Eastern Churches
The service of Vespers on Great Friday in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Catholic churches uses the expression "impious and transgressing people", but the strongest expressions are in the Orthros of Great Friday, which includes the same phrase, but also speaks of "the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews" and referring to "the assembly of the Jews", prays: "But give them, O Lord, their reward, for they devised vain things against Thee."
This having been said, on multiple occasions at Great Friday the forgiving words of Jesus Christ to the Jews are also brought to mind: "Heaven at this was amazed and the sun hid its rays; yet thou, O Israel, was not ashamed, but hast delivered Me to death. Forgive them, Holy Father, for they do not know what they have done," and again, "How great is the Master's love for mankind! For those who crucified Him, He prays to His Father, saying: 'Forgive them this sin, for in their wickedness they know not what they do.'"
In 2007, a group of twelve Orthodox priests representing five different national churches, some in open defiance of directives from their church leadership, issued a ten-page declaration calling for the removal all liturgical passages they perceived as anti-Semitic.
Read more about this topic: Good Friday Prayer For The Jews
Famous quotes containing the words eastern and/or churches:
“Midway the lake we took on board two manly-looking middle-aged men.... I talked with one of them, telling him that I had come all this distance partly to see where the white pine, the Eastern stuff of which our houses are built, grew, but that on this and a previous excursion into another part of Maine I had found it a scarce tree; and I asked him where I must look for it. With a smile, he answered that he could hardly tell me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)