Good Friday is a unique and solemn day for Christians, with ancient prayers and fervent processions

MIAMI — Good Friday is a unique — and uniquely solemn — day in the Christian calendar.

It commemorates the crucifixion and death of Jesus, ahead of what’s a central tenet of faith for believers — his resurrection two days later on Easter Sunday, according to the Gospels.

This year, it falls on April 3 for Catholics and Protestants, and April 10 for Orthodox Christians.

Across Christian denominations, Good Friday services are unlike those on most other days. They often include centuries-old, once-a-year traditions both during the liturgy and out in the streets, where elaborate processions and other rituals of fervent popular piety are held.

While Catholics gather, it’s the only day without an actual Mass, because there’s no sacrament of the Eucharist, which is the transformation of bread and wine into Jesus’ body and blood according to the church. Orthodox Christians don’t celebrate the Eucharist either on what they call Great and Holy Friday.

Most mainline Protestant denominations and Evangelicals also hold unique services, like the Lutheran devotion focused on the biblical accounts of Jesus’ last words on the cross, though they are not as strict on fasting as Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Church services tend to last more than an hour, usually starting at 3 p.m., when tradition says Jesus died. But even though it’s not a day of obligation, and it’s a workday in the United States, churches tend to be packed.

“The time leading up to Good Friday is a big reflection on sacrifice — what he did for me and what I am doing in return,” said Manuel León, 22.

A member of Miami’s Corpus Christi Catholic Church youth group, he will carry a grimly realistic statue of Jesus crucified in procession through a hip central neighborhood on Good Friday.

“Pushing that statue from the back and seeing how torn up he is, what he did for us really becomes real,” León added.

Ancient forms of liturgy mark Good Friday

Some of the most ancient liturgical practices define Good Friday service for Catholics, said Father John Baldovin, a professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College.

“The most solemn days tend to retain the oldest ceremonies,” he added, including as example the fact that the priests and ministers prostrate themselves in front of the altar at the beginning of the service.

Another ancient tradition is the extensive prayers of the faithful, interspersed with genuflections, which today include intentions as varied as praying for the pope, for the Jewish people, and for those who do not believe in God.

Up until Holy Week reforms introduced by the Vatican in the 1950s, Communion wasn’t distributed on Good Friday, though now it is with hosts consecrated a day earlier on Holy Thursday, Baldovin said.

But the highlight of the ceremony is the adoration of the cross, which in many cases is held up near the altar as the faithful line up to kiss it or touch it in reverence.

Among the earliest documents of this practice is the diary of pilgrim who in the 4th century went from what’s today Spain to Jerusalem, Baldovin said. There, at the present-day Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a bishop held up the cross for several hours as the faithful venerated it.

Processions with sacred images make Jesus’s passion real for global faithful

Life-sized statues of Jesus crucified, the weeping Virgin Mary, and representations of scenes from the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ torture and death on a cross are carried in large processions in different parts of the world.

Some of the oldest and most awe-inspiring are in southern Spain’s Seville, where tens of thousands of people watch much-venerated images of Jesus and Mary being carried in hourslong processions throughout Holy Week.

“Not all of us have the ability to look at the sky and feel fulfilled. Others like me need the images,” said Manolo Gobea.

He moved from Seville to Miami three decades ago and now heads the brotherhood that organizes the Good Friday procession starting from Corpus Christi church and winding its way through the graffiti-splashed neighborhood of Wynwood.

As the main, Seville-made statues exit the palm-fringed church, they’re carried over intricate carpets made of colored sawdust and flowers. That’s a nod to another tradition that’s perhaps most exuberantly followed in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, where miles of these carpets are created for Holy Week — twice on Good Friday.

“On Good Friday, we feel the pain of Mary, Jesus’ pain, his surrender for love,” said Silvia Armira, as she prepared the carpet drawings for the procession in Miami, where she arrived from Guatemala in the 1990s. “It’s the great love of God, who gave up his only son for us.”

Faithful’s devotion sees past Good Friday’s pain to Easter joy

Solemn and popular rituals on Good Friday vary from the pope’s traditional “way of the cross” in Rome to a trek to the adobe sanctuary of Chimayo in New Mexico to self-flagellation and even crucifixion in the Philippines.

For many priests, they are all opportunities to take faith out of church and into streets to evangelize — and to point out that the gruesome death on the cross isn’t the end of the story.

“Our procession is a cry to the world — ‘get out, look at what is the way, the truth, the life,’” said Father José Luis Menéndez.

“May your entire attitude be a living prayer,” the Cuban-born, Spanish-raised pastor at Corpus Christi in Miami told more than 100 faithful at the last rehearsal for this year’s procession.

Carefully watching over the SUV-sized float covered in silver-plated ornaments, flower vases and candlesticks, Gobea said the main appeal of Good Friday celebrations is that they lead from death to Easter joy.

“To the weeping Mary, we put flowers, we sing hymns, and that’s because we know how it ends — which is the resurrection,” he said.