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The Roots of Good Friday

Every year on Good Friday, pilgrims from all over the world gather to walk along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Some carry a cross, to understand better the nature of the burden that Jesus bore. Others accompany them, as witnesses, as penitents, as believers. All Christians believe that by dying on the cross at Calvary, Jesus delivered us from sin and despair.

From the earliest times the Christians kept every Friday as a feast day; and the obvious reasons for those usages explain why Easter is the Sunday par excellence, and why the Friday which marks the anniversary of Christ's death came to be called the Great or the Holy or the Good Friday.

The English-speaking part of the church calls this great day of commemoration of Jesus death ‘Good’ Friday.  Much more befitting the spirit of that day, the German Christians call it Karfreitag ("Sorrowful Friday"). Kar or Char is an old German root word comparable to the English word care in the sense of sorrow.

The origin of the term Good is not clear. Some say it is from "God's Friday" (Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag, and not specially English. Sometimes, too, the day was called Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons; so today in Denmark.

The Good Friday service is one of the oldest preserved services we have, and may have shaped the Christian service in general. The Catholic encyclopedia writes:

[The] order of lessons, chants, and prayers for Good Friday is found in our earliest Roman Ordines, dating from about A. D. 800. It represents, according to Duchesne (234), "the exact order of the ancient Synaxes without a liturgy", i.e. the order of the earliest Christian prayer meetings, at which, however, the liturgy proper, i. e. the Mass, was not celebrated. This kind of meeting for worship was derived from the Jewish Synagogue service, and consisted of lessons, chants, and prayers. In the course of time, as early perhaps as A. D. 150 (see Cabrol's "Origines Liturgiques" 137), the celebration of the Eucharist was combined with this purely euchological service to form one solemn act of Christian worship, which came to be called the Mass.