While I have been sharing some of the history of the development of our Divine Liturgy, I have also attempted to stress the importance of making the Divine Liturgy our personal act of worship. This can only be accomplished IF we truly understand the prayers that we pray and if we join   ourselves mentally to the actions of the Liturgy.

I have suggested one important image. I have suggested that during the Great Entrance, when the gifts of bread and wine are carried through the Church, that we consciously think about these food gifts as representing our lives as well as those of Jesus. We join with Him in offering the symbols of human life back to the Father in thanksgiving for the gift of life.

This requires, of course, that we be thankful for the gift of life. We must begin to think about the gift of life as the most precious of all the gifts that our Father-God has bestowed upon us.

If the Divine Liturgy is truly to become our worship of God, we must consciously make ourselves a part of the worship. Jesus showed us by His life and actions that the real worship of God comes from our conscious offering of our lives back to the Father in thanksgiving.

Permit me now to return to the historical development of the Liturgy as a means of increasing our appreciation of it as an act of worship of God. By the end of the fourth century the Eucharistic memorial of Jesus, like the Paschal celebration, was beginning to be understood less in a sacramental, and more in a dramatic, historical way. This tendency was strengthened as the various traditions of interpretation developed. The various interpretations of the Divine Liturgy found expression in a number of prayers being added to the service and a number of rituals (e.g., Little and Great Entrances). These ceremonials helped shape the late Byzantine iconographic scheme of church decoration and had an impact on Eastern Christian, in particular Byzantine or Greek-Catholic, spirituality and piety.

In the centuries following Chrysostom’s occupation of the see of Constantinople, a number of developments took place in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy in the capital. The Great Church itself (i.e., Hagia Sophia), damaged in the disturbances which accompanied Chrysostom’s expulsion from his bishopric in 404, was finally destroyed in the Nike riots under Justinian in 532 and replaced by the   magnificent new Hagia Sophia, the mother church of Byzantine Christianity, the model for Byzantine liturgical worship. The new Great Church provided the architectural setting for a rite which during these centuries was steadily receiving additions to its prayers and other formulae, and whose ceremonial was steadily evolving. We have documentation of these changes in the writing of Maximus the Confessor.