Good Friday Service
Lessons and Reflections
This service can be done in community or modified for home and individual practice. The hope of this service was to create space where we connect the pain and violence of crucifixion in our faith tradition to a history of this violence in the wider world. The hope of this connection is that we can bear witness, not just as watchers but as witnesses who will speak for justice and transformation. This is a hard collection of stories and voices to read or hear.
This is not a celebration of atonement theology but rather a reflection on how the cross calls us to bear witness. This is not a service that you will find in a book of worship but it was modeled after the notions in traditional services.
We are not called to celebrate this violence, but rather to name it as sin. The crucifixion was not for human sin but rather because of human sin. It was an act of state violence and we are called yet today to be a part of changing it.
Note to clergy regrind worship use:
If you are making a worship guide, I would print information about the reading but not the entire reading to allow people to experience the words. I would also recommend inviting a variety of readers and if you are able to connect this with community work or non-profits even better.
This service can be modified or shortened with just a refrain of Lenard Cohens Hallelujah between each reading and responsive prayer.
Below this Order of Worship are collections of other narratives, edited and cut for this service. Rather than putting both orders of worship, I placed them there as an option for you to consider what works best where you are. These narrative pieces were put together in 2009 and 2010. There are new stories to be told that you could also add.
Good Friday
Order of Service
Prelude Hallelujah or Were you There
Greeting (warning of the heavy continent ahead)
1. Crucifixion at Jericho Reading based on Joshua 6:15-24
On the seventh day, the Israelites rose at daybreak and marched around the city of Jericho seven times. On the seventh round, as the priest blew the horn, Joshua commanded the people, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. The city and everything in it are to be proscribed for the Lord; only Rahab the harlot is to be spared. All the silver and gold and objects of copper and iron are the Lord’s; they must go into the treasury of the Lord.” When the people heard the horns they raised a might shout and the walls collapsed. Stone under stone tumbled down and the people rushed into the city, every man straight in front of him, and they captured the city. Devoted to destruction, they exterminated everything by the blade of the sword; man and woman, young and old, ox, and sheep and ass. They burned down the city and everything in it.
All: In a cold and broken world, we bear witness with the stones to the eerie shouts raised to bruise and brake in God’s name and chard reminders of our failure to care for each sacred life, forgive us and teach us to put out the flames of violence.
Congregational song “God Weeps” The Faith We Sing Hymnal 2048
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
2. Crucifixion by Capital Punishment at Golgotha
Reading based on Matthew 27:24-51
After flogging Jesus, Pilate handed him over to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; then they sat down there and kept watch over him. Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’ From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
All: In a cold and broken world, we bear witness at the foot of the cross to our inhuman arts of bruising and breaking sacred souls, forgive us when we look away from another’s pain and teach us to extinguish the flames of power and rampant fires of greed.
Choir sings - Lacrimosa
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
3. Crucifixion through slavery
William Well Brown endured life under slavery, liberated himself, called for change, worked for abolition and spoke of his life as ‘fugitive slave.’ As a contemporary of Fredrick Douglas, his testimony supported Douglas in claiming the Bible as the highest authority of American Slavery. Professor Allen Dwight Callahan shares their voices in his text, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible.
It was not uncommon in St. Louis to pass by an auction-stand, and behold a woman upon the auction-block, and hear the seller crying out, “How much is offered for this woman? She is a good cook, good washer, a good, obedient servant. She has got religion!” Why should this man tell the purchasers that she had got religion? I answer, because in Missouri, as far as I have any knowledge of slavery in the other states, the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave that he must never strike a white man; that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault for the Bible says, ‘He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!’ And Slaveholders find such religion very profitable to them.
In a cold and broken world, we bare witness to the power of religion to corrupt and sanctify violence and defer dreams, forgive us and teach us to speak your life giving truth as we blow the fires of control out.
Song: Were You There
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
4. Crucifixion of Laborers
In September 1913 Coal miners working for the Rockefeller family owned corporation Colorado Fuel and Iron went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions and feudal domination of their lives after the murder of one of their organizers. Hear the retelling through historian, Howard Zinn.
When the strike began, miners were immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. They set up tents in the nearby hills and continued picketing. Hired men toting Gatling guns and rifles raided the tent colonies; the strike continued as death lists grew. With miners resisting and refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate, so the Colorado governor, referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as “our little cowboy governor” called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers supplying the Guard’s wages. The miners greeted the Guard with flags and cheers but soon learned they were there to destroy not protect. The Guard arrested, beat, and harassed the miners, their wives and their children. On the morning of April 20th National Guards men, perched in the hills above Ludlow, lunched machine gun attack on the tent city. Women and children dug pits in the earth to escape the rain of bullets and men fired back. At dusk, the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents. Some were able to escape into the hills. When the violence was over, men returning to the scene uncovered charred bodies of women and children resting in earthen pits before the mass funeral procession.
All: In a cold and broken world, we bare witness to greed masked at progress and violence as an acceptable means, forgives us and teach us to extinguish the flames that wound souls and break hearts.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
Offertory Song Khawuleza (this is the proper spelling)
Is a South African song that comes from the townships, locations and reservations where black South Africans live, the children shout from the streets as they see police cars coming to raid their homes for one thing or another. They say Khawuleza which means hurry home Mama don’t let them catch you and take you Mama. –Miriam Makeba, 1966
5. Crucifixion of being
Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang Bayard Rustin
On March 21, 1949 Bayard Rustin, openly gay civil rights leader, entered the Orange County court at Hillsboro, North Carolina to serve a 30 day sentence imposed two years before for sitting in a bus seat out of the Jim Crow section. He wrote Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang following his experience.
I took the pick and for about ten minutes succeeded in breaking the ground. Then my arms and back began to give out. Just as I was beginning to feel faint, a chain-ganger called Purple walked over and said quietly, “OK Let me use dat pick for a while. You take the shovel and, no matter what they say or do, keep workin’ keep tryin’ and keep yo’ mouth shut. I took the shovel and began to throw the loose dirt into the truck. My arms pained so badly that I thought each shovelful would be the last. Then gradually my strength seemed to return. Captain Jones was displeased with the rate of our work, and violently urged us to greater effort. In an attempt to obey, one chain-ganger struck another with his shovel. The victim complained, instantly and profanely. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the Captain strode across the road and struck the cursing chain-ganger in the face with his fist again and again. Then Captain Jones informed the crew, using the most violent profanity, that cursing would not be tolerated. To me the most degrading condition of the job was the feeling that “I am not a person; I am a thing to be used.” The men who worked us had the same attitude toward us as toward the tools we used. At times the walking bosses would stand around for hours while we worked, . . . just watching, often moving from foot to foot or walking from one side of the road to the other. It was under these conditions that they would select a plaything. One man, Oscar, was often “it.” Once the bored gun guard ordered Oscar to take off his cap and dance. With a broad smile on his face, he warned Oscar, “I’ll shoot your heart out if you don’t.” As the guard trained his rifle on Oscar’s chest, Oscar took off his cap, grinned, and danced vigorously. The guard and the walking boss screamed with laughter.
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness to our power to dehumanize and degrade, forgive us as we close our eyes to the sacred alive in each soul, saying yes to sacred value, worth, and hope we blow the flame of violence out.
Congregational song When Cain killed Able, The Faith We Sing 2135
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
6. Crucifixion of the earth and Native Americans
Native American peoples having been pushed to the margins now find the land they live on and the water they fish from contaminated by pollutants as they are courted to host toxic waste facilities. Hear their words from the United Methodist Council of Bishops and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology.
For Decades Native American Tribes and reservations throughout the Western United States have faced the gravest danger from public and private efforts to mine uranium and transport and store nuclear waste and radioactive materials on their lands. Members and allies of the Western Shoshone people are still fighting U.S. Government efforts to bury atomic waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a sacred site for the tribe.
In fact, so enthusiastic is the United States government to dump its most dangerous waste from "the nation's 110 commercial nuclear power plants" on the nation's "565 federally recognized tribes" that it "has solicited every American Indian Tribe, offering millions of dollars if the tribe would host a nuclear waste facility.” Given the fact that Native Americans tend to be so materially poor, the money offered by the government or the corporations for this "toxic trade" is often more akin to bribery or blackmail than partnership of equals. But some resist, recalling the words of Chief Seattle, “You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that the earth is our mother; whatever befalls the sons of the earth. (American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1998) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487423
All: In a cold and broken world, we bare witness to the struggle of life blooming in difficult spaces, forgive us as discard the sacred and teach us to live and work anew as loving stewards of Love’s sacred earth that we might extinguish the flame of dominion over all.
Instrumental
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
7. Crucifixion of Christ Today
At the Cross Adapted from Chris Polhill
I see Christ crucified still – today:
Where the hungry cry for food, Die for food,
Though there’s plenty.
Where people are yelled at, jeered at –
Bricks through their windows
Because their skin isn’t white, or their beliefs aren’t right
Where tree limbs hang heavy with strange fruit, where people are violated and abused, where lust kills love,
Where lonely cries from a fence post under the vast Montana sky fall on closed ears,
I see him crucified still.
I see Christ crucified still – today
Where wars scar people, lands, God’s hands –
The endless killing, the politics of hate
Where the cry for justice is unheard, oppressed, beaten down.
Where power comes first,
Where religion twists faith,
Where fear kills trust –
I see him crucified still.
I see Christ crucified still – today
Where creation’s fabric shreds, is bled, by must have now, must use
Where earth’s beauty is destroyed.
Where trees burn, Where water poisons, where greed kills need-
I see him crucified still.
And I try – a little- to stem the deadly tide
As I give –a little, Write to those in power – a little
Recycle- a little. Walk – a little. Listen-a little
And I try to love as he said. I try to love – a little
And I pray- a little
For all these crucifixions may there be resurrection.
All: Today we blow this flame out. Amen.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
Song Hallelujah by Lenard Cohen
Lowering Banners and Stripping Altar
Dismissal to Holy Saturday’s waiting and Easter Sunday’s hope of new life.
Extra Narratives
These readings were used the first time we did this service at FUMC Omaha in 2009. The Pattern of reading, response and music was the same. I leave them here so you can make the service or reflection that works best in your community.
Reading based on Joshua 6:15-24
On the seventh day, the Israelites rose at daybreak and marched around the city of Jericho seven times. On the seventh round, as the priest blew the horn, Joshua commanded the people, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. The city and everything in it are to be proscribed for the Lord; only Rahab the harlot is to be spared. All the silver and gold and objects of copper and iron are the Lord’s; they must go into the treasury of the Lord.” When the people heard the horns they raised a might shout and the walls collapsed. Stone under stone tumbled down and the people rushed into the city, every man straight in front of him, and they captured the city. Devoted to destruction, they exterminated everything by the blade of the sword; man and woman, young and old, ox, and sheep and ass. They burned down the city and everything in it.
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness with the stones to the eerie shouts raised to bruise and break in God’s name and charred reminders of our failure to care for each sacred life, forgive us and teach us to put out the flames of violence.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
Reading based on Matthew 27:24-51
After flogging Jesus, Pilate handed him over to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; then they sat down there and kept watch over him. Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’ From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness at the foot of the cross to our inhuman arts of bruising and breaking sacred souls, forgive us when we look away from another’s pain and teach us to extinguish the flames of power and rampant fires of greed.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
Deeds of the Franks and Other Pilgrims to Jerusalem Unknown Pilgrim
During a Peace Council in 1095, Pope Urban II called Europeans to claim Jerusalem for Christianity and commit to the first Crusade saying, “Let those who are accustomed to wantonly wage private war against the faithful march upon the infidels. Let those who have long been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver attain an eternal reward. Let nothing delay those who are willing to go!” Following Pope Urban’s call, Latin Christians rallied at the foot of the cross and journeyed across Europe, plundering from non-Latin Christians and killing a third of European Jews. Reaching Jerusalem and took the city on Good Friday.
In Mainz, Germany a band of crusaders began, breaking the bolts and doors, they killed the Jews, about 700 in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and while they ravaged the Jews of Mainz, mothers cut the throats of nursing children with knives and stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus by their own hands. From all the kingdoms of Europe the pilgrims continued to the holy land. At last they reached Jerusalem and held the city in a long siege culminating on Holy Week. On Good Friday at dawn we attacked the city from all sides but could achieve nothing, so that we were all astounded and very much afraid, yet, when the hour came when our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to suffer for us upon the cross, our knights were fighting bravely on the siege-tower. . . At that moment one of our knights, succeeded in getting on to the wall. As soon as he reached it, all the defenders fled along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as Solomon’s Temple, where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood, praising God they fulfilled their vows to Jesus as they burnt the synagogue.
- A Reading from Pope Urban’s Sermon and Deeds of the Franks and Other Pilgrims, From Saving Paradise by Rita Nakashima Brock.
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness to war paraded as piety and unmask the violence cloaked behind the flag of freedom. Saying no to flames within and quelling the violence circulating without, we blow this candle out.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
The Bonus Army Howard Zinn
Following the First World War, Congress promised American Veterans financial bonuses for their service to be paid years latter. In 1932 the veterans, struggling to survive the Great Depression, marched to Washington DC demanding Congress pay the bonus certificates now when the money was desperately needed.
And so they began to move, the veterans began to move to Washington from all over the country, with wives and children or alone. They came in broken down old autos, stealing rides on freight trains, or hitchhiking. They were miners from West Virginia, sheet metal workers from Georgia and unemployed Polish veterans from Chicago. One family –husband, wife, three-year-old boy spent three months on freight trains coming from California. More than twenty thousand came. Some camped in Government buildings but most camped on the bank of the Potomac River across from the Capitol in little lean-tos built out of old newspaper, cardboard boxes, packing crates, bits of tin or tarpaper roofing, every kind of cockeyed makeshift shelter from the rain scraped together out of the city dump. The bill to pay the veteran’s bonuses passed in the House, but was defeated in the Senate, some veterans, discouraged, left. Most stayed and President Hoover ordered the army to evict them. Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House. General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the operation, Major Dwight Eisenhower his aide while George S. Patton served among the officers. MacArthur led his troops down Pennsylvania Avenue, used tear gas to clear veterans out of the old buildings and set each one on fire. Then the army moved across the bridge over the Potomac. Thousands of veterans, their wives, and their children began to run as tear gas spread. The soldiers set fire to some of the huts and soon the whole encampment was ablaze. When it was over, two veterans had been shot, an eleven-week-old baby was dead, an eight-year-old boy was blind, two police had fractured skulls, and a thousand veterans were injured by gas.
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness to the violence we teach and the craft of war rolling over the last and burning the least, forgive us and teach us extinguish the flames that wound souls and break hearts.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
Crucifixion of being and autonomy
Human Trafficking Survivor, Jill Leighton
Born and raised in the United States, Jill Leighton was trafficked into sex slavery from her home state of Ohio in 1981 at the age of fourteen. She ran away from a dangerous home to find a world of violence and destruction. With between 1.3 and 2.8 million homeless youth in America the Justice Department estimate that 293,000 youth are at risk. She tells her story in the text, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal: Stories by Today’s Slaves edited by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd.
There where no familiar faces and no one who wanted to talk to a homeless teenage girl; even my name became irrelevant. My concerns were more pragmatic, finding food, shelter, and water. Into my hunger, loneliness and desperation came a man named Bruce. Attractive, well dressed, and very charismatic, he approached me in a suburban mall and offered to help me. He brought me to his office blindfolded, explained that I had to audition for the job and should step on the stage and raise my hands. I felt leather straps around my wrist, I was stripped, the reality was so unclear, the box beneath my feet was kicked out and I was left hanging for days. This was the first step of my training; I was tortured verbally and physically for months. Bruce and his clients rented my body, devising torture that stopped just before death, held under water, hung, shocked and required to tell them I was enjoying it. Doctors in LA didn’t keep me safe in the hospital and EMS personal asked nothing of my bruised body when I fainted in an Arizona rest stop getting Bruce a Pepsi. In 1984 my captivity came to an end when he was arrested on unrelated charges, the police found me bound, gagged and blindfolded in a closet. I asked for help, I asked for a female officer and they told me that they were here to execute a warrant and I’d better shut up or I was going to be arrested, too. I wasn’t even eighteen yet. I took what money I could find and ran away, I lost most of my body weight, my hair and my voice. I still didn’t exist except as an escaped slave. I am still recovering decades later.
All: In a cold and broken world, we bear witness to our power to dehumanize and degrade, forgive us as we close our eyes to the sacred alive in each soul, saying yes to sacred value, worth, and hope we blow the flame of violence out.
Hazel Johnson (African American), in October 1982, founded People for Community Recovery (PCR) located on the Southside of Chicago. PCR is one of the oldest African American grassroots community-based environmental organizations in the Midwest. Her story comes from the Chicago Tribune and the National Council of Churches.
Low-income housing is located near sewage treatment plants, landfills, power plants, or toxic dumps. Cancer was a word used so much people almost expected in the Atgeld Garden housing project located on the Southeast side of Chicago, were nearly all of the residents are African American but when Hazel Johnson witnessed the death of four infant girls to cancer in her housing community she began to research and organize. What Hazel Johnson found astounded her. She learned that her section of Chicago had the highest incidence of cancer in the city. She learned that the 190-acre Altgeld was surrounded by about 50 documented landfills, and that there were more than 250 leaking underground storage tanks in an area defined by the Bishop Ford Expressway on the east, the Calumet River on the west, 130th Street on the north, and 144th Street on the south. Describing the Atgeld Garden’s community, Hazel said, “We’re sitting in a center of a donut surrounded by a hazardous waste incinerator that gives off PCB’s, seven landfills that are constantly growing...there are chemical plants, a paint factory, two steel mills... We have lots of cancer, respiratory problems, birth deformities.” "I love the social fabric of the community. This is my sense of security. We should have a right to a clean environment. It shouldn't be a choice. So we've decided to stay here and fight for our community."
In a cold and broken world, we bear witness to the struggle of life blooming in difficult spaces, forgive us as discard the sacred and teach us to live and work anew as loving stewards of Love’s sacred earth that we might extinguish the flame of dominion over all.
(Extinguish candle and remove from altar. )
You may have more secular music or more hymns you would like to listen too between the readings. My suggestions:
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
Highwomen by The Highwomen
Stay with me (Taize)
All the Sad Songs by Butterflyfish
This Time Tomorrow by Brandi Carlile
The Joke by Brandi Carlile
I Shall Be Released by Bob Dylan
Nugget by Cake
Let Your Heart Hold Fast by Fort Atlantic
Pease Don’t talk about Murder while I’m Eating by Ben Harper
If I Ever Leave This World Alive or The Sun Never Shines by Flogging Molly