GOOD FRIDAY LITURGY

April 7, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

The cross is the archetypal symbol of Christian faith. Apart from its historical role as the instrument of the Lord’s torture and death, some commentators see its intersection of vertical and horizontal beams as a visual symbol of Incarnation. The vertical beam symbolizes transcendence. It points to heaven above, and to eternity. The horizontal beam symbolizes immanence. It points to the world around us, the here and the now. So, the cross’s intersection of vertical and horizontal beams signifies the union of transcendence and immanence, eternity and time, spirit and matter, divine and human, in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. 

 

At the historical level, moreover, the Lord’s actual death on a wooden cross on the hill of Golgotha also exhibits both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Up the vertical axis, the suffering Jesus is offering to his Father in heaven the one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world; and the Father looking down from heaven is lovingly accepting his Son’s sacrifice. Along the horizontal axis, the dying Lord is stretching out his arms of love to gather in all humanity and all creation; and conversely his life, forgiveness, grace, and strength are flowing from his outstretched arms to the world’s remotest ends.

This ancient Good Friday liturgy exhibits a fourfold structure, which oscillates back and forth between these vertical and horizontal orientations. First, our attention is drawn upwards, vertically, to Jesus lifted high upon the cross. Then, our attention is redirected outwards, horizontally, to the world he died to save. And then the pattern repeats itself.

 

We begin with the Liturgy of the Word, culminating in the Passion according to Saint John. It focuses our attention on Jesus, on what actually happened to him on Good Friday. In some churches, the Passion is read dramatically, with readers taking the various spoken parts. In parishes that have the resources to do so, the Passion is sung to the ancient chants, with the cantors and choir taking the various parts. Either way, the goal is a performative recitation, aiming not merely at remembering something that happened in the past, but making it vivid and real, transporting us back, so that we become virtual eyewitnesses; or, conversely, bringing it forward into the present so that we experience it here and now in all its naked terror and awe. In this way, we’re able to give an affirmative answer question posed in the old spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Yes, we were there. We are there.

Then, following a sermon or homily, which is ideally kept brief, we turn our attention from the cross outwards, towards the world, reciting the ancient prayers known as the Solemn Collects. This movement has a deep inner logic. It’s not simply that since there's really nothing left to say, we may as well say some prayers. No, having just listened to the Passion Gospel, we ask God the Father to apply the benefits of his Son’s death “to all people everywhere, according to their needs.” We make these prayers in the assurance that “God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” The Church’s liturgical response to the proclamation of the Lord’s death is thus to pray for all those for whom he died.

 

Continuing our alternation between the vertical and the horizontal, we turn our attention once again to the cross, this time in loving adoration. A cross is brought in for the congregation’s veneration. The rubrics specify that this cross must be made of wood, like the cross on which Jesus was crucified. This ceremony dates back to the fourth-century Church in Jerusalem, where worshippers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher would line up for hours on Good Friday to kiss a large fragment of the true Cross that would be unveiled and exposed for that purpose.

 

Then comes the fourth part of the liturgy, the Mass of the Presanctified. We retrieve from the Altar of Repose the Blessed Sacrament reserved at last night’s Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In many churches, the Sacrament is reserved one kind only, the sacred hosts but not the wine, to emphasize that today’s liturgy is not another Mass, no fresh offering of the Holy Eucharist, but a Communion from the Reserved Sacrament—an extension of the single extended Triduum liturgy that began last night.

 

The Church’s sacramental theology teaches us that we receive the grace of Holy Communion just as fully in one kind as in both kinds. The Pandemic brought this teaching home to us, I think, when Communion in both kinds was taken away from us under emergency conditions. 

But still, Communion in one kind diminishes the symbolism. The English Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols writes: “

We are invited to come to Communion under the deliberately deficient symbolism of the single species. As orthodox Catholics we know that our Lord is wholly present in his full Godhead and his full manhood under either Eucharistic sign. Yet we also respect the ways in which he allows himself to be given to us ... Today we receive him, quite deliberately, by the symbolism of incompletion … Today we have only a truncated Eucharist … for today Christ our Lord suffered the disintegration of his very being.

Even in one kind, the Holy Communion of Good Friday conveys the Lord’s life, grace, and power to all who receive it. Having venerated Christ on the cross, we receive him into ourselves—not just for our own comfort and consolation, but also for our empowerment as ambassadors of Christ’s forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing. So we have another turn to the horizontal. Just as in the Solemn Collects we prayed for the world that Christ died to save, so now in the Communion of the Presanctified we offer ourselves as living vessels to carry forth Christ’s salvation into that same world. 

 

Then, following Communion, we leave in silence. There’s nothing left to say. For the time being, the Incarnate Word has been silenced. We do well to keep silence too, waiting in hope and expectation for what God will do next.