Good Friday is unique in being a day with more than one collect assigned to the day. Each brings something different to reflection on the death of Jesus. The first collect seems slightly anticlimactic at first glance.

ALMIGHTY God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

In response to Jesus’ death we ask for nothing more than that God would ‘graciously behold’ us. That doesn’t seem especially ambitious, and yet there are hidden depths. For one thing, Zahl and Barbee suggest that we may be asking God to watch over us for the whole of the Triduum, effectively asking his blessing on our Easter celebrations. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what I make of that suggestion. The idea of God looking at us, however, also carries resonances with the Aaronic blessing. In the light of the cross we ask God to make his face shine upon us and be gracious to us, to turn his face towards us and grant us peace. And we do so as his family. The most fundamental blessing secured by the cross is that God our Father turns a gracious eye towards us because he loves us as his children in Christ.

The second collect expands on this and applies it to the life of the Church.

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Doubtless, the generic use of ‘he’ here needs modernising and indeed Common Worship casts it in gender neutral terms. What we ask here is that Jesus’ death will cause us to serve God faithfully. Jesus died to purify for himself a people who are zealous for good works (Titus 2:14) and we ask that God would empower and sanctify us by his Spirit so that we would be just such a people.

The third collect is easily the most controversial one in the whole BCP. I honestly hesitated to write this post because of it.

O MERCIFUL God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live: Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

I don’t honestly think I could use this collect in public worship. There are so many issues. Referring to all Muslims generically as ‘Turks’ is clearly not acceptable in a modern context. Dividing the population of the world into Christians, Jews, Muslims, ‘infidels’ and heretics is far too simplistic a division to be of any use in 21st Century Britain. But it is what this collect says about Jews in particular that makes it controversial.

There are lots of things you can say about this. You can point out that Jews are being specified but not singled out. You can point out that the book of homilies homily for Good Friday specifically rebukes the idea that Jews were specially to blame for Jesus’ death. You can point out that ‘hardness of heart and contempt of your word and commandment’ is something we pray to be delivered from ourselves in the twice weekly litany. You can argue that there are non-Supercessionist readings of the ‘true Israelites’ line. You can say that it’s eminently Scriptural to pray for the Jews, that they may be saved (Romans 10:1).

You can say all of these things, but none of them erase the legacy of Christian antisemitism, nor the part prayers like this have played in that history. If the last 1900 years of Jewish-Christian relations hadn’t happened, perhaps this prayer would be less problematic. But they have and we must take account of that.

So I am glad that Common Worship has replaced this prayer with a series of far more nuanced ones, including one in which we explicitly recognise the Church’s role in the persecution of Jews. In the light of the case of Stephen Sizer, conservative Evangelicals have no place for complacency in this area.

What can and must be salvaged from this collect is the sense that Christ died for the sins of the world. It’s all too easy for our celebrations to be overly inward looking, whichever of the two approaches to Good Friday I described earlier we adopt. We can end up focusing exclusively on our guilt or our forgiveness. But Christ died for the world. As we reflect on Christ’s death, we must lift our gaze from ourselves to the global scope of God’s plan in Christ.

Three collects, then, in light of the Cross, asking for God’s grace, his blessing on the life of the Church inwardly, and the reach of the Gospel outwardly.