Good Friday

I wanted to name this post 'Black Friday,' which is the proper name, but alas, it's been usurped by the chaotic shopping day after Thanksgiving.

It was indeed good, though, just as it was truly black. I awoke at 5:30 am, in preparation for the Via Dolorosa. Starting at 6:30 from the first station of the cross (and departing St. George's Cathedral at 6:00 as a group), the Anglicans of St. George's, Lutherans of Augusta Victoria and Church of the Redeemer, and Reformed from St. Andrew's Church of Scotland joined together in a mass, multilingual procession through the Old City.

I've already mentioned the meeting of Bishops Suheil and Munib and posted the pictured, so I'll forego explaining that again. In any case, we used the text found in John Peterson's book A Walk In Jerusalem, which contains appropriate biblical readings and accompanying prayers (which often relate to issues of injustice and suffering in today's world as well as sin and the propitiation thereof). It was extraordinarily moving, especially that early in the morning. Hearing it all in Arabic, English, and German, while yet being able to read along, as well as American, English, and Scottish accents, gave me a sense of catholicity I rarely find outside Catholic and Orthodox churches.

It was quite impossible to get into the Holy Sepulchre to read through the final four stations- Jesus is stripped of his garments, Jesus is crucified, Jesus dies on the cross, Jesus is laid in the tomb- but fortunately the Lutheran's church, Redeemer, is right next door. We finished up in the main sanctuary, with the priests and bishops standing together at the front:
After returning to the college and a rest I went back into the Old City for a 10:30am service at the Melkite church. The Melkites are Greek Catholics, who perform their worship according to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (the Orthodox liturgy), but are Catholics in communion with the pope. Oddly enough, these Melkites don't do the Chrysostom liturgy in Greek at all, but in Arabic.

The service that morning, though, was not the standard weekly Divine Liturgy but rather an adaptation of a Vespers service called the Descent of the Cross. In this service a wooden cross is placed in front of the congregation with a flat icon of Christ's deceased body hung upon it. I had to leave after forty-five minutes, but at the climax of the service they remove the iconic corpus from the cross and place it on a sort of burial slap where the congregation can go forward to venerate it through kisses, prayers, and anointing.

The reason I left early was so that I could rush back to the St. George's Good Friday service. Alas, this weekend remains something of a blur due to a severe lack of sleep throughout the Paschal Triduum, but I can tell you that we read the entirety of St. John's passion account in both Arabic and English. I had thought about not going and instead doing the Via Dolorosa with the Franciscans, to be followed by their 4:00pm Good Friday liturgy in the Holy Sepulchre; but honestly, the Way of the Cross I'd walked that morning with my Anglican and Lutheran (sigh, and Calvinist) brothers and sisters had been so deeply touching, and the Maundy Thursday service at St. George's with the stripping of the altars really is a big setup (in a way, the 'first half') for the Good Friday service, I decided to skip it.

In the end, this turned out to be an excellent decision, because rather than packing into the inevitably crowded Catholic pilgrim groups in the Old City's tiny streets and in the Holy Sepulchre, I went instead with the Eastern Holy Week course group to the Armenian 'burial service.'

I'd only been in the Armenian Cathedral of St. James- the heart of the Armenian Quarter- once before, back during the Palestine of Jesus course when they held their service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. As I mentioned then, it had been quite wonderful, especially to receive the final benediction in Armenian, Coptic, Arabic, Latin, English, German, Ethiopian, Greek, and Syraic. I also got the chance to experience Armenian architecture and liturgy for the first time, in all their solemn beauty.

You see, among the churches of the East- whether the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox (Greeks, Russians, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.) or non-Chalcedonian Oriental Orthodox (Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, and Syriacs), I really, really must say: the Armenians have the best and most outstanding sense of dignity in worship (closely followed by the Romanians, but more on them in a later post). It doesn't hurt, of course, that their choir is one of the best church choirs in the city; it also doesn't hurt that while their cathedral has electric lighting, they make sure that only candles and oil lamps are lit during the liturgy; and lets not forget the simple sense of politeness and gentleness that their clergy, monks, and laity simple exude, guiding people out of the path of some procession rather than shouting and pushing. Really, the high church Anglican liturgy and the Tridentine Mass, while topping them, I think, are given a run for their respective money by the Armenians.

The Armenian Good Friday service, though, puts the rest to shame. You see, they don't simply read the passion narratives. They act it out through what is known as the Solemn Burial Service. They assemble a casket filled with lilies- lilies!- place it in a sarcophagus lined with candles, sing chants recounting and eulogizing the life and death of the deceased, Jesus of Nazareth, and cense the 'body' (the lilies) with incense. I cannot express how touching it was, and how appropriate it was after the reading of the passion at St. George's. First we remember, then we reenact.

After this and dinner we made our way to the Holy Sepulchre. The Parvis, the courtyard, was packed wall to wall with people. There we watched as the Greeks processed three times in circles through the crowd carrying banners with icons embroidered onto them, followed by a glass box with flowers. It was a little chaotic, with hoisted banners getting caught in electrical wires suspended above the Parvis to provide spotlighting, and not nearly as moving as the Armenian service. Perhaps it was because of the mass crowds of tourists, but maybe I need to reevaluate my perception of the sacred; perhaps it's because they were just walking in circles, but I know that I need to think through my theology of procession. Yet I think it was also because the Armenians just really are tops.

Allow me to reflect for a moment on my above statement, though: first we remember, then we reenact. This, I think, is the essence of liturgical worship, where we first listen to the reading of the Scriptures, which serves as a 'script' for the reenactment of grace that follows in the Holy Eucharist. We participate in the events of Scripture by following that script, first in the liturgy, and then in the world. And the reading of the Word is not and can never be the central feature of worship: the Scriptures are there 'to prepare our hearts and minds to receive him who comes to us in his body and blood,' as we say in the liturgy. So when we fast, for the only time in the whole year, for the only day in the whole year, from Holy Communion, we came together for a very different sort of reenactment: the Via Dolorosa and the Burial Service.

Granted, very few people perform the Via Dolorosa as a spiritual devotion, and no Western church, Catholic or Protestant, has a form of a burial service. Yet I think we must reinvigorate the former as a tradition of our churches and perhaps introduce the latter. For only when we reenact can we truly participate; one does not participate by sitting back and listening, after all. Participation involves not being a spectator in the audience, but an actor on stage. And when our worship conforms to the liturgical pattern in the Eucharist, the Via Dolorosa, the Solemn Burial, and the many other enriching ceremonies the tradition of Mother Church offers us, we are all the more prepared to follow the mandatum of Maundy Thursday: love one another as I have loved you. These outward rituals shape our behavior, exercises in the visible that reshape the essence. By replaying the events of Good Friday as the church, we are all the more prepared to share the love of Good Friday in the world.