Holy Friday is the day of absolute mourning for all of Christianity. The day of the culmination of the Divine Drama, where the Passion of Christ culminates, with His Crucifixion.
Eva Metis Koutoumanou
At the Ninth Hour of the day, He says "Done" (Τετέλεσται). His divine soul descends into Hades. The "Gospel," God's first joyful promise to the fallen Forefathers, begins to be fulfilled. Until shortly before 11:00 in the morning, the liturgy of the Great Hours is celebrated, where women lament and weep for Christ, while others worship and pay homage to the crucified Christ. From dawn of the same day, the epitaph is prepared and an overnight vigil is held in most churches in Greece. At noon of the same day, Christ is deposed and placed in the Epitaph where his procession will take place in the evening.
On the morning of Good Friday, the decoration of the Epitaph takes place in the churches. Initially, the Great Hours are chanted, which contain psalms, troparia, Apostles, Gospels and Prayers. Then the Vespers of Good Friday is chanted and the Deposition of the Crucified One takes place.
All day long the bells ring mournfully all over Greece and traditionally all work is prohibited and there is a strict fast and the ingestion of oil is also prohibited. In many areas of Greece on that day, an effigy of Judas is made which is either burned or shot and then burned. Also, on the same day, many believers visit the graves of relatives and friends or the exhumation of the dead takes place if the required time has passed.
On the evening of Good Friday, the Matins of Holy Saturday are sung and the hymnology is related to the burial of the Lord by Joseph and Nicodemus and the descent of His soul into the dark kingdoms of Hades.
On Great and Holy Friday the Orthodox Church commemorates the death of Christ on the Cross. This is the culmination of the observance of His Passion by which our Lord suffered and died for our sins. This commemoration begins on Thursday evening with the Matins of Holy Friday and concludes with a Vespers on Friday afternoon that observes the unnailing of Christ from the Cross and the placement of His body in the tomb.
On this day we commemorate the sufferings of Christ: the mockery, the crown of thorns, the scourging, the nails, the thirst, the vinegar and gall, the cry of desolation, and all the Savior endured on the Cross.
The day of Christ's death is the day of sin. The sin which polluted God's creation from the breaking dawn of time reached its frightful climax on the hill of Golgotha. There, sin and evil, destruction and death came into their own. Ungodly men had Him nailed to the Cross, in order to destroy Him. However, His death condemned irrevocably the fallen world by revealing its true and abnormal nature.
The day of Christ's death has become our true "day of birth".
Within the mystery of Christ dead and resurrected, death acquires positive value. Even if physical, biological death still appears to reign, it is no longer the final stage in a long destructive process. It has become the indispensable doorway, as well as the sure sign of our ultimate Pascha, our passage from death to life, rather than from life to death.
