Great Entrance

Midway through the Divine Liturgy, after the catechumens' dismissal, the choir begins the Cherubic Hymn and the deacon censes the altar, the iconostasis, and the people. The priest and deacon then go to the table of oblation, where the gifts have waited since the Proskomedia before the service; the deacon takes the diskos with the Lamb and the priest the chalice, and, preceded by candles, they come out through the north door and pass before the people.

There the procession pauses for the commemorations — the Church aloud remembering her own: hierarchs, the country, the parish, the living and the departed, according to local custom, and always ending with everyone present: "May the Lord God remember all of you Orthodox Christians in His Kingdom, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages." The celebrants enter through the Royal Doors, the gifts are set on the antimension on the Holy Table, the veils are arranged (the aer and veils), and the choir completes the hymn's second half: "That we may receive the King of All, Who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!"

The Cherubic Hymn gives the first meaning: the congregation, "mystically representing the Cherubim," lays aside every earthly care to receive a King who arrives with an invisible army. What looks like two clergymen carrying dishes is confessed to be a royal progress with angelic outriders — the Liturgy's boldest claim about the gap between what the eye sees and what is happening.

The prayers said as the gifts are set down give the second: the priest recites the burial hymns of Great Friday — "The Noble Joseph, when he had taken down Your most pure Body from the tree, wrapped it in fine linen, and anointed it with spices, and placed it in a new tomb" — and the altar becomes, for a moment, the tomb. The commentators accordingly read the Great Entrance as Christ's going to His voluntary Passion and burial: the gifts enter the altar as Christ entered the tomb, to be raised in the Anaphora that follows. The faithful bow as the gifts pass — customs differ by jurisdiction, from a simple bow to kneeling in some Slavic parishes — honoring the offering and the One it will become. The gifts are not yet consecrated at this point; the bow is reverence toward what is being offered, and worship belongs to the Lamb once the epiclesis has sealed the mystery. Since the gifts carry the commemorations of everyone named at the Proskomedia, the procession is also the parish itself, by name, being carried to the altar.

The origin is practical: the gifts were prepared in a separate place and had to be brought to the altar. In the great churches of Constantinople — Hagia Sophia above all — the bread and wine were kept in a skeuophylakion, a treasury outside the church proper, and their transfer became the Liturgy's most spectacular procession. The Cherubic Hymn was added to clothe it, traditionally dated to the reign of the Emperor Justin II in the sixth century. When the preparation moved to a table inside the sanctuary, the procession remained — a few steps that remember a longer road.

The hymn changes with the calendar: at the Liturgy of Great Thursday it is replaced by "Of Thy Mystical Supper," on Great Saturday by the ancient "Let all mortal flesh keep silence" from the Liturgy of St. James, and at the Presanctified Liturgy of Lent by "Now the powers of heaven" — and there the procession itself is made in silence, the faithful prostrate, because in that service the gifts carried in the entrance are already consecrated. Together with the Little Entrance, the Great Entrance frames the Liturgy's whole shape: first the Word comes to be heard, then the Offering comes to be given.