Anaphora

The word comes from anapherō, to carry up or offer up — the same verb Scripture uses for offering sacrifice. In the Anaphora the Church lifts up the gifts, and herself with them. The deacon marks the threshold: "Let us stand aright! Let us stand with fear! Let us attend! That we may offer the Holy Oblation in peace." The people answer, "A mercy of peace! A sacrifice of praise!" — Christ Himself being both the peace-offering of God's mercy and the only sacrifice of praise adequate to God. From here to the great Amen, the Anaphora is a single continuous prayer, addressed to God the Father, even though the singing of the choir makes it sound to a newcomer like separate hymns.

After the apostolic blessing — "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you" (2 Corinthians 13:14) — comes the exchange Christians have spoken over the gifts since the Church's early centuries: "Let us lift up our hearts!" "We lift them up unto the Lord!" "Let us give thanks unto the Lord!" St. Cyprian of Carthage was already expounding these words for his flock in the mid-third century, and a century later St. Cyril of Jerusalem told his catechumens exactly what they demand: "For truly ought we in that most awful hour to have our heart on high with God, and not below, thinking of earth and earthly things."

"Let us give thanks" is, in Greek, eucharistēsōmen — the verb that gives the Eucharist its name. The Anaphora is before all else the Church's thanksgiving: the grateful creature answering the giving God, in the one Man who ever gave thanks perfectly.

The Anaphora of the Byzantine Liturgy unfolds in a sequence the Church has prayed for many centuries. It begins with thanksgiving: "It is meet and right to sing of Thee, to bless Thee, to praise Thee, to give thanks to Thee and to worship Thee in every place of Thy dominion" — thanksgiving for creation, for salvation, and "for all things of which we know and of which we know not." The prayer then joins the angels in the Sanctus, the Thrice-Holy song Isaiah heard at the throne (Isaiah 6:3): "Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord of Sabaoth!"

Thanksgiving narrows to one night. The prayer remembers the Mystical Supper and speaks the Lord's own words of institution — "Take! Eat! This is My Body which is broken for you for the remission of sins" — and likewise the cup. Then, in the anamnesis, the Church remembers before God the cross, the tomb, the resurrection, the ascension, the enthronement — and, astonishingly, "the second and glorious coming": in the Anaphora the Church remembers forward, because at this altar the Kingdom is already present. The gifts are elevated with the words "Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, in behalf of all and for all" — we can offer God nothing that is not already His, and so we offer His own gifts, and ourselves in them, a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1).

The summit is the epiclesis, the invocation: the priest asks the Father to "send down Thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here offered," making the bread the precious Body of Christ and the cup His precious Blood, "making the change by the Holy Spirit." The prayer then widens into commemoration — the Theotokos, honored aloud with her own hymn, the saints, the departed, the living, the Church's bishops and the whole world (the diptychs) — before closing in a doxology sealed by the people's Amen. The consecration is not pinned to a single formula or instant; Orthodoxy receives the whole Anaphora as one consecratory prayer, and declines to dissect the mystery further.

Nearly all year the Church prays the anaphora of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Ten times a year — chiefly the Sundays of Great Lent, Holy Thursday, Holy Saturday, the eves of Nativity and Theophany, and St. Basil's feast on January 1 — she prays the older and longer anaphora of St. Basil the Great, whose central prayer is a vast retelling of the whole economy of salvation. The ancient anaphora of St. James survives in occasional use. Customs differ between and within jurisdictions on how much of the Anaphora is prayed aloud: in many places the priest reads the long prayers quietly while the choir sings, in others the whole prayer is read for all to hear. The words vary in audibility but never in direction: lifted hearts, lifted gifts, and the Spirit descending.