In today’s gospel reading, Jesus feeds miraculously a whole crowd with the five loaves his disciples had provided. But since then, the Lord has continued this process on a different scale, feeding the entire human race and all of creation. In the power of his Holy Spirit given to the Church at Pentecost, Christ’s work has acquired cosmic dimensions. When we celebrate a Liturgy, the visible congregation is but a minute fraction of those actually affected. The Liturgy is celebrated on behalf of all people and for all people.

Our parish follows a liturgical tradition where five loaves are used, to mark the link with today’s gospel. But in the entire Orthodox Church, bread is set on the disc in an identical way: in the centre of the disc, a large cube of bread representing Christ will be consecrated and changed into the body of Christ. Around it, pieces of bread represent the Mother of God, the Saints and all the living and departed.

Since the bread and wine are about to become the body and blood of Christ, the priest raises them up, saying, ‘thine own of thine own we offer unto thee, on behalf of all and for all.’ Saying this, we acknowledge that we are offering God to God; what we can produce has been transformed into the presence of God, who gives himself to us so that we can offer back to him the only gift capable of rescuing the entire human race, the entire cosmos, visible and invisible: God himself.

A similar prayer from a different perspective will be offered towards the end of the Liturgy, as the bread remaining on the disc is poured into the chalice, with the words: ‘wash away, Lord, the sins of all those who have been commemorated here, in thy precious blood, at the prayers of thy most pure Mother and of all thy Saints.’ Once again, it is asserted that the purpose of the Liturgy is to enable the whole human race and the whole cosmos to share the life of God.

When we read the account of the Last Supper in the Gospels, we notice that partaking of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ does not prevent us from sinning. Immediately after receiving the holy gifts, Judas went out to betray Christ. Soon after, Peter, James and John fell into a deep sleep at Gethsemane as the Lord was sweating blood. Moments later, when Jesus was being arrested, Peter out of fear pretended he had never met Christ and did not know him.

The other apostles fled, abandoning their Lord at the beginning of his Passion. When Jesus was on the Cross on Golgotha, only the Mother of God, Mary the wife of Cleopas, Mary Magdalen and the apostle John stood near the Cross.

In spite of all that, history shows that, through repeated experience of the Liturgy, lives can become transformed, enriched to the point of preferring union with Christ even to earthly survival. The apostles celebrated the Eucharistic meal regularly for many years, enabling ten of them to die martyrs, as only John died of old age.

The way the Lord gives himself to us as food in the Liturgy includes not only the consecrated bread and wine, but every part of the Liturgy, because the prayers and the Scripture readings are also a means of receiving Christ into our lives.

Similarly, our participation in the Liturgy includes life-long efforts to understand it better. Outside the actual service, it is spiritually useful to ponder slowly the words of the service, including the prayers the priest reads silently. Those prayers convey the meaning of the various parts of the Liturgy in a way which transforms our time in church.

The most important ones are, first, the prayer before the Gospel which asks for help with understanding and obeying God’s will set out in the Gospel; secondly, the prayer before the Great Entrance, which is a supplication to be freed from our all too human outlook so as to enter into the divine mystery about to be enacted. The wealth of blessings provided by the Liturgy deserves to be understood, to enable us to make it the centre of our life.

Amen.

Given by Fr. Yves