A Reflection:
As a general rule (based on my own experience), Protestants view liturgy as decorative. It beautifies our worship of God, adds to the tangibility of our worship experience, and makes God’s holiness more evident to us. But check the Statement of Belief on the website of any Protestant parish, and you’ll never find “liturgy” listed among the other essentials of Christian faith. If I were blindly optimistic, I might say its absence is due to liturgy being implied. But alas, I have glasses, and I’m no optimist. Ultimately for Protestants (even many Anglicans), liturgy is optional. As a decorative addition to Christian devotion, Protestants believe it can be removed altogether and Christianity would be no less Christian.
On the flip-side, in his (incredible) book, Consecrating the World, Catholic theologian David Fagerberg asks and answers the question: Why is there something instead of nothing? (In other words, Why did God create?) His answer: liturgy.1 Clearly, what he means by liturgy is not the extravagant fluff Protestants envision when speaking of liturgy. Nor is it mere religious ritual. What Fagerberg (((and the apostolic Fathers, and the Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Church))) means by liturgy is something otherworldly and utterly essential.
Sacramental. Christian liturgy is not some dressed up musical that tickles the ears with beautiful melody and warms the soul with visual artistry. Nor can it be compared to historical reenactments full of costumes and rehearsed episodes of some far off historical moment like the Civil War. Liturgy, Christian liturgy, is religious ritual that transcends time and crosses the dark chasm of human sin. It is participation in the divine life by means of earthen symbols.
Bread and wine, the priest, incense, icons, holy oil. All these and more manifest the presence of Christ and his Kingdom. In other words, liturgy contains the Christian faith; it contains the spiritual realities we profess. Liturgy contains the divine life of the uncontainable God and imparts it to mankind for the life of the world. Such is the meaning of the Church’s liturgy, such is its purpose: salvation.
Efficacious. Liturgy is efficacious (i.e., it works). And that is the quality of true Christian liturgy, the precise quality which makes it Christian and sets it apart from all the innumerable religious rites seen through every epoch of history. All other religious rites grasp in vain for the Holy, hoping to attain divine absolution and a share in divine life. But Christian liturgy — true Christian liturgy — it successfully capacitates man to see and touch the Other; to partake of the Holy God and participate in his divine life; to become gods as St. Athanasius boldly proclaimed.
Christian liturgy quenches the human need and thirst for the Almighty God, not due to an absence of ritual or rite, but precisely because as a ritual, it actually accomplishes what it sets out to do. Its antithesis with the other religious cults of the world is that it works, and all others don’t; Christian liturgy is efficacious, and all others are vain — and it’s efficacious because it is Christ himself who works in the liturgy, and God’s Word never returns void but accomplishes what it sets out to do.
The sacramental symbols of the liturgy are lowly, earthen vessels, and yet, infused by the charisma of the Spirit, they impart to us the lofty grace of divine life. Through them, in no uncertain terms, mankind is saved. For by means of these lowly vessels, we humans are rectified, fortified, and sanctified to fulfill our true purpose and attain our intended end: to become partakers of the divine nature. To become gods.
An excerpt:
From the time of Cain and Abel, the blood of sacrifices has daily covered the earth, and the smoke of burnt offerings has unceasingly risen to heaven.
Our "refined" sensibilities are horrified by these blood sacrifices, by these "primitive" religions. In our horror, however, do we not forget and lose something very basic, very primary, without which in essence there is no religion? For in its ultimate depths religion is nothing other than thirst for God: "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God" (Ps 42:2); and often "primitive” people know this thirst better, they sense it more deeply as the psalmist declared once and for all — than contemporary man does, with all his "spiritualized" religion, abstract "moralism" and dried-up intellectualism…
But where there is thirst for God, this consciousness of sin and this yearning for genuine life, there necessarily is sacrifice…And in his sacrifices, in these innumerable offerings, invocations and holocausts, man, albeit in darkness, albeit savage and primitive, seeks and thirsts for the one for whom he cannot cease to seek, for "God created us for himself, and our hearts will not rest until they rest in him…”
[And in the sacrifice of Christ which is offered anew in the Divine Liturgy] everything is fulfilled and accomplished. In it, above all, sacrifice itself is cleansed, restored and manifested in all its essence and fullness, in its preeternal meaning as perfect love and thus perfect life, consisting of perfect self-sacrifice. In Christ, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” and in Christ man so loved God that he gave himself totally. And in this twofold giving nothing remains not given, and love reigns in all — “the crucifying love of the Father, the crucified love of the Son, and the love of the Spirit triumphing through the power of the cross." In this sacrifice, furthermore, because it was made only through love and only in love, was forgiveness of sins granted. And finally, in it man's eternal thirst for God was fulfilled and staked, the divine life became our food, our life. Everything that man, consciously or unconsciously, in darkness, partially, distortedly, included in his sacrifices, everything that man hoped for from them, and all that "the heart of man could not conceive,” was fulfilled, perfected and granted one-once and for all — in this sacrifice of sacrifices.2
Fagerberg, David. Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2016), 5.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 101-104. Emphasis mine.
Artist Attribution:
Swanson, John August. Last Supper, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56552 [retrieved December 29, 2022]. Original source: Estate of John August Swanson, https://www.johnaugustswanson.com/.