Hello, and welcome to Kathy Gantz's Live. I'm Psy Kelly, your host. Thank you so much for being here with us on this good Friday for what you will see is a special episode, a good Friday episode shorter than usual.

We're just going to sit and chat with our chaplain for the same keys, your chaplain for the next few minutes.

The primary reason we do this is that we are not on the air today on most of the stations that we're on. We will be preempted for liturgical broadcasts of one kind or another or preaching or other things that will be done for good Friday.

And thank God for that. It's all beautiful stuff, but we didn't want it neglect to do our work. And so we are here for a little bit with you to talk about good Friday.

For the same keys, as I said, is our chaplain here. Father, thank you for being here. I love you. Very welcome. Good Friday. If I last time yesterday, we started a little bit with the celebration in relation to the life of Christ.

So just so for those who need a refresher, and we all do from time to time, what happened in the life of Christ on good Friday? What was his Friday like?

It was not a good Friday for him. It begins in the wee hours of the morning with his trial.

So just as we said yesterday, the evening of Thursday after the last supper, after the institution of the Eucharist, and that time celebrating the Passover with his disciples, Jesus goes into the garden to pray.

The garden of Gethsemane, and there he is. Well, his disciples fall asleep a few times. There's that.

Yeah. Which is why you get one of the things liturgically that happens in between Thursday and Friday is the sacrament. The blessed sacrament is kept for communion on good Friday, but there's a kind of tradition of waiting with the sacrament.

Because Jesus says to his disciples, could you not watch with me one hour? And so that kind of language of watch and pray gets used with the kind of watch with the blessed sacrament.

In some places, it might be a continuous vigil for 24 hours, or until whenever the liturgy of good Friday is. A lot of churches that might close at midnight or something.

But anyway, in terms of what's actually happening with Jesus and the gospels, he goes to the garden, he's arrested, his trial.

Well, if you read the Passion Accounts, he gets shuffled from place to place. He goes to the Jewish authorities that he goes to the high priest.

The Sanhedrin he goes to eventually ends up in front of Pilate, partly because the Jews do not have the authority to execute him under Roman law.

And so they basically ask Pontius Pilate to put him to death for them. And so he does. So that's really fundamentally the event of good Friday is the crucifixion. Jesus carrying his cross up the hill, being nailed to the cross, dying.

So those kind of three hours, especially between noon and 3pm, those are the hours of the crucifixion. And so if churches can, the privileged time for celebrating the liturgy of good Friday is actually noon or 3pm.

In many cases, for practical reasons, we postpone it into the evening so that more of the faithful can be present. But those are kind of the three hours of the climax, if you will, of the Passion.

And then Jesus dies. And that's kind of where we're left, right? I mean, we talked yesterday about how the sacred syndrome is a kind of single continuous liturgy over three days. And good Friday is very obvious because it ends, right?

The story seems to be over. And I mean, so please don't go to church just on good Friday. That's a good point. That would be just really sad. But it's, I mean, it is, you know, obviously it's the lead up to Easter, right? And in a sense, you know, Easter takes its meaning from Friday in that, you know, there's no resurrection without death.

And so good Friday is really that moment in which we just kind of sit with the reality of the Passion and Death of Christ. And we try to enter into that with him and, you know, it tastes in some sense of the Passion.

It's a day of, it's complicated day. I mean, in a sense, it's a day of mourning, you know, the traditional, the traditional color for good Friday is black, like for a traditional funeral mass.

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