Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
Every Real Resurrection Deserves a Good Funeral
Essay on the Holy Friday Liturgy of the Lamentations
April 30, 2005
I have written elsewhere about Eastern Orthodox Good Friday services. I attended my first one back in the late 1980s. It sort of ruined my experience of Protestant Easter ever since. Easter had always been a bit of an enigma to me. In the Protestant setting the morning often begins with a sunrise service. As a kid I remember sunrise services at the local cemetery. The Roman Catholic section was on a nice hill, and there was a crucifix in the center of it. We would have our services facing the backside of the cross. That way we didn't have to go to all the work of setting up our own cross, and by using the back side it appeared empty because we couldn't see the Christ hanging on it. Following that we would have a pancake breakfast at church and then attend the regular worship service. The only real difference in the Easter worship service was that it was a little bit more upbeat and we always sang “Christ is Risen from the Dead.”
The Bible Church actually had a sound theological principle for why Easter Sunday wasn't too much different than any other Sunday. Every Sunday, after all, is a celebration of Christ's resurrection; Easter is therefore not all that different than any other Sunday.
I generally like a well reasoned theological argument. Although this was well reasoned, I still wondered why Easter wasn't that big of a deal.
Then I discovered how Easter was done is some other churches. It was an extravaganza. It was a party. It was the whole bag of liturgical special effects packed into one service. Oddly enough, this embarrassed me more than satisfied my longing for the perfect Easter Sunday celebration. (Although, I must admit that in my twenty years of planning worship I've tried some of those same tricks. Even though they weren't satisfactory I couldn't come up with anything better.)
Then I attended a Good Friday service in an Eastern Orthodox church.
I discovered that my problem was not Easter Sunday, it was Good Friday. In essence, it's hard to put your heart into a celebration of the resurrection if you haven't had a good funeral first. And that is essentially what Orthodox Good Friday is all about. It is called the “Service of Lamentations” because a long series of lamentations are sung in front of the funeral bier where the Epitaphios is laid. The Epitaphios is a small rug with a picture of Jesus wrapped in the burial shroud. The Epitaphios points to another Orthodox sensibility that I like. If Passion Play producers were in charge of a funeral for Jesus it could quickly become an extravaganza that was far more outrageous than some of the Protestant Easter extravaganzas that were offered for my entertainment. But the Orthodox aren't interested in extravaganzas.
That last sentence requires some explanation because everyone who has ever attended Orthodox worship knows that it's extravagant. There are gilded icons. (And I'm not using “gilded” euphemistically. It's real gold!) The clergy are in outrageously fancy outfits. There's gold and brass fixtures everywhere. There's bells, incense, chanting. And then there's the processions. The Orthodox will process just about anything that can be picked up off the floor. At Good Friday the funeral bier is processed around the church. (At one Orthodox Good Friday service we attended in New York City, the procession with the bier was a regular parade that went several blocks!) Orthodox worship is nothing if it's not extravagant.
But there's a difference between extravagance and extravaganza.
Some of the Protestant Easter services I attended weren't at all extravagant. The stuff they used was very ordinary: rubber balloons, plastic eggs, party favor whistles, etc. But the events themselves were extravaganzas. The crowd was entertained! They were great fun. And all of it was done in honor of Jesus!!
Orthodox worship, even its extravagance, is a holy thing. While getting ready to process the funeral bier, the Epitaphios of Jesus was handled with the utmost care and respect. While processing the bier, the great Orthodox hymn, “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us,” was intoned with the most solemn tone. There was nothing entertaining about it, although it was a most extravagant funeral.
I cried.
And I rarely cry at funerals.
And with that, I'm finally ready for a resurrection!
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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