The Epitaphios Services of Great Friday

The Vespers of Great Friday afternoon — often called the Unnailing Vespers — reads a long composite Passion Gospel, and at the words of the burial the service does what it describes. In Greek practice the figure of Christ is literally unfastened from the cross that has stood in mid-church since the night before, wrapped in white linen, and carried into the sanctuary — the priest acting the part of Joseph of Arimathea, the secret disciple who begged the body from Pilate. Then the epitaphios itself — a large embroidered or painted cloth icon of Christ laid out for burial, mourned by His Mother and the disciples — is carried out and laid in the tomb: a canopied bier, in Greek called the kouvouklion, which parishioners have spent the morning covering in flowers. Details vary from parish to parish and between traditions, but the grammar is everywhere the same: deposition, wrapping, burial.

As the epitaphios is laid down, the choir sings the troparion of the Noble Joseph — the hymn of a man doing the bravest and tenderest thing in the Gospels, dressing God for burial. The faithful then venerate the epitaphios, typically with a prostration and a kiss, and in many places children and adults alike will keep watch by the tomb through the evening, as at the wake of a beloved.

Friday evening brings the Matins of Great Saturday, served by anticipation, and with it the Lamentations — in Greek the Enkomia, "praises." These are hundreds of short poetic verses sung in three groups called stases, interwoven line by line with the verses of Psalm 119 (Psalm 118 in the Church's Greek numbering), the long psalm of the blessed dead who kept God's law. The verses marvel at the impossible thing in the middle of the church: the Life of all lying dead in a grave; the One who hung the earth upon the waters hung upon a tree and now buried; the Mother weeping over the Son she knows will rise. English translations of the Lamentations vary considerably from book to book, so the wording you hear will depend on the parish — the astonishment does not.

Toward the end of Matins the epitaphios is lifted and carried in procession — around the outside of the church where practice allows, with the faithful following holding candles, and in many places bells tolling slowly as for a funeral. When the procession returns, the epitaphios is held up at the door and the faithful pass beneath it to re-enter: everyone goes home through the tomb of Christ. Local customs embroider the night — in Greek parishes the tomb is sprinkled with rosewater and flowers are given from it — and the epitaphios is then laid on the altar table, where in many uses it remains until the feast of the Ascension.

Nothing about these services is despair. Isaiah had foretold that the Servant would make His grave with the rich — Joseph's unused tomb — and the hymns treat the burial itself as an act of war: Christ enters death's territory as a conqueror entering a city. The Church calls Great Saturday the blessed Sabbath, the day God rests from the work of the new creation as He rested at the first, and the Lamentations keep breaking out of mourning into expectation — grief and triumph in the same breath, as the dead Christ is already harrowing Hades. Stand at the kouvouklion on Friday night and you are as close as the Church's year brings you to the still point of the Gospel: the silence between the Cross and the Resurrection, kept not in doubt but on tiptoe.