Good Friday

Here's everything that happened in the Church today. There's a lot folks!

Good Friday Vespers

"The noble Joseph, taking down thy most pure Body from the Tree,

wrapped it in clean linen and sweet spices and laid it in a new tomb.

But on the third day thou didst rise, O Lord, granting the world great mercy."

This afternoon, at Vespers, we remembered when Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate if he could take Jesus' body down from the cross, so that He could be buried. Pilate agreed, and so Joseph took Jesus and buried him in his own, brand new tomb. (How generous!)

During the Gospel Reading, Fr. Philip took down the icon of Christ which had been placed on the cross in the center of the Church the night before.

Towards the end of the service, Fr. Philip takes a special cloth icon, called the Epitaphios, from the altar table then carries this cloth in a procession before placing it in the tomb in the center of the Church. The Epitaphios depicts Christ being prepared for burial.

the Epitaphios at St. George in Lawrence, MA

The tomb and Epitaphios will stay in the center of the Church for the remainder of Good Friday.

The Lamentations Service

On the evening of Good Friday (which is actually Holy Saturday), we celebrate the Lamentations Service. At this service, we mourn Christ's death, but at the same time we remember why He died. The songs and hymns may be full of sad lament for all He suffered for us, but they also contain the hope and joy of the coming resurrection. Christ may be in the tomb, but He is certainly not at rest! He is doing the work of salvation, going down to Hades to raise Adam and Eve and all the other men and women who have died and to raise them up to heaven with him. This is why the Church seems to happy, even though we are remembering a sad event.

At the beginning of the service we see that members of the Church have lovingly decorated the tomb of Christ with beautiful flowers!

The choir then sings the Troparia for Holy Saturday:

 The noble Joseph, when he had taken down Thy most pure body from the Tree, wrapped it in fine linen and anointed it with spices, and placed it in a new tomb 

When Thou didst descend to death O Life Immortal, Thou didst slay hell with the splendor of Thy Godhead! And when from the depths Thou didst raise the dead, all the powers of heaven cried out: O Giver of Life! Christ our God! Glory to Thee!

The angel standing by the grave cried out to the women: Myrrh is proper for the dead, but Christ has shown himself a stranger to corruption.

Soon the whole Church begins to sing the Lamentations, in four different languages! (English, Arabic, Slavonic [Russian] and Greek) These are a special set of hymns, in which about how sad we are that Christ had died. Many of them are written from the point of view of Jesus' mother Mary, the Theotokos. We hear her crying and mourning at the grave of her son, and we too mourn with her.

"In a grave they laid thee, O my Life and my Christ: and the armies of the angels were sore amazed, as they sang the praise of thy submissive love."

During one of the last verses, Fr. Philip went around the entire Church and sprinkled everything with holy water!

Close to the end of the service, the whole congregation made a procession, with candles, outside into the streets. Four men carried the Epitaphios, or the cloth icon of the buried Christ, while the choir slowly chanted, "Holy God."

Right down Main Street, South Glens Falls!

Everyone entered the Church underneath the bier and epitaphios!

We then had a special Old Testament Reading from Ezekiel: the story of the raising up of the dry bones. God tells Ezekiel to prophecy to a bunch of bones, and suddenly they rise up and become living people again! ("Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Oh hear the word of the Lord!") This was a foreshadowing of Jesus' resurrection.

At the end of the service, everyone received a flower from the tomb.

The Resurrection is nearly upon us!