Good Friday Liturgy

By Mary Pandiani
Executive Diretor
Selah Center

We will be offering a Good Friday Liturgy on April 15th as we journey through Holy Week. Written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes (used with permission), the liturgy gives us an opportunity to add a few songs and images of our own. You will find he has shaped the encounter with familiar, and perhaps unfamiliar, scriptures and prayers.

That means we will have a different experience for our time together. In the prayers, music, and scriptures, we will be led as a community, collectively offering our prayers to God in our reflective space. We will close our time in silence.

Paschal Triduum

This time honors the tradition of the Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Celebrated in many of the Protestant traditions and Catholic Church, it’s not as familiar to those who were raised in a less formal liturgical church experience. Here is some information that may help in your understanding of the significance of Holy Week .

To establish a posture for our time, here are the words of N.T. Wright to remind us:

[T]his moment [of crucifixion], this bloody and dark moment, this miscarriage of justice, this terrible suffering,
this offering of Jesus of his full self to the will of God — this is how God is dealing, in sovereign, rescuing love,
with the weight of the world’s evil and pain, and with death itself. Jesus is the green tree, the wood that wasn’t ready for burning, dying in the place of the dry trees, the people all around who were eager to bring in the kingdom in their own way rather than God’s way.

(Source: N.T. Wright, Christians at the Cross: Finding Hope in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus)

Liturgy

Written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Used with permission

INTRODUCTION
(Philippians 2. 5-11)

Though Christ was by nature divine,
he did not cling to equality with God,
but emptied himself, took the form of a slave,
and was born as a human.

Lord have mercy.

Appearing in human form,
He humbled himself,
and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

Christ have mercy.

Therefore God has highly exalted him,
and given him the name above all others,
that every knee should bend, and every tongue confess
and given him the name above all others,
that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Giver of Life.

Lord have mercy, and grant us your peace.