It is during the 6th and 7th centuries that we see additional development of the Divine Liturgy. These developments took place against a background of continuing doctrinal controversy, which was not without its effect on the Liturgy in the capital, where the population took a lively interest in both doctrine and worship. Debate focused on the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, to which the theological traditions of Alexandria and Antioch took differing approaches. (You will recall that this is immediately after the challenge of Arius and Nestorius and others who debated who Jesus is. You can only imagine the impact that this would have on the Liturgy).

The tradition of Alexandria tended to emphasize the divinity of Christ, at what some thought to be the cost of his full humanity. The tradition of Antioch so emphasized the completeness of Christ’s humanity that for others there was a less than perfect union of the two natures in the person of Jesus Christ. Early in the fifth century Nestorius, then Patriarch of Constantinople, doubted that it was truly appropriate to call Mary the Mother of God – Theotokos. As an Antiochene he preferred the term Christotokos, the Mother of Christ. The Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431 affirmed the correctness of applying Theotokos to Mary, and the title passed into frequent liturgical use in the Byzantine tradition, always quick to reflect contemporary dogmatic definition.

The definition of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451, proclaiming the union of the divine and human natures in the one person of Jesus Christ, was an attempt to reconcile the Alexandrian and Antiochene traditions in Christology. For political as well as doctrinal reasons the definition was unacceptable to those who eventually came to be called monophysite on the one side, and Nestorian on the other. Meanwhile in the latter part of the fifth century monophysite tendencies were influential throughout the Eastern part of the Church, and found imperial support. (The Monophysite position was that Christ only had one nature and wholly divine and only subordinately human. He did not have two natures). The accession of the emperor Justin in 518 put a stop to this trend. The four ecumenical councils were included in the diptychs read at the Liturgy, and the names of the recent pro-monophysite patriarchs of the capital removed. (You will recall that the diptychs were tablets with the names of those bishops who were considered top be in union with one another and their names were mentioned during the Liturgy. If your name was removed, you were considered not in union with others).

You will recall that several prayers were introduced into the Liturgy to reinforce the true faith about Christ and Mary.

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.