Christological Dimensions of Liturgy

            Christian prayer is customarily offered in the context of a special relationship with Jesus. Prayers in the Christian tradition usually end with the ascription, “in Jesus’ Name,” or “through Jesus Christ our Savior,” or even with a full Trinitarian formula, “through Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is one God, now and forever, Amen.” Verbal forms such as these point to the traditional belief that when Christians pray, they do not pray in a vacuum, but respond to God within a communion established by Jesus’ relationship to God, on the one hand, and Jesus’ relationship to humanity, on the other. As Paul puts it in Ephesians 3:12, “in Jesus we have access to God in boldness and confidence.” More generally, we can say that prayer in relation to Jesus invites the pray-er into Jesus’ own relationship with God. All Christian prayer, therefore, has a specifically Christological dimension.

            This is perhaps even more true of liturgical prayer. Liturgy is common prayer, prayer offered in a communal and social setting, in which a diversity of pray-ers is brought together through shared themes, shared words, shared ritual forms, shared ceremonial actions. Because it is social, liturgy emphasizes even more strongly that prayer happens in a relational context, and the character pervading that context is the character of Christ. Liturgical prayer is the prayer of the Body of Christ gathered, and it is therefore preeminently prayer that draws its participants into sharing the relationship between Christ and God. All liturgy has a specifically Christological dimension.

            Liturgy can draw worshipers into sharing the relationship between Christ and God, because liturgy represents the forms of definiteness that were characteristic of Jesus’ life and makes them available to be experienced in the contemporary lives of worshipers. In process-relational thought, a thing is what it does. A thing’s existence, or a person’s life, is a series of moments of experience; these moments are connected to each other by certain “eternal objects”—abstract qualities and past facts—that are reenacted from one moment to the next. A thing’s “nature” is that constellation of eternal objects that it reenacts consistently in its moments: my desk chair is a chair because in each moment its molecules together reenact the quality of chairness; I am a human being because in each moment my body, mind, psyche, biochemistry, and so on, reenact the quality of humanness. Traditionally, Jesus is said to have had two "natures," human and divine; in a process-relational formulation, this can be said to mean that Jesus in his life and ministry, his person and his work, enacted both human and divine qualities. Jesus did what humans do, and that makes him human; but Jesus also did what God does, and that makes him divine. In his earthly ministry, Jesus not only proclaimed God’s basileia, but Jesus enacted it, healing people as a sign of God’s reign come near, liberating people from the bondage of sin and separation, breaking down barriers between people and gathering them into new communities characterized by the agape and compassion of divine love. Because Jesus did what only God can do, Jesus is God; in Jesus, humanity and divinity are not two different “substances” that must be reconciled by some metaphysical paradox, but they are two qualities of action that are effectively united in one person’s acting.

            Christian liturgy represents those qualities of Jesus’ acting, through symbol and ceremony, and makes them available to become constituent elements in the lives of worshipers today. In the liturgical reading of scripture, for instance, stories that illustrate the divine-and-human qualities of Jesus are read out, to be made available for reenactment in the hearing and imagination—and action—of the hearers. Stories from the Hebrew Scriptures that shaped Jesus’ own human consciousness are made available to shape the consciousnesses of Jesus’ followers. In liturgical prayer, the needs and concerns and celebrations and intercessions and petitions and thanksgivings of the worshipers are brought into conscious connection with the ministerial qualities of Jesus’ life and work. Especially in the Lord’s Prayer, when worshipers reenact the specific words of Jesus in their own hearts and voices, the qualities of Jesus’ prayer and the worshipers’ prayer are brought together, so that contemporary worshipers do again as Jesus does. Above all, in the celebration of the Eucharist, contemporary worshipers reenact the acts of Christ: in the Eucharist, worshipers reenact the symbolic meal of bread and wine which Jesus used to typify his own self-giving and sharing love, and in that reenactment the character of Jesus’ love is made available to characterize the worshipers’ loves as well. The "nature" of Jesus’ love is made available to worshipers’ experience through the symbols and ceremonies of the eucharistic action; and the experience of that love becomes a constitutive influence in the worshipers’ lives. Having felt Christ’s love reenacted symbolically in liturgy, participants become more able to enact that love in their own concrete persons and works above and beyond the liturgy.

            In liturgy, and especially in eucharistic liturgy, worshipers do again as Jesus does. And if a thing is what it does, then in liturgical reenactment worshipers in some real sense become Christ. When the qualities of Christly love, exemplified in Jesus, are renacted in worshipers praying in Jesus' Name, then the nature of Christ is manifest in the worshipers as well.