Great Friday- The Twelve Gospels

On Great Friday Morning (Holy Thursday evening in some other churches) the Eastern Church has a special Matins service called the Twelve Gospels. Over the course of about two hours, the priest and deacon read twelve gospel readings depicting the passion of Christ, from his arrest in Gethsemane, to his trial before Pilate to his crucifixion and death.

This is a picture of my grandpa, one of our ushers, holding the candle which is held every time a gospel is read in our church. The first of the gospel readings is the longest, it clocks in at about 17 minutes and they get progressively shorter after that. During this service we sing "Glory be to you Passion O Lord" and "Glory Be to you long suffering O Lord". I think this is the best way to read the Passion of Christ. Reading it all together really helps one visualize what he went through for us.

After the reading of the Twelve Gospels, we eat a light breakfast and get to work. One of the great Easter or Pascha traditions in the East is to bring Easter baskets to be blessed on Saturday night or Sunday morning, filled with all of the food we have been fasting from: meat (especially ham and sausage), eggs, cheese, some bread, butter, etc. Because we have many families at our church who have converted to the Byzantine Rite and we have many older parishioners, the Teens take orders and make Easter baskets. During this time, we also do little tasks around church like re-organizing our library and scraping wax from the candles off of the floor in the sanctuary before mopping it and hand drying it.