Good Friday 2025

Good Friday and the Service of the Three Days at Redeemer

The Service of the Three Days proclaims the very heart of the Christian faith: the death and resurrection of Jesus. It begins on the evening of Maundy Thursday and ends on Saturday with the Easter Vigil. On Maundy Thursday and Good Friday there is no benediction, because the service does not end. At Redeemer, Maundy Thursday provides the opportunity for individual absolution, mirroring Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent when our confession was answered by the imposition of ashes. After communion, the altar and chancel are stripped bare, preparing for the grief and darkness of Good Friday. The Great Vigil of Easter begins in darkness, gathered around a fire as the story of our redemption is recalled in scripture and music, the altar and chancel are restored, “Alleluia” returns to our worship, the Paschal Candle is lighted, and new family join us in Holy Baptism. Good Friday stands in the center, focused on reading the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion and death, and responding with song, and ends with the Adoration of the Cross when you are invited to reverence the cross as you leave: standing, kneeling, praying, touching it, or, in the 6th or 7th century tradition, kissing it. The service is called “Tenebrae” because the room is darkened as the Gospel is read, representing Jesus’ approaching death.

At Redeemer for the past few decades, the musical responses to the gospel narrative have been drawn from a wide variety of styles, from German hymns to American spirituals, from simple anthems to major classical compositions, ancient and modern. This year, the Redeemer Choir will sing the Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross by Joseph Haydn, giving the service a significantly different form. The work will be accompanied by strings and organ and will feature four guest soloists with the Redeemer Choir. The work is divided into an instrumental introduction, followed by a movement for each of the seven sayings of Jesus from the cross, and ending with a truly surprising final movement. These movements will be sung during the gospel reading as they occur in the final part of the story, necessarily incorporating passages from Matthew and Luke’s gospels since John’s, the prescribed gospel, does not include all seven sayings.

Musical Settings of the Passion and the Seven Last Words

Early church liturgy included intoning the Passion gospel on Good Friday, often assigning “roles” to different soloists, creating a dramatic narration. By the mid-17th century, the Reformation had produced musical Passion settings in German, including recitatives, arias, choruses, and instrumental movements, reaching their highest expression in Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions.

By the 12th/13th century, the seven sayings were compiled as the “Septenary of the Words on the Cross”:

1. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

2. Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)

3. Woman, behold thy son! - Behold thy mother! (John 19:26-27)

4. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46)

5. I thirst. (John 19:28)

6. It is finished. (John 19:30)

7. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)

Around 1500, the German hymn Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund provided a poetic setting with a stanza for each of the seven sayings, and an opening and closing stanza. Heinrich Schütz wrote an extended setting of the Seven Words in 1645 (last performed at Redeemer in 2000) and other composers created versions, notably Haydn in 1786 and Theodore Dubois in 1867. 

A parallel creative movement arose in the Jesuit community in Lima, Peru who developed a Passion devotion on the Seven Last Words around 1690 and service structures celebrating Three Hours at the Cross. the tradition spread to and was embraced in Europe even before the Jesuits were expelled from Peru in 1767, and Haydn’s setting–commissioned for the 1786 Good Friday service at Oratorio de la Santa Cueva (Holy Cave Oratory) in Cádiz, Spain–arose from this movement of popular devotion. These were necessarily devotional services, since the contemporary liturgy focused on the gospel narrative and did not allow instruments. 

Haydn’s setting of the Seven Last Words

Haydn was a modern composer with an international reputation, standing between the Baroque and Classical periods, looking forward as he invented new forms like the symphony and string quartet, and using harmonic language that anticipates Mozart and Beethoven, and intimates the language of Brahms and Mahler. His Spanish commission was for an instrumental work, which Haydn wrote for a large orchestra of winds, brass, percussion and strings. In the introduction to the 1801 published version, he wrote: 

“At that time, it was customary to perform an oratorio every year during Lent in the main church of Cadiz, to whose increased effect the following arrangements had to contribute not a little. The walls, windows and pillars of the church were covered with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging in the center illumi­nated the holy darkness. At noon all doors were closed; now the music began. After an appropriate prelude, the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced one of the seven words, and delivered a meditation on it. As soon as this was completed, he descended from the pulpit and fell kneeling before the altar. The silence was filled by music. The bishop entered and left the pulpit for the second, third time, etc., and each time the orchestra played after the end of the speech.”

Performances in Berlin and Vienna that preceded the Spanish premiere suggested a popularity that led Haydn within a few years to create or permit adaptations for string quartet, solo piano, orchestra with chorus and soloists (in German, Italian and English), and string quartet with soprano solo. Our performance at Redeemer will include five solo string players and organ providing the critical wind lines.

Though the original version was orchestral with no sung text, Haydn was thinking textually from the beginning. Before a sung version was considered, in the first violin part of the string quartet version, he writes the “Father, forgive them” text under the opening notes, encouraging the violinist to think lyrically as they play. 

While traveling to London in 1794, Haydn stopped in Passau where he heard a performance of his Seven Last Words to which the local choir director, Joseph Friebert, had added four vocal parts singing German pietistic texts. Haydn liked the idea but thought he could improve on it. Working from a copy of Friebert’s adaptation, he created his own choral version with incidental soloists, and recruited Baron Gottfried van Swieten–with whom Haydn would later collaborate on The Creation and The Seasons–to revise Friebert’s text. The text we will sing in our performance at Redeemer is largely an English version created by John Webb, prepared for an English performance in 1836 under the direction of Haydn’s pupil Sigismund Neukomm. Webb’s English text is theologically more Protestant than van Swieten’s German, written for the devoutly Catholic Haydn and his Spanish Catholic commissioner.

Because this was originally a work for a large orchestra, some find the string quartet version lacking in tonal variety, or disparage the oratorio version–even with orchestra–as an unnecessary adaptation in which “the words get in the way.” In our Redeemer performance, we will try to add the expressive textures and colors of the orchestral winds through Sarah Hawbecker and the Létourneau. The addition of human voices singing adds its own texture and color, and the pietistic texts–though not profound poetry–invite us to reflect on what it means in our lives to hear Jesus’ words spoken from the cross: 

forgive…

you will be with me…

look on us…

do not leave us…

we suffer…

our work is completed…

“Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit; you have redeemed me.” (Psalm 31:5)