Here is the essay I wrote on Good Friday for a take-home exam for liturgy class. Some of it does deal with historical concerns, but I hope you'll give it a skim and find the power of Good Friday anew in some of what I put together for my essay response. May we hold the death of our Lord deep in our hearts...

The celebration of Good Friday is the result of an evolution of the liturgical observances of the Paschal events. As the understanding of Pascha evolved to emphasize the transitus or passage that occurs from death to life, the observance of Good Friday became more distinct and self-contained while still connected to the broader wholes of the Triduum and Lent. The baptismal theology of being initiated into Christ’s death and resurrection grew with the emergence of the Good Friday observance. Ultimately, Good Friday has become the Church’s day to meditate on the cross—a day without Eucharist that focuses believers on the revelation of the cross with a distinctive observance that commemorates the death of Jesus Christ.

The Gospels set the death of Jesus on different dates. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus dies on 15 Nisan, so for those accounts, the Last Supper, which occurs on 14 Nisan, is the Passover. In the Gospel of John, Jesus dies around the same time the lambs are slaughtered for Jewish Passover on 14 Nisan, the day of preparation (OFFS, 40); this makes Jesus the Lamb of God, the new sacrifice for all people. The Quartodeciman tradition within early Christianity celebrated the death of Jesus on 14 Nisan. These Christians would hold a vigil until midnight as 14 Nisan turned to 15 Nisan, keeping a fast until Christ would come again then celebrating the Eucharist (BMH, 114-115).

The significance of the Christian festal title of Pascha has been theologically unpacked throughout tradition. Talley identifies Nicea as a turning point—before it, Pascha was understood to mean passion and suffering (BMH, 101). Johnson and Bradshaw explain that thought shifted so that the emphasis was less on passion and more on passage or transitus, “from death to life” (OFFS, 60).

The changing understanding came from Alexandria; Clement cited Pascha as “humanity’s passage ‘from all trouble,’” and Origen explained that the Hebrew term invoked passage, as in the Exodus (OFFS, 60). Origen’s understanding also helped spread the Paschal Mystery out into its eventual three-day form, reaching back to the prophecy of Hosea (6:2 reads, “He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence.”) to identify Friday as His Passion, Saturday as His descent, and Sunday as His Resurrection (OFFS, 61). The clinging to passion-based understanding lingered for a few centuries, and the ideas came to fuse together, as seen in the words of Didymus of Alexandria: “we keep the Crossing-Feast…[o]n this day Christ has been sacrificed” (OFFS, 61-62).

The strength of Christ’s Passion also yielded strong baptismal theology, often connected to Romans 6 (see 6:3 for example: “Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”). Baptism gets connected to the Pascha and comes to mean baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ. Very early on in Rome, perhaps even from the beginnings of Christianity there, the celebration of Pascha highlighted how “the solemn administration of baptism becomes the great sacrament of the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord” (BMH, 107). The whole of the catechesis centers on eschatological expectation in the Resurrection, the celebration of the reality and profundity of salvation history, and the Passover or passage from captivity to freedom in the Passion of Jesus.

The origins of a clearer, more self-contained Good Friday are evident in the accounts of Egeria, the 4^th century pilgrim to Jerusalem. She writes that the Christians there exposed the true cross for veneration; the bishop would sit on a chair at Golgotha with the cross as pilgrims passed by to touch their heads to it and kiss it (OFFS, 63; BMH, 144). Usually, the Friday services in Jerusalem were at 3pm, but the Good Friday service started at noon with special readings until 3pm, when the readings switched to stories of Jesus’ burial. The fact that the Friday service was moved earlier to coincide with the timeline of Jesus’ Passion indicates that the Good Friday observance had taken on a special character, at least in Jerusalem, by this time.

It appears that Rome did not have clear elements of a distinct Good Friday observance until later. Gradually, a core of readings and psalms were assembled to go along with the Passion account from John’s Gospel. By the 7^th century, an imitative form of cross adoration modeled after Jerusalem devotion had taken root as well (OFFS, 65; BMH, 143). Relics of the true cross traveled around Europe from Jerusalem, and other churches gradually acquired their own small relics, which were displayed in larger crosses. Additionally, other Passion relics went from Jerusalem to other churches—the placard over Christ on the cross ended up in Rome, and the Holy Lance made its way to Constantinople.

The key to the evolution of Good Friday liturgy is that Eucharist is never consecrated on this day. The liturgical rite for this day is very simple and spare. The liturgy ends in silence, and the altar is stripped (Connell, II, 128). Only Penance and the Anointing of the Sick are celebrated on Good Friday and Holy Saturday while the bridegroom is away, for even the Church is fasting (Connell, II, 135). Some distribution of pre-consecrated Eucharist may occur. However, the central element of Good Friday is the cross, and on this day, the full sacramentality of the faith is focused on the cross.

Good Friday as a whole went from simply being “a preparatory feast [for Pascha] to a commemoration of his death” (OFFS, 60). In the late fourth century, the Church saw the “emergence of the liturgical observance as the memorial of Christ’s death” (OFFS, 62). This moves the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection to the Sunday liturgy. The center of Good Friday devotion and piety became the cross. The crucial distinction in practice is that the Church venerates the wood, the tree, the instrument of torture and death that Christ transformed with His Passion. The crucifix should be put aside for these days while Christ is buried and descended—“the object to be venerated on this day is not a crucifix [i.e., a cross with the body of Jesus on it]… but rather a relic of the true cross or at least a cross” (BMH, 143).

The directives of the Roman rites reflect the centrality and magnitude of the cross vividly: “The cross is here treated as the revelation of God” (BMH, 147). The Church today preserves the custom dating back at least to 4^th century Jerusalem of genuflecting and adoring the cross (BMH, 147). The centrality of the cross to the Good Friday devotion and liturgy helps believers tap into the depths of meaning associated with the tree on which their hope is hung. The cross is the “instrument of redemption” through which Christ made the perfect sacrifice, formerly a cruel tool of punishment but now “the royal throne from which divine presence reigns,” and a “sign of the Lord’s eschatological presence,” a part of the Paschal Mystery that Christ has died, has risen, and will come again (BMH, 150-151).

Ultimately, the whole of Jesus’ death and the Church’s veneration of His cross brings believers back to the redemption won by Christ in His Passion. “As the wood of the cross appears to sight, it prompts the narration of how Christ in the fullness of time assumed our flesh and redeemed mankind by his death on the tree, thereby restoring creation by means of the very material which caused its fall” (BMH, 148). Humanity fell by the fruit of a tree, and through Jesus’ Passion and His tree, humanity was redeemed and restored: “no forest ever yielded its equal in leaf, flower, and fruit” (BMH, 148).