Anaphora: the Meaning of the Central Prayer of the Liturgy
Next in this commentary series we examine the
Anaphora, which is a Greek word meaning “offering” (the verb form is used in
Leviticus 17:5, for example, where it describes the offering of sacrifice). It
is a long prayer, punctuated by a number of “Amens”. It begins with the
celebrant’s blessing “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God
the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” and does not
conclude until the end of the words, “and grant that with one mouth and one
heart we may praise Your all-honourable and majestic name: of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages”. The
congregational “Amen” which follows seals the entirety of the long anaphoral
prayer. It is sometimes referred to as “the Eucharistic prayer”, since it
constitutes the heart of the Eucharist and serves to consecrate the gifts of
bread and wine, transforming them by the Spirit’s power into the Body and Blood
of the Lord. A Eucharist can do without the antiphons if need be, or even
without the Creed, but not without the Anaphora, for it is this prayer which
makes the Eucharist to be the Eucharist. We may look at three of its
characteristics, for they reveal something about who we are as Orthodox
Christians and how we are to live.
First the prayer is dialogic. That is, it begins not
with words addressed to God but with a dialogue in which the celebrant and the
congregation address each other. The long prayer is prefaced with this back and
forth: the priest first blesses the congregation in the name of the Triune God
(in the words cited above), and they respond by blessing him in return: “And
with your spirit!” He then tells them, “Lift up your hearts!”, and they
respond, “We lift them up unto the Lord!” In this second exchange he is not
urging them to cheer up, encouraged possibly by the fact that the end of the
long service draws near, but telling them to ascend. The Lord reigns in heaven,
and in the Liturgy we ascend to where He reigns. Our Liturgy in St. Herman’s
therefore is not served in Langley, but in the Kingdom; not on earth, but in
heaven. In the Liturgy time and eternity intersect, and heaven meets earth. We
serve and worship with the Mother of God, the saints, and the angels, for we
ascend to where they are. In a final exchange the priest says, “Let us give
thanks unto the Lord”, and the people respond, “It is meet and right”. The
meaning of this last exchange is easily missed: the priest is obtaining the
liturgical assent of the gathered community to offer the Eucharist, for it is
as part of that assembly that he speaks and acts. It is his signal to proceed
with the anaphoral prayer.
It is not just in the opening preface that we find
congregational response. Throughout the anaphora the congregational voice is
heard, joining the priest, finishing his sentences. Thus, for example, when he
rejoices in the heavenly song of the angels and says that they are “singing the
triumphant hymn, shouting, proclaiming, and saying” the congregation joins in
and completes his sentence: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord of Sabaoth! Heaven and
earth are full of Your glory! Hosanna in the highest!” And again, when the
priest says, “Your own of Your own we offer unto You, on behalf of all and for
all”, the people again join him, saying, “We praise You! We bless You! We give
thanks unto You, O Lord!” It is as if they are so enthusiastic they cannot keep
themselves from joining in. Yet these congregational interruptions do not
reveal only their liturgical exuberance, but also their sacramental status.
They join in with the priest because they are the royal priesthood, the body of
the high-priest Jesus Christ, and it is this corporate priesthood to which the
celebrant gives voice. Their dialogic participation reveals that they are not
simply passive observers, but active offerers; not an audience, but a
priesthood, not the great unwashed, but the holy people of God, made holy
through the washing of holy baptism.
Secondly, the anaphora is an anamnesis, a word
sometimes rendered “remembrance”. Thus in the Authorized King James Version of
Luke 22:19 we read that Christ said, “This is My body which is given for you;
this do in remembrance of Me”. Such a translation can be a bit misleading, for
we often tend to think of remembering in terms of mental activity—I can
daydream about the future or remember the past, but in both cases words
describe a purely cerebral happening taking place inside my head. The word
anamnesis is less misleadingly rendered as “memorial”, and in Hebrew thought a
memorial is not a merely mental process but an action that is done. Thus in
Numbers 10:1f, Moses was commanded to make two silver trumpets which were to be
blown over their sacrifices in times of war, and “there shall be a memorial for
you before your God” (v. 10). In other words, when the trumpets are blown over
the sacrifices, they will “be remembered before the Lord your God and you shall
be saved from your enemies” (v. 9). In this memorial, it is God who does the
remembering. And God’s remembering here is also not a purely mental act, but
means that God takes action and saves.
That is the point of Christ’s words at the mystical Last Supper: the act
of eating bread and drinking wine during their gathered assembly is Christ’s
memorial, the means whereby God remembers Christ and His sacrifice and take
action to save us. Through this memorial, Christ’s saving sacrifice becomes
present and active in our midst. The bread which we eat as His memorial is His
sacrifice, His true Body, and the cup from which we drink is His Blood. That is
why the liturgical tradition everywhere speaks of the Eucharist as a bloodless
sacrifice—it is not a fresh immolation of Christ, or a re-crucifixion, but an
anamnesis of His once-for-all offered sacrifice. There is no salvation without
the Cross, and the Cross is not sacramentally saving in our weekly lives
without the Eucharist. We are saved by His sacrifice, since we are the people
of the Eucharist.
This means that the Eucharist is the most important
thing we ever do, and we live from Eucharist to Eucharist, even as we live from
breath to breath. Without the Eucharist, we have no life. One remembers the
story recounted long ago by Gregory Dix in his classic The Shape of the
Liturgy, about the importance of the Eucharist in the early church: “A whole
congregation of obscure provincials at Abilinitina in Africa took the risk of
almost certain detection by assembling at the height of the Diocletian
persecution in their town, where the authorities were on the watch for them,
because, as they said in court, the eucharist had been lacking a long while
through the apostasy of their bishop Fundanus and they could no longer bear the
lack of it. And so they called on a presbyter to celebrate—and paid the penalty
of their faith down to the last man.” The story reveals not only the courage of
these obscure Christians, but also the importance of the Eucharist for all of
us even today.
Finally the anaphora is an extended epiclesis or
invocation of the Spirit. The epicletic character of the entire prayer is
summed up most succinctly in so-called epiclesis itself, in which the celebrant
asks God to send down His Spirit upon the offering. But we must look more
carefully upon the actual wording, for the Spirit is not simply invoked upon
the gifts of bread and wine alone, but also upon us as well. Thus the celebrant
prays, “Send down Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here offered
and make this bread the precious body of Your Christ and that which is in this
cup the precious blood of Your Christ, making the change by Your Holy Spirit.”
Note: “Send down Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts”. The final goal
of the epiclesis and of the anaphora and the Eucharist as a whole is not to
merely change the bread into the body of Christ, but also to change us into His
body. Through eating the sacramental Body of Christ, we are incorporated afresh
into Him as His mystical Body. The goal is not simply the transformation of the
gifts, but our own transformation as well. Regarding the transformation of the
Gifts of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood, St. Cyril of Jerusalem
once said, “Whatever the Holy Spirit has touched is sanctified and changed”. He
might have said this about us also, for the goal of the Eucharist is to
sanctify and change us as well. We walk into the church guilty, stained,
weighed down with sins and heavy laden; we walk out of the Church after
receiving the Eucharist forgiven, cleansed, liberated and light.
The Anaphora is the heart of the Divine Liturgy, for
it is our liturgical thanksgiving. It reveals us as the holy people God,
baptized so that we may declare the wonders of Him who called us out of
darkness into His marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
By Fr.
Lawrence Farley
Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/nootherfoundation/commentary-divine-liturgy-anaphora/
