Why are the elements removed from the altar on Good Friday?
Good Friday is unlike any other day in the church year. It is the day we solemnly remember Christ’s crucifixion — His suffering, death, and burial. In many Lutheran churches, the paraments (the cloths adorning the altar, pulpit, and lectern) are removed, and the altar is stripped bare. Some congregations also extinguish candles and remove flowers and other decorative elements.
This practice draws from ancient Christian tradition and reflects the profound weight of the day. The bare altar visually proclaims what the liturgy announces: The Lord has died. There is no celebration, no festivity — only grief, repentance, and awe before the cross. Just as Christ was stripped of His garments before His crucifixion, the stripping of the altar becomes a wordless sermon, helping us enter more fully into the solemnity of His suffering.
The removal of elements also heightens the joy of Easter. When the altar is adorned again on Resurrection Sunday — filled with white paraments, lilies, and light — the contrast powerfully proclaims that death has been swallowed up in victory.
Why was Jesus given a crown of thorns?
The soldiers who placed a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head intended it as mockery. They dressed Him in a purple robe, pressed thorns into His brow, and called out, “Hail, King of the Jews!” (John 19:2-3). Their cruelty was meant to humiliate — to ridicule the very idea that this beaten man could be a king.
But what the soldiers meant as contempt, God ordained as truth. Jesus is the King of kings, and even in His suffering, the crown (however cruel) declared it. The thorns themselves carry deeper meaning. In Genesis 3:17-18, God cursed the ground after Adam’s sin, causing it to bring forth “thorns and thistles.” Thorns, in Scripture, are bound up with the curse that sin brought into the world. When Jesus wore that crown, He was bearing the curse of sin on our behalf, taking upon Himself what we deserved so that we might be freed from it. As Paul writes, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).
In Matthew 22, where was the wedding guest supposed to get a wedding garment?
Ancient custom held that wealthy hosts, especially kings, would provide wedding garments for their guests. For those gathered hastily from the dirty and dusty roads, this provision would have been expected. The man without a garment had been offered one and refused it, choosing instead to come on his own terms.
Lutheran theology finds beautiful Gospel meaning here. Luther taught that the wedding garment represents the righteousness of Christ received through faith and Baptism (Galatians 3:27). God provides what we cannot supply ourselves. Our own righteousness, as Isaiah reminds us, is like a “polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). The offense of the man thrown out wasn’t that he lacked access to a garment; it was that he rejected the one freely given. In Christ, God clothes us in His own holiness.
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