Holy Unction

The mystery rests on one of the plainest instructions in the New Testament: "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him" (James 5:14-15). The apostles were doing this already in the Gospels — they "anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them" (Mark 6:13) — and the Church has simply never stopped. In Greek the service is called the euchelaion, literally "prayer-oil."

Oil was the everyday medicine of the ancient world; the Good Samaritan poured oil and wine into the wounds of the man left for dead. The mystery takes that ordinary kindness and fills it with grace: Christ, whom the Church calls the physician of our souls and bodies, touches the sick person through the anointing as truly as He once touched lepers and blind men with His hand.

In its full form Holy Unction is served by seven priests — in practice, as many as can be gathered, and very often one. Oil is blessed in a vessel, traditionally with seven candles set around it, and there follow seven pairs of Epistle and Gospel readings, each with its prayer, telling of God's healing mercy from the Good Samaritan to Peter's fever-stricken mother-in-law. After each reading the sick person is anointed — forehead, nostrils, cheeks, lips, breast, and hands — while the priest says the prayer that is the heart of the mystery: "O holy Father, Physician of souls and bodies, who didst send thine Only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, which healeth every infirmity and delivereth from death: Heal thou, also, thy servant, N., from the ills of body and soul …"

Notice what the prayer asks: healing of body and soul, in that inseparable pair. James promises that the sick man's sins will be forgiven, and the Church has always understood sickness and sin as tangled together — not in the crude sense that every illness is punishment (a notion Christ rejected), but in the sense that the whole person is wounded and the whole person is healed. Unction does not replace confession; the two mysteries work side by side, and one preparing for unction ordinarily comes to confession too.

Western Christians often arrive with the medieval picture of "extreme unction," the anointing of the dying. Orthodoxy never narrowed the mystery that way. Unction is for the sick — before surgery, in chronic illness, in depression and affliction of soul — and the Church prays confidently for recovery while leaving the outcome in God's hands. The dying are certainly anointed, but what the Church most wants to give the dying is Holy Communion; for that final threshold, see preparing-for-death and the-orthodox-funeral.

In many jurisdictions there is also a general unction: a celebration of the mystery for the whole congregation, most familiarly on Holy Wednesday of Holy Week, when parishioners are anointed for the healing of soul and body as Pascha approaches. Practice varies — some churches serve it at other points in the year, some reserve the mystery for the sick by name — so a newcomer should simply ask how the local parish keeps it. However it is kept, the meaning is the same: no sickness of ours, of body or of soul, is outside the reach of Christ.