“The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints” is the proper title given to the Orthodox Divine Liturgy set by the text attributed to St John Chrysostom (Hieratikon Á, 2025: 123). On special occasions a similar but longer text attributed to St Basil is used.

As the title indicates, the subject of the Liturgy, or the actor in it, is God the Father Himself, who performs the liturgy for us. He condescends toward us and serves us, so that we may ascend toward Him and serve Him in return. In the Liturgy His sacrifice for us is joined by our sacrifice for Him.

The Liturgy culminates in God giving his Son in sacrifice on the altar of the Eucharist. Just as God once demanded Abraham to sacrifice his “only son Isaac, whom you love” (Gen 22.2), He offers his “only begotten Son” (Jn 3.16, KJV) at Golgotha as well as on the altar of the Eucharist to save, redeem, purify, reconcile, nourish, and to give eternal life to us and the world, thereby allowing us to return back to Him. Just as Christ voluntarily offered himself in sacrifice once and for all in the garden of Gethsemane, He in his risen Body offers Himself in eternal sacrifice in the order of Melchizedek, interceding for us at the right hand of God (Heb 1.13, 4.14, 7.11-25, 8.1-2). The Liturgy symbolizes and actualizes all these polysemic sacrifice of Christ. His earthly sacrifice is remembered, as His heavenly sacrifice is reenacted.

The Liturgy as a whole is a symbol (raza in Syriac, meaning ‘secrete,’ ‘mystery,’ ‘symbol,’ σύμβολον) of God’s saving work (ἔργον) in which humans join with Him as His coworkers (συνεργόι, I Cor 3.9). Without God’s action (θεουργία) the Liturgy becomes an empty ceremony. Without human co-operation, it cannot take place at all. God’s act requires our act; His sacrifice our sacrifice.

Because the liturgy is God-act (θεουργία), because God serves us therein, we can draw near to Him. When Jacob encountered God at Bethel, he exclaimed: “Surely the LORD is in this place…. How awesome is this place!” ( Gen 28.16-17). Jacob’s attitude is the only appropriate attitude we can have when we encounter God in the Liturgy. Accordingly, the Liturgy must be splendid and majestic, not because of some atmospheric music or lighting, but because we are bringing ourselves before God with awestruck fear and reverence, longing to become one with Christ. “It is no longer I but Christ who lives in me,” says St Paul (Gal 2.20).

Liturgy as Public Works

The word ‘liturgy,’ λειτουργία, originally referred to: “A public service.”  Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon further defines:

At Athens, a burdensome public office or charge, which the richer citizens discharged at their own expense, properly in rotation, but also voluntarily or by appointment.

Liturgy, however, entails running a deficit; it “require[s] … a putting out of funds at a loss” (Levinas, 1996:50). The treasury gets emptied, as funds are overspent on public works such as road and building projects, erecting temples and statues, sponsoring sacrifices and festivals, etc. It is a ‘burdensome’ work, because one’s treasury gets emptied.

For God to perform the Liturgy (for us) is to spend prodigally, like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, who offers a lavish banquet at the homecoming of the lost son, after giving him the ring and the robe (Lk 15). The father’s prodigality in restoration exceeds the son’s prodigality in waste.

Likewise, in the Liturgy, there is excess of God’s goodness and love (“the lover of mankind”) that overflow downwards to us. Or, to put it differently, God’s abundant Light (Christ) that exceeds any other light illuminates us, enabling us to glow in turn in His radiance and to become lights ourselves to the world. Thanks to God’s abundant goodness and love emanating down to us, we can become divine in His likeness and illumination. The purpose of the Liturgy is to achieve theōsis (θέωσις), becoming one with God in illumination and imitation. Theōsis requires purity and presupposes our ability to divinize ourselves as much as possible, within our own capacity, without becoming an angel by losing our humanity—in full restoration of our being in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1.26).

The Hierarchy

The Divine Liturgy is hierarchically (divinely) ordered so that we can be uplifted higher to the divine likeness of God. The Liturgy presupposes hierarchy, which in turn is set to achieve God-imination, according to Pseudo-Dionysius, who coined the term. He writes:

Hierarchy [ὶεραρχἰα] is … a sacred order [τἀξις ὶερὰ], knowledge [ἐπιστἠμη], and energy [ἐνέργεια]—assimilated [ἀφομοιουμένη], as accessible as possible [ἐφικτὸν], to the likeness of God [θεοειδὲς] in connection with [ἀναλόγως] illuminations [ἐλλάμψεις]—illumination which itself is endowed [ἐνδιδομένας] from God—into upliftment [ἀναγομἐνη] toward God-imitation [θεομίμητον].

Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy (CH), Ch. 3; 164D, translation mine. (The word ἐνδίδημι means: “to bind someone through a curse by entrusting themselves to a deity.” I translated it “endowed.”)

Hierarchy has nothing to do with power or authority. It has everything to do with illumination and imitation. Without the hierarchy appropriate for us humans—the ecclesiastical hierarchy, our imitation toward God and our illumination by Him would not be possible. But the Liturgy is what the ecclesiastical hierarchy does essentially and for which it mainly exits. And the Liturgy works through the hierarchy, as the hierarchy actualizes itself in the Liturgy. (The Liturgy purifies, illuminates, and perfects in accordance with the Dionysian hierarchy of the laity, the clergy, and the hierarchs.) In short, the Liturgy is the icon of ecclesiastical hierarchy, if the chief purpose of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is to make us divine (theōsis). We are to be lifted up and illuminated in the increasing degree as we progress toward the climax of the Liturgy: the Eucharist, whereby we arrive at the union with Christ, “the Light of the Father” (CH 121A).

The rite (τελετή), by definition, is meant to bring about one’s “initiation in[to] the mysteries.” We enter into the reality/Mystery of God’s Kingdom, whereby His will and His righteousness (δικαιοσύνην, justice,' Matt 6.33) is realized on earth as it is in heaven. (See below the footnote on ‘mystery’ and ‘mystagogue.’) During the Eucharistic Prayer before Anaphora the priest exhorts us:

Let us lift up our hearts. [The choir responds:] We lift them to the Lord.

Referring to baptism, which is a part of the Liturgy, St Cyril of Jerusalem writes:

You became christs when you received the prefiguration [τὸ ἀντίτυπον, antitype] of the Holy Spirit… […] … when you ascended from the pool of the holy waters, you received chrismation [χρἲσμα], the prefiguration [τὸ ἀντίτυπον] of Christ’s chrismation [ἐχρίσθη].”

St Cyril of Jerusalem, 2017: 105; Johnson’s translation altered.

‘Christ’ means ‘anointed,’ which in turn means ‘chrismated’ or ‘rubbed with chrism’ (“a consecrated oil, usually mixed with balsam or balsam and spices, used by certain churches [in Syro-Palestine] in various rites, as in baptism, confirmation, and the like” (Random House Dictionary at www.dictionary.com). The root Greek word is χρίω means “to touch on the surface, to rub.”

To become the prefigured image of Christ one must be entirely enwrapped by Him, as if immersed in the water of baptism, as if shaped by hammer and anvil (ἀντίτυπος means: formation by hammer and anvil). The Liturgy (τελετή) effectuates divine likeness by imitation and illumination, as we enter into the Mysteries, as we partake of the Bread and the Cup in the Liturgy.

Becoming Christ, the Self-Sacrifice

What does it mean to imitate or become Christ?

Christ offered himself as a sacrifice. He sacrificed himself by becoming a self-sacrifice. This is what/whom we imitate.

What does it mean to sacrifice?

To sacrifice is to give (προσφέρειν), to give the gift—gifting (to change the noun to a verb). Referring to the Bread and Wine as the Gifts captures it perfectly.

A sacrifice in Hebrew (קרבן qorban, which the Septuagint usually translates as δῶρον, gift) literally refers to a “cause to come near” (Moffitt, 2022:163). The word, which is to be correctly translated as ‘offering,’ is frequently mistranslated as ‘atonement’—one of many English words William Tyndale (d. 1536, a Greek scholar) invented—like ‘passover’ (פָסַח, pascha, ‘protect,’ Exod 12.13; Milgrom, 1991: 1081)—when translating the Bible for the first time. (See the origin of the word ‘atonement’ in Random House Dictionary at www.dictionary.com.)

Another Hebrew word that is frequently (mis)translated as ‘atonement’ is כפר, kipper, which refers to “both ransoming and purifying effects” (Moffitt, 2022:109). Meaning ‘purification,’ the word kipper implies ‘repentence.’ Now, if by ‘atonement’ we mean ‘purification,’ we can translate kipper as ‘atonement,’ as in ‘Day of Atonement’ (or Day of Repentance).

In English, however, ‘sacrifice’ means ‘substitution,’ as can be seen in the baseball phrase: ‘sacrifice hit.’ However, substitution is not the primary meaning of ‘sacrifice’ or ‘offering’ but became such later, as in Isaiah 53, as I will discuss below.

The idea of substitution is implicitly implied in the idea of sacrifice but it is not the main idea. Sacrifice mainly means ‘giving,’ or ‘offering.’ When God sacrifices His Son for us, he is ‘giving’ or ‘bestowing.’ When we sacrifice ourself to God and to one another in return, we are ‘offering’ up ourselves to Him or to the Other. ‘Bestowing’ is a term Rowan Williams likes to use to refer to ‘generative giving’ as in Creation (in both the capital and lower case ‘c’). The term works well with ‘sacrifice.’

The Levitical sacrifice, then, involves drawing near to God by bringing gifts as well as by cleansing oneself by performing purification rituals with blood (by smearing it in certain manner as prescribed by God). In the context of the purification ritual, the blood that is offered functions as a cleansing agent (חַטָּאָה, hattā’t, ‘the purification offering,’ in Num 29.11: “the purification offering of purification;” or in Exod 30.10: “the blood of the purifying purification offering;” Milgrom, 1991:1062; cf., Rev 7.14). Blood is apotropaic (Exod 12.13).

Moreover, during the night of the Passover (Pascha) in Egypt, the blood of lamb that was smeared on the doorposts and lintel had the protective effects (פָסַח, pascha, ‘protect,’ Exod 12.13; Milgrom, 1991: 1081): the blood protected the Hebrews from the angel of death (Exod 12; cf., Rev 12.11).

Finally, in Isaiah 52-53 a suffering servant is depicted as substituting for sinners (“he was wounded for our transgressions…” 53.5). The suffering of the righteous, as the Israelites understood during the Babylonian Exile, renews the broken covenantal relationship with God, when the covenant with God is broken by Israel’s transgression or inequity.

In Christ’s earthly crucifixion, as recorded in the Gospels, all these diverse themes of sacrifice are invoked and combined, historically and symbolically. Moreover, in his heavenly sacrifice, as referenced in the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ offers himself in perpetual sacrifice to intercede for us (Heb 7.25).

The sacrificial act of Christ—in all its polysemic fullness as outlined above— is symbolically brought forth and produced in the Divine Liturgy, especially in the eucharistic rite (Anaphora). The (Mystery of) symbolism employed in the Liturgy is such that, like Mary, it contains what cannot be contained: The Mystery of God’s work (θεουργία) in operation effectuated by human cooperation in the ritual (τελετή) celebrated as the Liturgy. See the Great Entrance for more on sacrifice.

As a symbol (raza), the Liturgy produces or brings forth the divine, ineffable, and mystical reality, and presents it in the visible and tangible things with which and to which we act ritualistically. Rather than being something exotic, primitive, irrational, or magical, the symbols (including the symbolic acts) contain their intrinsic reality. As understood by the Neo-Platonists, symbols are not imitations (μιμητικὴ) (Proclus, Commentary on the Republic, I. 198.14-15); and they (σύνθήματα) “themselves, by themselves perform their appropriate work” (Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, II.11. 96, 13-97, 8, as quoted in Schibille, 2014:209; and 204 for reference to Proclus’ citation). Symbols, then, have intrinsic power. It is in this sense the Latin transported the Syriac notion of ‘symbol’ into its word, sacramentum, whose origin has nothing to do with what the Syriac word refers to.

‘Sacramentum’ means: “a sum deposited by a party in a civil process, as security for a future judgment, forfeit money, guaranty,” or, “the preliminary engagement entered into by newly-enlisted troops;” whereas, as stated above, raza in Syriac means: ‘secrete,’ ‘mystery,’ ‘symbol’ all combined.

Brock, 1985: 41.

Lastly, “symbol gives rise to thought” (Ricoeur, 1967: 347, 356). Theology is possible because symbolic is its language and power. See more in the footnote below.*

Prayer as the Living Sacrifice

Finally, St Paul exhorts us to offer (παραστῆσαι) our bodies as “a living sacrifice” (Rom 12.1). Accordingly, in vespers, we pray, reciting Psalm 141.2:

Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as the incense;

And the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

To pray is to sacrifice; and to sacrifice is to pray. But to pray, according to Hannah, is to pour out one’s soul (I Sam 1.15), to empty oneself completely and entirely. Likewise, to sacrifice is to completely empty oneself (kenosis, κενόω) and descent to the lowest level of being—even to the point of death (Phil 2.7-8)—offering oneself and making available “to the least of these” (Matt 25: 40, 45). In short, to sacrifice is to be a grain of wheat that falls and dies, bearing much fruit (Jn 12.24).

As a divine love, God’s sacrifice knows of no limits, as He gave His “only begotten Son.” Christ, too, gave all of Himself. Love, sacrifice, gift/offering—these words are synonymous as noun and verb. This is what we imitate: Giving and becoming a sacrifice completely, totally, and wholly, without limits, like a burnt offering, whose smoke arises from the altar, ike prayer, like a holocaust (ὁλοκαύτωμα) (Exodus 20.24; 29.18, 25; Lev 1.6, 9; 4.10; Num 10.10; 15.24; 28.11, 13; Deut 12.6; 13.16).

Thus, St Basil the Great challenges us:

This is how you pray continually, not by offering prayer in words,

But by joining yourself to God through your whole way of life,

So your life becomes a continuous and uninterrupted prayer.

This must be what St Paul means when he exhorts us to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice…” (Rom 12.1), a life as prayer, a prayer as life. Such (self) bestowing life is what we offer to God and to our neighbor. Such a sacrifice is what the Liturgy symbolizes and effectuates materially and visibly “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Thus, the priest prays softly at the epiclesis:

Send down your Holy Spirit upon us, and upon these offered gifts, and make this bread the Precious Body of your Christ, and that which is in this chalice the Precious Blood of your Christ, changing [them] by your Holy Spirit… […] for fullness of [your] kingdom…. (Quoted from Taft, 2008: 105).

Amen [responds the deacon].

The Holy Spirit is invoked to descend “upon us, and upon these offered gifts.” It is the work of the Holy Spirit that transform us into the image of Christ, just as it is the same Spirit that transforms the bread and wine into the Body of Christ.

Is It Possible?

Can we really become Christ? Is it possible to give, as Christ did in self sacrifice? Giving is not giving up. Sacrifice is not slaughter. It is offering. By the power of the Holy Spirit, yes, we can.

Imitating Christ, the archetype, is indeed a lofty goal for us to emulate. Do we have the power to become the children of God? Yes. Thank to God, our imitation of Christ does not depend on our own ability. Rather, as Pseudo-Dionysius assures us,

God is the cause of all being of similarity that partake in similarity, and is the creator of auto-similarity; and all similarity is some similarity of a trace of divine similarity and thus completes the union.

πάσι δὲ τοῖς ὃμοιὀτητος μετέχουσι τοῦ ἔίναι ὃμοἰοις ὸ θεός αίτιος γίγνεται καὶ ἒστι καὶ αὐτῆς τῆς αὺτοομοιότητος ὺποστάτης. Καὶ τὸ ἐν πᾶσιν ὃμοιον ἲχνει τινὶ τῆς θείας ὃμοιὀτητος ὃμοιὀν ἐστι καὶ τὴν ἓνωσιν αὐτῶν συμπληροῖ

Divine Names (“DN”) IX 6, 913D-916A; translation mine.

God is the source of our imitative power and ability, and the cause of our longing to become divine/holy/sacred children of God. This is because we, as His creation, are implanted with a trace of His likeness. The like attracts the like, like a father attracting his son. “Because God loved us in this way [εἰ οὕτως],” loving one another as He loves us is possible (I Jn 4.11).

Divinization (θέωσις) is possible, because, as Dionysius says, God “wishes all things ever to become near to Himself, and participants of Himself, according to the aptitude of each” (Letter VIII.1; 1085D). As Golitzin puts it otherwise:

It is God himself who gives himself, opens himself to participation, enables the same in his creatures, and so leads them back to himself.

Golitzin, 2013: 100.

Participation (μετουσία) in the divine emanation/energy is the key (CH 305C, 308A). Let us partake of the Gifts and have a communion with Him!

Footnotes

*I am using the word ‘symbol’ in the sense that Dionysius uses to refer to what the Latin Church means by the word sacramentum. But to translate ‘symbol’ as ‘sacrament’ would lose its rich meaning. In Syriac we find the appropriate equivalent: raza, meaning ‘secret,’ ‘mystery,’ ‘symbol’ all combined (Brock, 1985: 41). A divine symbol by definition then contains the ineffable, inscrutable reality/mystery of God that exceeds and defies human reason and comprehension. Our reason runs up against the wall of its aporia (ἀπορία), as in paradox. Such is the overwhelming, inscrutable reality/mystery of the divine symbols that Dionysius refers to in his discourse on the Divine Liturgy: Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Everything is symbolic in Dionysius, however, including the names and adjectives by which we designate God and His attributes. Because ‘symbol’ has much broader and deeper meaning than ‘icon,’ which is included in the meaning of ‘symbol,’ the question concerning the difference between the sacraments and the icons does not arise in Dionysius. Both baptism and an icon, for example, contain the divine reality inscrutable to human reason or aesthetics. (An icon is not an aesthetic object, to begin with.) Another benefit of using the word ‘symbol’ in the Syriac sense (where its plural, raze, refers to the Mysteries, the Eucharist, as in Greek), in its strong sense, is that it avoids figurative usage, i.e., the excessive symbolic representation or allegorization associated with signs, such as priestly vestments, apse, ambo, bema, altar, skeuophylakion, eiliton, etc.—the excessive figurative usage as found in St Germanus’ Ecclesiastical History and Mystical Contemplation (translated with introduction and commentary by Paul Meyerdolff, 1984). If theology speaks in symbolic language, the semiotic associations employed therein must be tight, as we find in St Paul’s letters or in St Ephrem’s poetic theology. Symbolic discourse (theology) must not be confused with figurative speech. Lastly but not the least, by ‘mystery’ we do not mean unsolvable puzzle, magic, epistemic conundrum, or magical exoticism. The Greek word μύησις refers to ‘initiation;’ and its derivative μυσταγωγία means ‘initiation into the mysteries.’ In the mystagogy of the Liturgy, then, one enters into the divine (reality of the) Mysteries, into the (new) reality of the kingdom of God and His righteousness (δικαιοσύνη). Something divine happens in such a way that one’s being or existence is fundamentally changed in our participation (μετουσία) there in. In other words, we become (initiated into being) “a new creation” (2 Cor 5.17, Gal 6.15). Otherwise, epiclesis (invoking the Holy Spirit to come down and to change us and the Gifts has no meaning. See also Symbol and Glory.