The nature of

christian liturgy
 EVOLUTION OF THE TERM “LITURGY”

• The history of this word, used

today in an exclusively cultic
sense, shows us that it received
different meanings along the
various historical epochs.
 CLASSICAL GREEK
• The term “liturgy” comes from classical Greek.

• The Greek word leitourgi<a comes from the

combination of laoj (=people) and of ergon (=
work).

• verb: leitourgei<n

• personal substantive: leitourgo<j

 Translated literally, leitourgi<a
means

• “service rendered to the people”

• “service directly performed for the
public good”
• “a public office one undertakes”
• “public works”
• “state projects”
 HELLENISTIC PERIOD
• Leitourgi<a: a service imposed by law or
custom for the good of the public, e.g.
organizing or practicing a choir for the
Greek theater, arming a ship, welcoming a
tribe on the occasion of a national
feast,etc.
• Later: public performance of service
• from the second to the fifth century:
cultic service rendered by deputized
persons.
 IN THE OLD TESTAMENT (LXX)
• The Septuagint employs the word leitourgi<a 170 times to
designate the levitic cult.

• Classical meaning: official function held by society’s nobility

which fits the definition of the levitic cult as a divine
institution entrusted to the care of Israel’s nobility, the
levitic priests.

• Leitourgi<a is therefore a cultic term applied to public and

official worship performed by a special category of persons,
in contrast with private worship rendered by individuals for
which the LXX reserves the words latre<ia (adoration,
worship) and doule<ia (honor, veneration).
 IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
• leitourgi<a, leitourgei<n, and leitourgo<j:
appear 15 times in the NT.
• Rom 13:6 -- a function of state authorities;
• Lk 1:23 -- the OT priestly office of Zechariah;
• Heb 8:2 -- Christ’s sacrificial or priestly offering whereby he became
leitourgo<j [minister] of the sanctuary;
• Rom 15:16 – the ministry of Paul to the Gentiles so that their own offering
may be acceptable to God;
• Acts 13:2 -- the cultic celebration of the Christians who “made liturgy to
the Lord” at Antioch. N.B. This is the only NT text in which “to make liturgy
to the Lord” [=leitourgei<n] particularly refers to “Christian liturgy”. It
cannot be affirmed with certainty however that this text refers to the
Eucharistic celebration in particular.
 EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS
• In the post-apostolic writings of
Judaeo-Christian origin, the term
leitourgi<a retains its cultic meaning
especially that which is Eucharistic, as
well as in the sense of OT worship.
• Didache 15,1 -- affirms that bishops and deacons also
perform the leitourgi<a of prophets and teachers.

• Clement of Rome, First Letter to the Corinthians 40,2.5–

“[The Lord] has enjoined offerings [to be presented] and
service to be performed [to Him], and that not
thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and
hours… His own peculiar [liturgical] services are assigned to
the high priest.”

• Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 10 – claims that clerical

ordination is propter liturgiam.
 LATER DEVELOPMENT

• IN THE CHURCHES OF THE EAST

–Leitourgi<a: the sacred rites in general

– the leitourgi<a of St. John
Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. James, St. Mark –
the eucharistic celebration in particular
[the Divine Liturgy].
 IN THE LATIN CHURCH
• The Latin term liturgia reappears only in the 16th
century in the scientific language referring to the
ancient ritual books or, in general, all that which
concerns the worship of the Church.
• Instead, terms like munus, officium, mysterium,
sacramentum, opus, actio, celebratio, officia
divina, opus divinum and sacri or ecclesiae ritus
were used.
• The word appeared for the first time in official
Latin documents during the pontificate of Gregory
XVI (+1846).
• The word liturgia in the context of the Mass
appeared only in the 16th cent. thanks to
rennaisance writers like G. Cassander, J. Pamelius,
and J. Bona.
• In the 18th – 19th centuries the term was also
adopted by the Churches of the Reform as
referring to Christian worship in the broad sense.
• The term was also adopted by papal documents
especially beginning from Pius X and by the 1917
Code of Canon Law, thus becoming part of the
official language of the Church.
 THE BIBLICAL CONCEPT OF
WORSHIP
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

To enter into a contact with the divinity, man as

homo religiosus sets apart gestures, persons,
spaces and times from the so-called profane
world and charges them with a symbolic
value and considers them a privileged locus
of encounter with the divinity. Thus, the
context of the SACRED comes about.
The SACRED
The Stonehenge: England (Neolithic & Bronze Age
ancient pagan temple of Garni
For Israel,
• the notion of the “SACRED” carries the idea of being “set
apart” but not from what is considered profane or what
belongs to the “world”;

• their notion of the “sacred” flows from their faith in YHWH

as the GOD OF HISTORY;

• an interruption of the “ordinary” by God’s inserting himself

in history.

• A person, place, object, or time acquires a “sacred”

character by its association with an event of God’s
intervention in history.
For Israel,
• their continued encounter with the God of history
was by means of commemorating the events of
God’s intervention in their history for their
salvation.

• MEMORIAL: not a simple act of reminiscing the past

by looking at souvenirs or yellowed photographs of
the past that have been kept in a chest.

• CULTIC MEMORIAL is rather a living act of

commemoration.
 CULTIC MEMORIAL
• It is in this act of common and shared memory that a
people or a group is constantly renewed and
regenerated.

• The past is in some way recovered or recouped to

become the living genesis of the “present”.

• This past is therefore received in the present as a gift of grace.

• Furthermore, every hope for the future seems to be rooted in a

recognition of this tradition: man has future only because he
has memory.
o The insistence on the fact that it is not only “with our fathers”
that God established the covenant (Dt. 5, 3) but with the
present generation, shows that the central function of
worship is not simply commemoration of the past, but its
ACTUALIZATION!

The Lord, our God, made a covenant with us at Horeb; not

with our fathers did he make this covenant, but with us, all
of us who are alive here this day.

o Worship, thus understood, seeks to transcend the

chronological and spatial distance, though without forgetting
it, between the past being commemorated and its present
actualization.
o Worship kept them in touch with the history that saved them and
with the God who saved them by inserting Himself into their
history. MEMORIAL was the way they kept that contact with that
saving history and with the God of history.

o God acted not only in times past and in different places and ways
but works efficaciously and in similar ways here and now.

o In their commemoration of the Passover, Israel receives her past as

a saving gift of the present and this gift guarantees a promise of
the future.

o This future promise attains its fulfillment only gradually, thanks to

the prophets who announced the new covenant.
o If in Israel, WORSHIP is seen as HISTORY, this has
the EXODUS as the foundational experience.

o On the political level, the Exodus embodied a

movement of liberation and constitution of the
people;

o on the religious plane, the same event of the

Exodus was seen as a movement of conversion
and acceptance of faith in Yahweh.
o The EXODUS-EXPERIENCE implies in its turn a
specific category of worship: Israel was
established as the “people of God” for God’s
service. It was born as a “PRIESTLY PEOPLE”.

o In the spirituality of Israel there is an

intimate relation between and among
history, worship, and living out of the
covenant—that is to say, between WORSHIP
and LIFE.
• The Old Testament repeatedly emphasizes
this intimate union between worship and
life.

• The 24th chapter of the book of Joshua, in its

account of the great assembly at Shechem,
strongly emphasizes the connection between
the word of God that narrates past history as
history of salvation, and the response of the
people to this word in submitting themselves
to the divine law.
• The encounter with Yahweh-Liberator in HISTORY, its
joyous celebration at WORSHIP, and the response of
FIDELITY TO THE COVENANT constitute three
fundamental moments and constitute a perfect
continuity in the life of the people of Israel.

• The response of the people to Joshua is eloquent: “We

will serve the Lord, our God, and obey his voice” (Jos
24:24). The use of the verb “to serve” expresses total
adherence of man to the Lord.

• The passage suggests an ideal of life—one where there

is intimate relation among history, worship, and law.
• This ideal vision of worship has not always been
realized in the religious life of the people of
Israel who have rather frequently given in to the
temptations of formalism to the point of
establishing a practical divorce among the various
elements that constitute the faith response to
Yahweh, dichotomizing the rite from the word of
God and from the life that flows from it.

• The temptation of Israel was that of being

attached to the rite, forgetting the demands of
the covenant in one’s life.
• It is in this context that the attitude and actuations of the prophets
should be interpreted. The passionate criticism of the prophets
against every cultic decadence is a known fact. They pronounced
radical denunciations against sacrifices (cf. Hos 6:3-7; Is 1:11-13;
Jer 7:21-22; Am 5: 21-25), against the ark (cf. Jer 3:16), and
against the temple (cf. Jer 7:14; 26:1-15). They denounced a
worship in which God is honored only with the lips, demanding
instead that the heart be in harmony with that which worship
expresses: “… This people draws near with words only though their
hearts are far from me” (Is 29: 13).

• The prophets who were witnesses to the divine plan proclaimed the
demands of the God of the covenant who does not accept a worship
without a soul. They exhorted people to look forward to a renewed
time and worship (Ez. 37:26).

• All these criticisms were not intended to suppress worship but

sought to keep it in the context of the living out of the covenant.
• What they condemned was not worship per se but a
ritual practice that no longer served the purpose for
which it was intended—that of being the locus or
context in which the living God of history is
encountered by his people.

• One such prophet is Amos, for example, for whom

the search for God is not simply a ritual action nor a
theoretical, intellectual, and speculative pursuit,
nor a mystical experience relegated to the
interiority, but a practical pursuit of a relationship
with God in concrete love that does justice (cf.
Amos 5:4-6.14-15).
 NEW TESTAMENT

Jesus fulfilled
the
worship
of the
Old
Testament.