For centuries in much of Christian Europe, Good Friday was a bad day to be Jewish. Far from understanding the real meaning of the Passion of Our Lord they had been listening to, worshippers would be inflamed by it to go and cause havoc to their Jewish neighbours. It was an annual disgrace, which to its shame the Church did little to correct. The crime of “Deicide” – “God-killing” – was blamed on the Jewish people on the basis of Matthew 27:25: “His blood be on us and on our children.” Matthew attributed this to “the people”, those present at the time. It was St John’s Gospel which repeatedly, and lamentably, identified them as “the Jews”.