The advent among men of the redeeming Word of God (i.e., Jesus Christ) required the development of a new liturgy – a new form of God-worship – a liturgy no longer intended solely to recall and maintain the natural relations of the cosmos and its Creator, but to express man’s faith in the divine economy and perpetuate the living effects of the Incarnation. The sacred play of beings and things before God and with him is no longer founded upon some myth expressive of the primitive past or an intimate awareness of the created harmony of the world, but on a sacred history, wholly oriented towards Christ and His Cross.

Liturgies (i.e., ritualistic ways of offering sacrifice and worship to a greater power in order to secure consideration from that greater power), however, have seldom been constructed out of nothing. They have all tended to build on previous ways of worship. Christian liturgy, as can be guessed, built on the fundamental framework found and used by Judaism. The extensive use of the Psalms and various scriptural passages in the Byzantine liturgy give evidence to this.

To understand the Liturgy, the act of the people, we must begin with the idea that it is the ritual act in which an organized community expresses itself, in the strongest possible sense of that word, setting free in its inmost depths those supreme values on which its being is founded. To comprehend this we must first know what the Church is in reality. Now, to the believer, the Church is part of the economy of salvation, of God’s plan for the world; it belongs to the order of mystery, of the divine secret, of its nature inaccessible to our understanding.

We believe too that God has willed to communicate this secret and to bring it within our reach. He has translated it into images, into parables, each of which is in itself fundamentally inadequate, but   which, taken all together, encompass the mysterious reality and shed convergent beams of light upon it. We must follow the themes which find their ultimate and complete fulfillment in the Church of Christ throughout the whole of biblical revelation, both in the history of the people of Israel as interpreted by the authors of the sacred book and in the prophets and the reflections of the wise men of Israel. We must learn to recognize these themes in utterances at first hesitant or fragmentary, adapted to differing situations, but which gradually arrange themselves into a coherent whole.

In order to make the Liturgy truly our own expression of worship, we must understand how it was formulated, what it includes and truly embrace its expressions as our own personal way of expressing our Thanksgiving and also our Remembrance of God’s saving acts.