The Epitaphios is an embroidered cloth icon depicting Christ’s dead body, used during Holy Week to represent His burial. We place it on a decorated bier, process with it, and venerate it on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
If you’ve been to services during Holy Week at St. Michael’s, you’ve seen it. The richly embroidered cloth shows Christ lying in death, sometimes with the Theotokos and angels surrounding Him. It’s not just decorative. When we carry the Epitaphios in procession and kiss it, we’re participating in Christ’s actual burial, entering into that moment when Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the Lord’s body and laid it in the tomb.
What Happens on Good Friday
The Epitaphios appears during the Matins of Holy Friday (which we usually serve Thursday evening because of work schedules here in Beaumont). After the Gospel reading about Christ’s burial, the priest places the embroidered shroud on a bier in the center of the church. That bier represents the tomb.
Then comes the procession. We carry the Epitaphios around the church while chanting the Lamentations, those haunting hymns of mourning that express both grief and hope. Some parishes process outside the building. Either way, it’s a funeral procession. We’re burying Christ.
After the procession, the bier stays in the center of the nave. Everyone comes forward to venerate the Epitaphios. You kiss the icon, cross yourself, pray. In many parishes people pass under the bier as a sign of humility before death and participation in burial and resurrection. Kids especially love this part, though the theological meaning runs deeper than they realize at first.
The Epitaphios remains on the bier through Holy Saturday. It’s there for the morning services, a constant reminder that Christ truly died and lay in the tomb. Only at Pascha, when we proclaim the Resurrection, does it get set aside.
Why It Matters Theologically
We don’t do this because it’s pretty or traditional. The Epitaphios proclaims something essential: Christ really died. God became human and went all the way into death for us. That’s not a metaphor. The Incarnation means God took on flesh that could die, and He died.
But there’s a paradox here. We’re mourning at a funeral, but we already know the ending. The Lamentations express real grief, the Theotokos weeping over her Son, the disciples devastated, yet they’re shot through with Paschal hope. Death has been trampled down even as we stand at the tomb. Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote about this tension in his Holy Week reflections: we enter fully into Christ’s death precisely so we can enter fully into His Resurrection.
When you kiss the Epitaphios, you’re doing what the myrrh-bearing women did. You’re Joseph of Arimathea wrapping the body. You’re identifying with Christ’s death so that you can be raised with Him. It’s baptismal. It’s Eucharistic. It’s the whole Christian life compressed into one liturgical moment.
The Hymns We Sing
The Lamentations are the heart of the service. These are the nine stichera chanted at the tomb, and they’re some of the most beautiful and sorrowful hymns in all of Orthodox worship. They weave together Old Testament prophecy, Gospel narrative, and the Church’s theological reflection on what Christ’s death means.
One of the refrains goes: “The noble Joseph, when he had taken down Thy most pure Body from the tree, wrapped it in fine linen and anointed it with spices, and placed it in a new tomb.” We sing this while standing before the Epitaphios, and suddenly we’re in first-century Jerusalem. Time collapses in the liturgy.
The hymns also give voice to Mary’s grief. She speaks to her dead Son, asking how she can bear to see Him lifeless. These aren’t sentimental. They’re raw and honest about what death does to us, even as they point beyond death to life.
A Word for Inquirers
If you come from a Protestant background, this might feel strange at first. Baptists don’t process with embroidered shrouds. But remember: we’re not symbolizing something that happened long ago. In the liturgy, past and present merge. When we venerate the Epitaphios, we’re not playacting. We’re entering into the actual event of Christ’s burial through the mystery of worship.
And we’re not worshiping a piece of cloth. We venerate the icon, we honor what it depicts. Just as you’d kiss a photo of someone you love, we kiss the image of Christ. The Seventh Ecumenical Council settled this back in 787, affirming that icons are proper and necessary for Christian worship.
Come to the services this Holy Week if you can. Stand with us at the tomb. Pass under the bier. Kiss the Epitaphios. You’ll understand it better by doing it than by reading about it. The liturgy teaches through participation, not just explanation.
