Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

Walk into nearly any Orthodox church on nearly any Sunday, anywhere in the world, and the service you hear is the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. What actually happens in it — the entrances, the readings, the Anaphora, Communion — is described in the entry on the-divine-liturgy; this entry is about where this particular form came from, what it is like, and when it is used.

It is the default: served whenever a full Liturgy is appointed, except on a handful of days with their own forms. The longer, more penitential Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is served ten times a year — the five Sundays of Great Lent, Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, the eves of Nativity and Theophany (or the feasts themselves when they fall on a Sunday or Monday), and St. Basil's own day, January 1. On most weekdays of Great Lent no full Liturgy is celebrated at all, and the faithful commune at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. The ancient Liturgy of St. James survives in occasional use, in some places on the feast of St. James. Everything else — the whole ordinary round of Sundays, feasts, and weekday Liturgies — belongs to Chrysostom's.

John was born in Antioch around 349 and served there as deacon and priest, where his preaching — direct, practical, fearless — made him famous; later generations called him Chrysostomos, "golden-mouthed," and the name displaced his own. In 398 he was taken, more or less against his will, to be archbishop of Constantinople. There he preached against the luxury of the capital and its court with the same freedom he had used in Antioch, made powerful enemies including the empress, and was twice driven into exile. He died on the road in 407, worn out by forced marches; tradition records his last words as "Glory to God for all things." The Church keeps his feast on November 13, and honors him again with Sts. Basil and Gregory among the Three Hierarchs on January 30.

John did not sit down and write the service as we now have it, and the Church does not need to pretend otherwise. The earliest surviving text of the Byzantine Liturgy, the Barberini Euchologion of the eighth century, names Chrysostom as author of only a few of its prayers; the full ascription of the whole Liturgy to him becomes standard in manuscripts a few centuries later. What is anciently associated with him is the core — the Anaphora, the great Eucharistic prayer — which many scholars think descends from the eucharistic praying of his native Antioch, akin to the Syrian Anaphora of the Apostles, and may well have come to Constantinople with him. Around that core the familiar service accumulated across the Byzantine centuries: the litanies and antiphons, the Cherubic Hymn (added in the sixth century), the Creed (likewise a sixth-century addition), and much else. So the honest formula is the one the Church can stand behind: the heart of this Liturgy has been prayed for some fifteen centuries, under the name of the saint whose city and whose spirit shaped it.

Its character fits the man. Set beside St. Basil's Liturgy, Chrysostom's prayers are noticeably shorter, plainer, and more direct — the whole service moves with a pastor's economy. That is why the Church made it the everyday Liturgy: it carries the full weight of the Eucharist at a pace a parish of working people, children included, can pray week after week for a lifetime.