Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
Good Friday is the Friday before Easter, the day on which the church keeps the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. It falls two days before Easter, between Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil, and moves each year with the date of Easter. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps it as Good Friday, with the Passion according to John at the center of its liturgy. The Byzantine churches keep it as Great and Holy Friday, in some years on a different date, because East and West compute Easter by different calendars, not because they disagree about the day. The English name is usually explained as using "good" in its older sense of holy. The day was first a fast, attested from the second century; its liturgy is first described at Jerusalem in the 380s; and the Roman rite has long kept it without consecrating the Eucharist.
The four Gospels close their account of Christ's ministry with his arrest, his trial before Pontius Pilate, and his crucifixion and death outside Jerusalem on a Friday, which Mark names the Preparation, the day before the Sabbath (Mark 15:42); the word passed into the church's names for the day, the Greek paraskeuē and the Latin Parasceve. The Gospels differ on the day's place in the Passover. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the Last Supper is the Passover meal and Christ dies on the fifteenth of Nisan; in John he dies on the fourteenth, as the Passover lambs are slaughtered. The question has not been settled, and the year of the crucifixion is not fixed.
Before the day had a service of its own, it had a fast. In the second century the churches of Asia kept the Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan, whatever the day of the week, remembering the Passion and the resurrection together in a single night, while Rome and most other churches kept it on a Sunday. The homily Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis, from about 160 to 170, belongs to that single night rather than to a separate Friday. In a fragment translated in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Melito says of Christ that "He was nailed upon the tree, and yet was the Lord of all things." The Peri Pascha also charges Israel with the murder of God, and modern scholarship cites it as the earliest surviving instance of explicit Christian deicide rhetoric directed at Israel. Late in the century Irenaeus observed that the churches disagreed not only about the day but about the fast itself: some fasted one day, some two, some forty hours. Early in the third century Tertullian, by then a Montanist writing against the mainstream church, reported that his opponents held "those days were definitely appointed for fasts in which 'the Bridegroom was taken away'." He was attacking the view, and his report is the earliest surviving text to tie a fixed Christian fast to the Passion.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 settled that Easter should be kept everywhere on a Sunday, and so fixed Good Friday as the Friday before it. The ruling is not among the council's canons, as is often said; it survives in a synodal letter and in Constantine's letter to the churches, the latter preserved by Eusebius. No source marks a first Good Friday. The controversy that made a separate Friday possible was resolved in 325, and the day's own liturgy is first seen some two generations later, at Jerusalem.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints the same readings for Good Friday in every year: Genesis 22:1-18, Abraham's offering of Isaac, or Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the song of the servant who bears the sin of many; Psalm 22:1-11, which may continue through verse 21, or Psalm 40:1-16, or Psalm 69:1-22; Hebrews 10:1-25; and as the Gospel the Passion according to John, John 19:1-37, optionally beginning at 18:1. The customary responses before and after the Gospel are omitted.
Genesis tells of the father who does not withhold his only son; Isaiah, of the servant wounded for the transgressions of others. Hebrews sets the one offering of Christ's body, made once for all, against the sacrifices of the law repeated year by year. John's Passion carries Christ, in its longer form from the garden of his arrest, through his trial before Pilate to his death and the piercing of his side; the burial that follows is left to Holy Saturday, as the medieval rite also set it apart as a reading of its own. Christ's last word in John, "It is finished" (John 19:30, ESV), is often explained in sermons as a term stamped on Roman receipts to mean paid in full; that explanation first appears much later, and the evidence offered for it does not bear the weight placed on it.
The Passion according to John is the one reading never displaced from the day. It was the Gospel of the medieval Roman and Sarum rites, which read before it Hosea 6:1-6 and the Passover instruction of Exodus 12:1-11; it stands in Cranmer's book of 1549; and it stands in 2019. The Old Testament lesson has moved. In 1549 Genesis 22 was the first lesson at Mattins, a provision that did not survive into the books of 1552 and 1559, and Psalm 22 was appointed at the Communion. The American book of 1979 offered Isaiah, Genesis, or a passage from Wisdom 2; the 2019 book keeps the first two, with slightly different verse ranges for the alternative psalms.
In the Book of Common Prayer (2019) the day has its own liturgy. After the readings come the Solemn Collects: nine biddings, each with its collect, praying for the church, for bishops and for all orders of the church, for those in civil authority, for those preparing for baptism, for the needs of the world, for those in heresy and schism, for the Jewish people, and for those who do not believe, and then a closing summons to commit oneself to God. A wooden cross may then be brought into the church and set where the people can see it, with an antiphon that may be said or sung three times, bidding them behold the wood of the cross and adore. Devotions may follow, using the anthems the book provides or other suitable anthems; among them are the Reproaches in their revised form, with the Trisagion as their refrain, and two anthems also found in the 1979 book. The liturgy closes with a prayer taken from the medieval Sarum devotion of the Hours of the Cross, in official Anglican use since 1979.
The rite asks the worshipper to listen, to pray, and to look. The Passion is heard without the acclamations that ordinarily surround the Gospel. The prayers that follow reach past the congregation to every condition of people, those outside the church as well as those within it, so that the day of the cross is spent in intercession for the world for which Christ died. Then the cross itself is set before the people, as it was set before the pilgrims Egeria watched at Golgotha.
The rite does not hurry toward Easter. Cyril of Jerusalem told his candidates that he could confess the cross openly because he knew of the resurrection that followed it; the church keeps this Friday in that confidence, and keeps it as a day of mourning all the same.
The veneration of the cross, first described by Egeria at Jerusalem, has been kept in the Roman rite since the seventh or eighth century, and entered the Anglican prayer books with the American book of 1979. The Latin tradition distinguished the reverence shown to the cross from the worship due to God alone. The Reproaches were set by Palestrina in 1560, a setting Pius IV prescribed for the Sistine Chapel, where it is still sung at the papal liturgy, and by Victoria. Tenebrae, the Matins and Lauds of the last three days of Holy Week, traditionally sung on the evening before, belongs to the day's music as well: its candles are put out one by one, the last is hidden rather than extinguished, and the office ends in darkness with a loud noise, the strepitus. It is still kept in Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and in some Lutheran and Reformed ones.
In Lutheran Leipzig the Passion was sung at Good Friday Vespers, in two parts with the sermon preached between them. Bach's St John Passion was first performed there on Good Friday, 7 April 1724; his St Matthew Passion probably on Good Friday 1727, though the year is disputed and some scholars hold for 1729. Haydn wrote The Seven Last Words for the Good Friday devotion at Cádiz, where it was first performed in 1787. In his own later account the church was hung with black and lit by a single lamp; at midday the doors were closed, the bishop preached on each of the seven words in turn and then knelt before the altar, and music filled each interval. That devotion, the Three Hours, is not ancient. It is traced to the Jesuit Alonso Messía Bedoya at Lima in the late 1680s, reached Rome by 1788, and spread across the Western churches. In England it was introduced in the 1860s at St Alban's, Holborn, or, as Marcus Donovan judged more probable, a few years earlier at St Matthias', Stoke Newington. Donovan granted that it was thought to have displaced the Prayer Book's own service, and defended it for the prayer and quiet meditation it fostered.
The day has been kept as a fast since the second century. Roman canon law keeps it, with Ash Wednesday, as a day of both fast and abstinence, and the Prayer Book of 1662 numbered every Friday of the year among its fasting days, so that Good Friday's fast was the general Friday discipline at its most solemn. Some English customs did not survive the Reformation: the burial of the cross in the Easter sepulchre; creeping to the Cross; and the blessing of cramp-rings, made from the gold and silver the king offered to the Cross on Good Friday and given against cramp and epilepsy, a ceremony that survived into the reign of Mary I. In the Byzantine churches the day centers less on the wood of the cross than on the Epitaphios, an embroidered image of the dead Christ carried on a bier through the streets on Good Friday evening. And the Roman Catholic collection for the Holy Land is taken on this day, limited to Good Friday by Leo XIII in 1887 and given new impetus by Paul VI in 1974.
Primary sources. Egeria's account of the day is chapter XXXVII of M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe's translation, The Pilgrimage of Etheria (SPCK, 1919), free online; it is the earliest eyewitness description of the Good Friday liturgy and the single strongest source for the day. Cyril of Jerusalem's thirteenth Catechetical Lecture, in Gifford's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 7, shows the place and the relic a generation before Egeria. The Fragments of Melito in the Ante-Nicene Fathers carry portions of the Peri Pascha in a public-domain translation, among them its deicide rhetoric; Tertullian's On Fasting, chapter 2, at CCEL, is the earliest surviving witness to a fixed fast tied to the Passion. Augustine's Sermon 218, the earliest Good Friday sermon in this account, is in Edmund Hill's translation, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III, volume 6 (New City Press), which is in copyright. The Homily for Good Friday of the Second Book of Homilies (1563) is in an 1855 Oxford printing at archive.org, and Lancelot Andrewes's Good Friday sermon of 1605 is at anglicanhistory.org; together they show how the English church preached the day once its ceremonies were gone. The Prayer Book texts are the 1549 Holy Week readings, the 1979 Good Friday liturgy, and the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
David Nirenberg, (1996), by one of the historians cited above on the violence of Holy Week against Jewish communities.
About 350 Cyril of Jerusalem gave his catechetical lectures at the Holy Sepulchre to candidates for baptism at Easter. His thirteenth lecture, on the crucifixion and burial, is instruction, not a Good Friday sermon, but it points to the place and the relic. Were he to deny the crucifixion, he told them in Gifford's translation, "here is Golgotha to confute me, near which we are now assembled; the wood of the Cross confutes me, which was afterwards distributed piecemeal from hence to all the world." Between about 381 and 384 the Western pilgrim Egeria described the whole day, in chapter XXXVII of her diary as M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe translated it in 1919; hers is the earliest eyewitness account of the Good Friday liturgy known to survive. In the morning the bishop sat at Golgotha behind the Cross with the wood of the Cross before him, brought in a silver-gilt casket. He held its ends in his hands while the deacons stood guard, because someone was said once to have bitten off a piece and carried it away. The people came one by one, bowed, touched the Cross and its title first with the forehead and then with the eyes, kissed it, and passed on. From the sixth hour to the ninth, in rain or heat, nothing was done before the Cross but the reading of psalms, apostles and Gospels, to show that all the prophets had foretold had been fulfilled; Egeria records that all the people mourned through those three hours. At the ninth hour John's account of Christ's death was read. She was an eyewitness to the liturgy of fourth-century Jerusalem, not to the events it remembered; but the gesture she describes is essentially the one still made at the veneration of the cross.
In the West, Augustine's Sermon 218, headed in the manuscripts for Good Friday and dated before 420, begins from the fact that the Passion is read and kept with solemnity every year, so that the yearly devotion may renew its memory. At Rome the surviving titles of Leo the Great's Passion sermons place them on Palm Sunday and the Wednesday of Holy Week, none on the Friday; that does not prove no Friday sermon was preached, but the long Good Friday preaching of later centuries was a new placing of the sermon, not a continuation. The veneration of the cross entered the Latin liturgy from Jerusalem in the seventh or eighth century, by a route no source records. The oldest full Roman orders, from about 800, give lessons, chants and prayers without a Mass. The Roman rite came to have three parts: those lessons and prayers; the veneration of the cross; and the Mass of the Presanctified, at which Communion is given from hosts consecrated on Maundy Thursday and nothing is consecrated. For roughly a thousand years only the celebrant received.
The medieval centuries gave the day its drama and, with it, an accusation. The Reproaches, or Improperia, sung at the veneration in the voice of Christ, begin from Micah 6:3, "Popule meus quid feci tibi? Aut in quo contristavi te?", answered by the Trisagion in Greek and Latin. They are first referred to in the ninth or tenth century, with a Gallican character, and reached a Roman order only in the fourteenth. The nine Solemn Prayers of the Roman sacramentaries prayed in turn for the church, the pope, all orders of the faithful, the emperor, catechumens, the afflicted, schismatics and heretics, the Jews, and the pagans. The bidding for the Jews called them perfidis, faithless or unbelieving, not perfidious in the modern sense, and asked "ut Deus et Dominus noster auferat velamen de cordibus eorum," that God would take the veil from their hearts. Alone among the prayers it was said without kneeling, on the claim that the Jews had bent the knee to Christ in mockery, and so it was said in every church of the Roman rite for roughly a thousand years. Good Friday became, across much of medieval Europe, a dangerous day for Jewish communities. At Toulouse, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, a member of the community, usually its most respected elder, was struck on the ear in public at the cathedral door every Good Friday; a petition to Charles the Bald in 850 failed to end it, and by the early twelfth century it had been commuted to a yearly tax and forty-four pounds of wax. At Béziers, Bishop Guillaume abolished the throwing of stones at Jews in Holy Week in 1160, in return for a yearly payment. Historians, among them David Nirenberg and Lester Little, have read such violence as ritual reenactment or as a ritual of revenge and boundary-marking.
In England the medieval parish buried the cross after the veneration in a sepulchre watched until Easter morning, and knew the veneration as creeping to the Cross. The Reformation removed all of it. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer of 1549 gave the day only its readings and three collects, the first drawn from a Latin prayer of the Gregorian Sacramentary for the Wednesday of Holy Week, the third praying for the conversion of Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics. That shape held through 1662 and into the American books, and the American book of 1928 recast the third collect's petition. In place of the ceremony came the sermon. The Homily for Good Friday of 1563, read in English parishes, turned the accusation around: its hearers, it said, had more reason to lament that their own sins caused Christ's death than to cry out against the Jews who pursued him. The same homily calls sinners children of the devil, and it is not a modern document; but it made forgiving one's neighbor the act the day required. The Westminster Directory of 1644 and 1645 went further and set the day aside, keeping only the Lord's day as holy, on the ground that fixing the remembrance to a date put a human ordinance in place of a continual one; when the day returned to those churches has not been traced.
The twentieth century reshaped the day again. The Holy Week reform issued under Pius XII by the decree Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria of 16 November 1955 moved the liturgy as near as possible to three in the afternoon, the hour of Christ's death, gave Communion to all who wished to receive, and restored the kneeling at the prayer for the Jews. John XXIII struck perfidis in 1959, and the Roman Missal of 1970 replaced the bidding with a new prayer for the Jewish people. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) rejected the charge that the Jewish people bear collective responsibility for Christ's death and condemned antisemitism. In the Episcopal Church the Reproaches appeared in the Draft Proposed Book of Common Prayer and were rejected by the General Convention of 1976 as capable of an anti-Semitic interpretation; a revised version avoiding that reading appeared in the Methodist From Ashes to Fire (1979) and the Anglican Church of Canada's Book of Alternative Services (1985). The Episcopal book of 1979 restored the ancient shape of the day in outline, with Solemn Collects, an optional veneration of a wooden cross, and three anthems, and contains no Reproaches. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) prints them only in the revised form, in which Christ's final reproach is addressed to the church, and adds a newly composed collect for the Jewish people.
Online resources. The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia's articles on Good Friday and the Improperia, though dated and written from within one tradition, gather the medieval Roman evidence. Marcus Donovan's After the Tractarians, chapter 10, is a contemporary Anglo-Catholic account of how the Three Hours entered the Church of England. The Jewish Encyclopedia's articles on Toulouse and Béziers record the Good Friday and Holy Week customs inflicted on those communities; Canon Albert Radcliffe's essay at JCRelations traces how the Anglican Good Friday prayers changed, and Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski's article in The Conversation gives the wider history. The appointed readings are at Bible Gateway in the English Standard Version: Genesis 22:1-18, Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Hebrews 10:1-25, and John 18:1-19:37.
Almighty God, we beseech you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the Cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.