The Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church can and should be for all of us not a dreary repetition, but a source of ongoing instruction in the deepest and most important truths of our faith. This week at OCN, we’re focusing on the Holy Eucharist. And we can’t hope to understand the Eucharist without understanding it’s context – the Divine Liturgy.

In the second half of the Liturgy, after we pray the Nicene Creed, we reach the part of the Liturgy called the Holy Anaphora. As the celebrant finishes his preparation of the Holy Gifts, he turns to the assembly and says, “Let us lift up our hearts.” To which the people respond, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Through this simple prayer, we glimpse the meaning of the sacrament. Fr. Thomas Hopko summarizes this moment of our worship with these words:

“As men in Christ lift up the eucharistic gifts, they lift up their hearts as well. ... The manner of lifting up oneself to God is through thanksgiving. The word eucharist in Greek means thanksgiving. The eucharistic Divine Liturgy is preeminently the action of lifting up one's heart and giving thanks to God for all that he has done for man and the world in Christ and the Holy Spirit.” Or even more fundamentally, in the words of Fr. Schmemann, “Man was created for Eucharist – for the pure love of God, for the sake of God, for the recognition of God as the content of his very life, as ... the Answer to all his questions, the Purpose of all his desires.”

The Holy Anaphora next moves to what is often thought of as the climax of the Liturgy, the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the epiklesis. The priest prays, “send down Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here offered.” The Holy Spirit is always “everywhere and fills all things.” The invocation of the Holy Spirit at the Divine Liturgy is our affirmation that everything in life which is positive and good is accomplished by the Spirit of God, and that it is the Person of the Holy Spirit who makes possible our unity with God and with each other. The deacon reaffirms the priest’s prayer, praying “That our loving God, having accepted them at His holy and mystical altar in heaven as an offering of spiritual fragrance, will in turn send down upon us divine grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, let us pray.” This central role of the Holy Spirit, the One who makes our life in God possible, reminds us of the teaching of the great Russian saint, Seraphim of Sarov, that the entire goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.

The Liturgy takes us as a human body and transforms us into the mystical body of Christ – the body through which the Risen Christ is present and works in the world today. This is affirmed by the priest, who proclaims, “The holy Gifts for the holy people of God.”

We then find ourselves presented with these holy Gifts. “Here before your eyes is the bread of life,” pronounced St. Nicholas Cabasilas. “Let not everyone come to receive it, but only those who are worthy, for holy things are for the holy only. Those whom the priest calls holy are not only those who have attained perfection, but those also who are striving for it without having yet obtained it. Nothing prevents them from being sanctified by partaking of the holy mysteries, and from this point of view being saints. It is in this sense that the whole Church is called holy.”

In the Eucharist we are offered Christ’s deified flesh. We are joined to His Body so that we can partake of divine life. In the Eucharist, Christ acts to make us His own Body. This is what we must understand: The mysteries are not merely ‘sacred rites’; they are nothing less than our participation in the life of the Holy Trinity. We have been united with Christ in Baptism and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And in our worship, we are led to the Holy Table and partake of the Bread of heaven. We reach the Kingdom. The Divine Liturgy is not simply a sacred drama, a mere representation of past events. More than anything else, it is a personal encounter with the living, resurrected Christ.

Let me conclude with a final observation of St. Nicholas Cabasilas. St. Nicholas teaches that the Eucharist is the final and greatest of the mysteries, “since it is not possible to go beyond it or add anything to it. After the Eucharist there is nowhere further to go. There all must stand, and try to examine the means by which we may preserve the treasure to the end. For in it we obtain God Himself, and God is united with us in the most perfect union.” 

Fr. Christopher Metropulos is founder, host, and executive director of the Orthodox Christian Network (OCN) and the Come Receive The Light national Orthodox Christian radio program (www.myocn.net). He is pastor of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he and his wife Georgia are raising their six children.