The Holy Friday Idiomelon "Today, he is hung upon wood": Liturgical Theology between Jerusalem and Constantinople

abstract: "Today, he is hung upon wood" ("Σήμερον κρεμᾶται ἐπὶ ξύλου") is among the most widely disseminated hymns for the commemoration of Christ's Passion to have emerged from the Christian East. One of a set of twelve hymns of the late antique Holy Friday liturgy of Jerusalem, it was transmitted in Greek, Georgian, and Syriac, entered the Triodion tradition, and survives to this day in the Byzantine Rite. Despite its enduring popularity, the hymn remains little studied. This article argues that verses were added to the hymn after its arrival in Constantinople, where the veneration of the relic of the lance took place in Holy Week. Exploiting this textual development as a point of entry into analysis of the hymn's rhetoric, it identifies a shift from an understanding of Christ's Passion developed around language of institutional abuse and slavery to one based on late antique and Byzantine understandings of gendered social hierarchy.