The Holy Mysteries

In the New Testament a mysterion is not a puzzle waiting for a clever solver; it is God's hidden purpose now revealed in Christ — something once concealed, now given, yet never used up by our understanding. A mystery in the Church's sense is not what we cannot know but what we can never exhaust. St. Paul uses the word of marriage itself: "This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32), and he calls the apostles "stewards of the mysteries of God" (1 Corinthians 4:1).

Every mystery therefore has two faces at once: a visible act anyone can watch, and an invisible gift that faith receives. St. John Chrysostom put the difference exactly: "He hearing of a laver, counts it merely as water: but I behold not simply the thing which is seen, but the purification of the soul which is by the Spirit." A laver is simply a washing-basin — the unbeliever sees a bath; the believer sees new birth. The Western word sacrament (from the Latin for a solemn oath) is not wrong, and Orthodox writers use it freely in English. But the Church's own word, mystery, guards the essential point: what God does in these acts outruns every definition of it.

Ask an Orthodox catechism how many mysteries there are and it will usually answer seven: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, confession, marriage, holy unction (anointing of the sick), and ordination. The list is true and useful — every item on it is a real mystery of the Church. But the number is a borrowing. The sevenfold enumeration was worked out in the medieval West and entered Greek usage late — one of its earliest Byzantine appearances is the profession of faith Emperor Michael VIII sent to the Council of Lyons in 1274 — and only afterward became standard in Orthodox teaching, as in the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672. Before that, the Fathers counted variously: the writings under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite describe six; other Byzantine writers counted more or fewer, and lists sometimes included the monastic tonsure or the funeral.

The Church adopted the count without ever dogmatizing it, and that is precisely the Orthodox position: seven is a serviceable answer for the catechism, not a fence around grace. The great blessing of water at Theophany (holy-water-agiasma), the monastic tonsure, the funeral, the blessing of homes and fields — the tradition has never been anxious to rule on which of these are "really" sacraments, because it never accepted that God's sanctifying action comes in exactly seven channels. Among them all, one stands at the center: the Eucharist, the mystery the others surround and serve, celebrated at the-divine-liturgy.

Why does God give Himself through things — water, oil, bread, wine, chrism, hands? Because of the Incarnation. Since the Word became flesh, matter is not an obstacle to the Spirit but a bearer of Him; the mysteries take creation's ordinary stuff and return it to its original vocation of carrying God to man. "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit" (John 3:5): water and Spirit, matter and grace together — that is the sacramental principle in a single verse. The grace given is not a created substance measured out in doses but God's own uncreated life and action (uncreated grace), and its goal is nothing less than theosis — the transformation of the whole person in Christ.

Two safeguards keep this from being magic. The mysteries are Christ's own acts — the clergy minister them, but He performs them — and they call for the free cooperation of the person receiving: faith, repentance, a life that answers the gift. A mystery received carelessly is not a vending machine that failed; it is a gift awaiting the opening of the heart.