Sarx

We continue with the serialised posts of Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregory’s, made here with the permission of the author and the publisher.

ollowing rabbinical custom, the Presider secures the congregation’s assent, (”Let us give thanks… It is right…”) and begins the Great Thanksgiving prayer, from which the entire Eucharistic Liturgy (Greek for “Thanksgiving Service”) takes its name. This prayer, derived from the long blessing (kiddûsh) over the first winecup opening formal discussion at the Chabûrah, thanks God for all the acts of creation and salvation that climaxed in Jesus’ life-giving death and resurrection, and prays for the gift of Christ’s Spirit and the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom. Centuries of debate have focussed on this prayer, on God’s answer to it, and on the place of these in Christian faith. Even a summary of the central points would overextend this pamphlet; a paragraph alone must suffice here.

The eucharist is a “sacrament,” (from the Latin, sacramentum, meaning “oath”) that is, a promise from God: our prayer will be granted, because Jesus himself is God’s “yes” answer. (2 Corinthians 1:20) As we pray for Jesus’ presence with us, so his Spirit is here; and the bread and wine are his body and blood shared with us, just as the Last Supper story affirms. According to that story, he followed the Chabûrah ritual, giving thanks as usual; then when handing out the bread and wine, he used words that made plain his own faith: his coming death would be a life-giving sacrifice. Instead of taking back Jesus’ life, God would give his life to the world. Just so, he is present now wherever two or three gather in his name (Matthew 18:20), and our worship from beginning to end is full of him. The gospel resurrection stories show that his followers recognized his presence especially when keeping his Chabûrah, and Christians ever since have honored this feast as the climax of their worship.

Changing Notions and Rites During later ages the table ritual changed to emphasize current notions of how Christ was present or what his presence meant. The fight against Arianism provided the first occasion. In an effort to buttress Christ’s divinity, John Chrysostom and other orthodox preachers proclaimed that the eucharistic bread was God’s own body. As Chrysostom himself complained, the faithful responded by giving that divine stuff a wide berth, increasingly shunning communion as dangerously sacred. For a long time most laypeople reserved communion, and even baptism, until their deathbeds.

Reformers in the ninth, sixteenth and twentieth centuries revamped the ritual following current historical (or historicized) ideas. Alcuin, Calvin and Dix are good examples: each found their contemporary liturgies different from the gospel Last Supper narratives, and set about “restoring” what he thought had got lost. Their historical views were partly conjectural, however, and they “restored” customs (like unleavened bread) that the meal had not had before. All these reformers meant to strengthen the continuity linking contemporary Christian worshippers with Jesus and his followers. Today the same intention leads us to simplify or omit symbols once popular, in favor of others we find more fundamental or inclusive. Perhaps one day others may do the same with our work!

Concelebration - Size Matters Byzantine bishops and presbyters concelebrate on occasion. After Vatican II, Roman Catholic reformers seized on this practice for a compromise that might enable priests trained for daily private masses to share in a single community eucharist; Anglicans welcomed it as a vehicle for collegiality; and ecumenists made it a sign of mutual denominational respect. By contrast, the classical pattern calls for one Presider at the table, taking the unifying role of the Chabûrah host, and yielding this place to a visiting presbyter when ecumenical circumstances warrant it. (*)

Following Hellenistic Symposium custom, rabbis at the Chabûrah, and early Christians following the Didachê, blessed the bread and wine separately at either end of a full meal, with scriptural discussion afterward. (Later the eating, drinking and discussing overlapped.) A Chabûrah host began this meal holding a loaf while giving thanks over it in normal family style, then broke off pieces, popping one in his mouth and giving each guest a morsel. Likewise after supper, he held the winecup while giving thanks, then shared it, first sipping himself, and then delivering it to each guest in turn. The Last Supper story says that during these distributions — not during the prayer — Jesus told his disciples, “Take, eat, this is my body…” and “…this is my blood…”

Such a ritual worked well enough for small groups. But the growth of church membership called for adjustments. (Among northern European Jews today the host exchanges sips of wine with each guest: a gesture few hosts could complete with a large crowd!) Christians soon separated the supper from the blessings of bread and wine, and joined these blessings into a single prayer; in the fourth century this prayer acquired an explanatory narrative of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples. As the amount of bread and wine increased, the deacons began piling these gifts on the table, or holding them in baskets when even the table became too small. Thus the host quit handling them, and instead stood praying with his hands raised throughout. After the fourth century, the decline of popular communion reduced the quantities needed, but presidents continued to celebrate without handling the gifts until the ninth century in the west, and until today in the east. (It astonishes Anglo-catholic seminarians to learn that Eastern Orthodox clergy never touch the bread and wine during the Great Thanksgiving, and have not for eighteen hundred years!)

Presdidigitation In the west, the era of Charlemagne and Cluny saw revived Christian interest in Judaism, year-long conferences between monks and rabbis, and a well-intentioned but mistaken “restoration” of seemingly “lost” Jewish ritual. Because the gospel accounts fixed Jesus’ death near Passover time, westerners now began eating unleavened Passover bread at their eucharist; and their presiders began mimicking Jesus’ actions as the Roman Great Thanksgiving prayer narrated them —lifting the bread, the cup, and their eyes on cue, and making hand signs at every verb. The resulting prestidigitation resembled neither Chabûrah nor Seder ritual; but it can still be seen in some form at most western altars today. Anglican Prayer Books still urge or require it. Nevertheless some western presiders follow a simpler, earlier style, either holding the bread and wine aloft throughout the prayer, or standing with empty hands raised as eastern Christian presidents have done since the third century. When the gifts exceed one paten and chaliceful, the latter method is still the only practical one, and so is our unvarying use at St Gregory’s.

At St Gregory’s the whole congregation stands around the Presider, praying together; and the collegial value of clergy concelebration vanishes into the crowd. The Presider stands at the table’s flat side, facing the icon of Christ, Lord of the Dance. The deacon and people stand all around the table, praying with their hands raised: the classic Christian posture for public prayer. (This posture included raising eyes heavenward as well.) The Presider sings the entire Great Thanksgiving prayer in this stance without manual gestures of any kind, leaving the deacon to turn pages and shoo flies. The congregation join in, droning softly in free harmony throughout the prayer, and singing Acclamations and Amen.

When to sing The Great Thanksgiving enfolds two scriptural hymns, both taken from Jewish synagogue worship, and normally sung in quick succession. (They are conventionally named for the first word of their texts in Latin.) The Sanctus from Isaiah 6 recalls God’s appearance in the Jerusalem temple as in a royal court, attended by seraphim crying “Holy! Holy! Holy!” — a Hebrew superlative, meaning God is the holiest of all. To evoke the Jerusalem temple surroundings at their hometown services, many synagogues synchronized their worship with temple ritual, stood temple furniture around their buildings, and opened with this hymn. Christian synagogue architecture focussed on Christ’s table, instead of the temple, as the place where we know God’s presence, and therefore moved the Sanctus to the table liturgy, attaching it to the Great Thanksgiving either as a climax to the whole prayer, or to the prayer’s opening praises.

The Benedictus is a short refrain conflating two verses from Psalm 118, which sings of God triumphantly rescuing Israel from peril, and of victory sacrifices. The psalm recurs in New Testament preaching about Jesus’ death and resurrection (See Acts, Hebrews, et al.) and Jesus’ Last Supper may have included it. The Benedictus refrain ends the eucharistic meal in the second-century Didachê text, our earliest surviving Great Thanksgiving prayer, and Chabûrah texts likewise have the company sing the same psalm before leaving, possibly using refrains like this one. Thus Psalm 118 is likely the “hymn” mentioned at this point in the Last Supper story. (Mark 14:26)

It appears that the Sanctus was moved from the opening of the synagogue reading service to the close of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, adjoining the Benedictus refrain; and later elaborations were tacked on after these hymns, so that the Sanctus and Benedictus fell somewhere near the middle of the resulting chain of prayers.

E.C. Ratcliff (in his The Sanctus and the Pattern of the Early Anaphora, published in the “Journal of Ecclesiastical History,” 1950) points to the fourth century Apostolic Constitutions as a late survival of a more primitive pattern, by which these hymns concluded the prayer. G. Cuming (to whose memory this pamphlet is dedicated) found Ratcliff’s theory too wide-sweeping: some ancient prayers may have developed according to Ratcliff’s theory; others demonstrably did not.

The Shape of the Thanksgiving When the Sanctus and Benedictus hymns fall in the middle of Great Thanksgiving prayers, as they do in most western prayers written since the fourth century, they divide two very different sections. The former section states a scriptural theme for the day’s celebration, and may change following the lectionary; the section after the hymns is fixed, and focusses on Jesus’ death and the table meal. Ratcliff’s theory suggests a possible explanation for this format: the first section may reflect a primitive stage when the Presider or preacher improvised the prayer “prophetically” suiting the occasion (the Didachê expressly approves this practice), and the hymns followed. The second section may then have emerged as a form for non-prophetic presidents to recite: with time this form grew more extensive and detailed. Then as prophecy disappeared, both forms may have been repeated together, conserving tradition. The Benedictus’ conflation with the Sanctus and separation from the Communion and post-communion implies that something like this happened somewhere, with widely copied results.

At St Gregory’s we use Great Thanksgiving prayers in both formats: those supplied in the Prayer Book and subsequent official publications, which locate the hymns in the middle of the prayer; and a small series of our own authorship, based on the form (not the length!) of the Apostolic Constitutions, recalling creation and salvation history from the lectionary readings, and climaxing with the Sanctus and Benedictus. It is a felicitous form for prayer writing, as the paragraphs move naturally from past to present to realized eschatological hope, climaxing in Isaiah’s majestic hymn.

The Prayer Book supplies six full prayers and an outline for writing more; official sources have added experimental drafts; other Anglican provinces have added theirs; and we have written a short series based on scriptural themes for various lectionary seasons.

The early Church was rich with many such prayers, originally freely composed from Bible imagery, as synagogue and Chabûrah prayers were. Centuries of Roman pressure for uniformity, followed by Reformation wrangling over eucharistic dogma, produced a legacy of western prayers in fierce denominational isolation from each other. By contrast, many eastern churches borrowed each other’s prayers, assigning them to diverse calendar occasions. Here as elsewhere, Anglican practice is shifting in an eastward direction; Roman reforms may be too. Despite formal diversity, however, the content of modern Great Thanksgiving prayers is similar today, as revisions and new compositions are increasingly harmonized under ecumenical influence.

A typical prayer begins by praising God for creation, then recalls God’s revelation to Israel, climaxing in the ministry of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and his Spirit poured out on the world. The prayer then narrates the Last Supper story, repeating Jesus’ sacrificial words when he shared his bread and wine. This story was first told to Paul at Antioch, and copied from his letter (1 Corinthians 11) into the gospels and many eucharistic prayers. Alas, since medieval times it has provided occasion for false magic and groundless sectarian polemic.

When doe it happen? Western schoolmen, misreading ancient prayers’ references to the saving actions of God’s Word (that is, to Jesus’ incarnation and death) reasoned that Jesus’ words in this paragraph of the Great Thanksgiving prayer must perform the sacrificial action at each eucharist. With bizarre precision, they settled on a single central letter in the Roman prayer version as the “moment of consecration:” the “e” in “enim,” a word missing from the scripture story even in Latin bibles! Western presiders began repeating Jesus’ words bent over in a whisper — a dramatic technique here twisted from its use in Syrian worship — and quickly lifting the bread or the cup for the faithful to adore, before completing the prayer. Vulgar witchcraft recognized the magical implications, corrupting the Latin text “hoc est corpus meum /this is my body” into hocus pocus, and the consecrated bread into amulets for white magic against bad luck and vampires, or for black magic at supposed devil’s masses.

Though appalled at these consequences, the Reformers accepted the schoolmen’s premise, and rooted out sacrificial references to purge superstition. For four hundred years polemicists made Jesus’ words an essential test of sacramental validity, as western denominations condemned each other’s worship. The few ancient prayers surviving without this paragraph were treated as unusable anomalies, or even as non-eucharistic prayers suitable for lay presiders at church suppers! To their credit, Eastern Christians resisted identifying any one “moment of consecration,” insisting that the Epiclêsis asking for the Holy Spirit was as important to the prayer as the Last Supper story. But western fashion influenced the ceremonial of some eastern churches too, only shifting this to the epiclesis instead. Our American Prayer Book requires the Last Supper story in freely composed prayers and prayers consecrating additional bread and wine, as though this were the minimal condition for validity.

However, modern textual criticism (M. Johnson et al.) shows this story was introduced into Great Thanksgiving prayers in the fourth century, when explanations instructing the crowds of new converts pervaded public worship. Most older prayers were edited then to receive it. Today insistence upon this paragraph as essential for sacramental validity would excommunicate the first three centuries of Christians, who are our sole source for scriptural and ritual tradition — an absurd position. As research uncovers more diverse usage at every historical level, ecumenists rely ever more on the classic doctrine of intention: a local church’s (or denomination’s) rites are valid if that church intends what the worldwide Church intends. Writing the Last Supper story into modern prayers shows that valid intention, but cannot be not the essential test.

Epiclesis Next, the Presider asks for God’s Spirit to show that Jesus lives in us as we share this bread and wine, which we offer out of all God has given us. Finally the prayer asks God to bless and unify the Church, and bring God’s reign to fulfillment, in accord with Jesus’ faith.

Much ink and blood have been spilt over this part of the prayer, called the Epiclêsis, that is “calling down [the Holy Spirit].” Rather than rehearse the controversies that still cleave Christians here, I note Ratcliff’s theory that the prayer originally asked for the Spirit’s gifts on the Church, and only later consigned them to the bread and wine, thereby opening up insoluble disputes about what happened to these objects as a result. In this pamphlet I have tried to honor the main arguments: the unity of our offering with Christ’s perfect offering; the meaning of Christ’s actions in the context of the Hebrew scriptures he knew; the Church’s faithful intentions in remembering him; the fruits of his life and death realized in the lives of his followers, individually and corporately; and God’s creative and free generosity towards us, from which we have all the gifts we fight over.

Nearly all modern rites call for Acclamations from the people during the Great Thanksgiving — an eastern custom reflecting two thousand years of popular vernacular worship, with parallels in black American church services and African folk music. These Acclamations can vary, but at St Gregory’s we set one Acclamation to music and use it with all prayers, so the congregation can take full part in the Great Thanksgiving without following printed booklets.

The Byzantine Acclamations from the Prayer Book’s Eucharistic Prayer D — a prayer largely written by Gregory of Nyssa’s brother Basil — are the best; and we adapt other prayers to use them. These Acclamations lack the futurist eschatology which other officially authorized Acclamations emphasize, and which contradicts Jesus’ emphasis on the Kingdom come now. (*)

This contradiction shows starkly how far the ascendant liturgical renewal lags behind New Testament scholarship. Perrin’s analysis of gospel tradition has dominated scholarly criticism for thirty years. Yet not one of the officially published new Great Thanksgiving prayers expresses Jesus’ distinctive teaching on the coming of God’s Kingdom; most unwittingly betray it for futurist expectation, in concert with early Christian apologetic. We need a new generation of prayers to bring Jesus’ message into Christian worship.

Finally, following Jewish custom, the congregation add their AMEN, confirming all the Presider has prayed on their behalf.