As shepherd of one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, he leads a congregation that speaks Aramaic—the ancient language of Jesus himself. The Chaldean Church has preserved the Gospel since before the great creeds were written, before the historic councils convened, and before the institutional church took its present form. Despite being driven from Baghdad in 2023 when the Iraqi state revoked his legal recognition, Cardinal Sako has returned. He remains steadfast, and the church in Babylon endures.

These realities find a place in our daily lives as the spike in oil prices amid Middle Eastern conflict, South African fuel prices follow within weeks — and with them, taxi fares, food costs, and the price of every imported good from medicine to machinery.

On the Cape Flats and in the gang-ridden streets of Gauteng, the daily calculation is grimmer still: which route is safe this morning, which corner is controlled by which faction. The deployment of over 2,200 SANDF soldiers to crime hotspots across the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and Gauteng is a formal acknowledgment that the violence has exceeded the reach of ordinary policing. For the child navigating that route to school, the cost of war is not measured in rands. It is measured in the geography of fear.

The Passion narrative intimately understands the terrain of human suffering and endurance. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus turns to his closest friends, imploring them to remain awake with him during his time of anguish. Yet they succumb to sleep— because they reach the threshold of what human beings are able to witness and endure. The human psyche, confronted by relentless suffering and sorrow, instinctively seeks refuge through its own mechanisms of sleep.

This sleep manifests in modern forms: we scroll past troubling images on our screens, we change the subject in conversation, and we develop a subtle, protective numbness without even realising it.

Good Friday calls us, as it called those disciples, to wake up. To look and name what is actually happening in the world and refuse to normalise it. The cross stands where love stands — not in comfort, not at a safe distance, but in the specific, named, bodied places of the world’s pain. In Isfahan. In Baghdad. In Rafah. In Manenberg.

The women who wept on the road to Golgotha could not stop the crucifixion. What they could do — what they did — was witness. They followed all the way. They stood at the foot of the cross. They were present at the burial. And on the third day, it was these same women — the ones who had refused to look away — who became the first witnesses to the resurrection. Their tears were seeds.

The women who wept on the road to Golgotha were powerless to prevent the crucifixion from unfolding. Their strength lay not in changing the outcome, but in bearing witness to what was happening. They followed Jesus through the entire ordeal, refusing to abandon him even as events grew darker. Reaching the place of execution, they stood faithfully at the foot of the cross, sharing in the agony and sorrow of that moment. Their presence extended beyond the crucifixion; they were there at the burial, offering their grief and love in the final acts of care.

And when the third day arrived, it was these same women—the ones who had steadfastly refused to look away—who were the first to encounter the resurrection. Their tears, shed in suffering and solidarity, became seeds of hope, marking the beginning of new life and bearing witness to the transformative power of enduring compassion.

We are not yet at Easter. Today, we weep, and we walk.

All people of faith and conscience are invited to join in another prayerful journey of solidarity with our Palestinian siblings through the 2026 Cape Town Pilgrimage for Palestine. The walk of 42 kilometres — the length of Gaza — is in solidarity with the millions who have been displaced and murdered, fleeing their homes amid the ongoing genocide. The Pilgrimage will take place on Holy Saturday, 4 April 2026. Walk all 42 kilometres, or walk in sections. Walk with us.

By Michael Ian Weeder