The Easter weekend is here again, which started with Good Friday, April 15.

This is a significant time for Christians, noting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Lord’s only son.

This weekend, many of us will be eating fish rather than meat but why?

Jesus sacrificed his flesh for humankind (“Forgive them Lord for they do not know what they do”) and so on this day we abstain from eating meat, substituting it with fish to honour Jesus Christ and why he died on the cross for all of us.

Good Friday is the day Christians set aside to reflect and remember the death and resurrection of Jesus. On the day, many Christians refrain from eating the flesh of warm-blooded animals.

Also, the fish is a symbol of Christianity and many of Jesus’s disciples were fishermen.

The Catholic Code of Canon Law 1250, 1251 gives insight into this holy day of the Christian calendar. It reads: “The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent. Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday’… The application of this precept varies from country to country. For example, American bishops allow individual Catholics to substitute another penance if they could not abstain from meat.”

It is believed that Jesus was crucified by the Romans on a Friday and rose from the dead on Sunday.

In the 1960s, the Pope decreed it was not a compulsory rule that Catholics should eat fish on Good Friday and factored in people’s economic circumstances.