The Divine Liturgy is meant to facilitate our encounter with God. While we are led to do this by remembering what Jesus did while He was here on earth, the reason we do this is so that we might have a present encounter with him. In remembering we do not take a mythic trip into the past, nor do we drag the past into the present by repeating the primordial even in mythic drama. For the events we are dealing with are not myths but history. As such they are once and for all. There was one exodus from Egypt and one resurrection of Christ, and we can neither repeat them nor return to them. But that is not to say they are dead, static, over and done with. They created and manifested and remain the bearers of a new and permanent quality of existence called salvation, initiating a permanent dialectic of call and response between God and his people. The events that began and first signaled this divine wooing of humankind may be past, but the reality is ever present, for the promises, Scripture tells us, were made to you and to your descendants, forever. The Divine Liturgy present this challenge to each new generation, that it too may respond in faith and love to the call.
So in memorializing the past event we do not return to it nor recreate it in the present. The past even is the efficacious sign of God’s eternal saving activity, and as past it is contingent. The reality it initiates and signifies, however, is neither past nor contingent but ever present in God, and through faith to us, at every moment of our lives. And if the past event is both permanent cause and contingent historical sign of salvation, the ritual memorial is the present efficacious sign of the same eternal reality. The ritual moment, then, is a synthesis of past, present, and future, as is always true in God’s time.
What the New Testament (NT) adds to this is the startling message that God’s time has been fulfilled in Christ. So NT time is not some distinctive theory of time, but the fullness of time. What distinguishes it is its completeness; what is inaugurated is not some new philosophy of time, but a new quality of life.
Because all this is true, it is imperative that we truly sense the meaning of the words, ritual and symbols that we use when we celebrate the Liturgy. They are the means that we use to encounter God in the present moment – an encounter which has the power to bring about our salvation. Salvation, remember, means coming to know God and the one He sent, Jesus Christ. Salvation also means the establishment of communion with God and others.
Since the Liturgy is meant to truly bring us into communion with God and others, we partake of transformed bread and wine that is symbolic of true union.