What is claimed, and what is left unsaid
Ask an Orthodox priest what is in the chalice on Sunday morning and he will tell you, without hedging, that it is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Ask him how the bread stopped being bread and he will most likely say that he does not know, that nobody knows, and that the Church has never undertaken to find out. Both answers are serious. The first is a confession of faith the Church will not soften; the second is a refusal she regards as equally important.
That combination puzzles visitors, particularly those who have been taught to expect a religion either to explain its claims or to reduce them. Orthodoxy does neither here. She states the fact and stops. A great deal of what follows is an attempt to show why stopping is not evasion, and why the Church thinks the question “how” belongs to a different order of enquiry from the question “what”.
John 6, and the disciples who walked away
The sixth chapter of John is where this begins. After feeding the five thousand, Christ tells a crowd that he is the bread of life, and then says something that they find impossible: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53, RSV). His hearers object. He does not withdraw the words or explain them away; he repeats them in stronger terms, four times over.
What happens next is the detail that Orthodox readers find decisive. “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66, RSV). Disciples leave, and Christ lets them go, asking the Twelve whether they will leave too. A teacher who had meant only a vivid metaphor had every opportunity to say so, and did not. The Church has therefore read the discourse as meaning what it appears to mean, and has read it at the chalice ever since.
Paul writing to a congregation that got it wrong
Saint Paul's first letter to Corinth gives the earliest written account of the Lord's Supper, and it is a rebuke. The Corinthians were treating the gathering as a supper club where the rich ate first. His correction turns on what the bread and the cup are: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16, RSV).
From there he draws a conclusion that only makes sense if something objective is present. Whoever eats unworthily is “guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord,” and anyone who eats “without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Corinthians 11:27, 29, RSV). He then says that this is why some in the congregation are weak and ill. One does not profane a symbol, and a memorial does not make anyone sick. Orthodoxy takes the warning as evidence about what is being received.
The epiclesis: the prayer that asks for the change
In the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, served in this parish most Sundays, the central prayer of the anaphora comes after the words of institution. The deacon and priest bow, and the priest asks God to send down the Holy Spirit upon the assembled people and upon the gifts set forth, and to make the bread the precious Body of his Christ and the cup the precious Blood of his Christ, changing them by his Holy Spirit. The congregation answers Amen three times.
Notice the shape of the request. Nobody in the building claims to perform the change. The priest asks, in the name of the whole assembly, and what is asked for is the action of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who overshadowed the Virgin and raised Christ from the dead. Orthodox theology has always laid weight on this prayer, and the epiclesis is one of the places where Eastern and Western liturgical thought developed differently over the centuries.
The consequence is practical. Because the change is asked for rather than produced, the Church has no procedure to describe. She has a petition and an answer. What the faithful see is bread and wine; what they are taught they receive is Christ himself, whole and entire, in each particle and each drop.
What other Christians hold, and what each view protects
Christians outside Orthodoxy hold a range of positions here, and each of them is trying to guard something the apostolic writings genuinely say. It is worth setting them out properly, at their strongest rather than at their weakest, because a caricature helps nobody and because most readers of this page will have been formed by one of them. What follows is a summary, not a rebuttal.
The memorial understanding, often associated with Zwingli and widespread among evangelical and non-denominational congregations, takes the Supper as an act of remembrance and of covenant loyalty, obeying “do this in remembrance of me.” What it protects is real: the sufficiency of the one sacrifice offered once for all, and the conviction that grace is not manipulated by ritual. Behind it lies a proper horror of superstition.
Reformed teaching, following Calvin, holds that believers truly feed on Christ in the Supper, not by his body descending into the bread but by the Holy Spirit joining the believer to Christ where he is. That view guards two things at once: the reality of the gift, and the bodily ascension of the Lord who sits at the right hand of the Father. It is not a thin doctrine, and those who hold it often speak of the Supper with great reverence.
Lutheran teaching goes further still, affirming that the true Body and Blood are given in, with and under the bread and the wine, though Lutherans generally reject the label consubstantiation as a scholastic intrusion. What that position protects is the plainness of Christ's words at the table. Anglican formularies have carried more than one of these views at the same time. Fr. Seraphim Rose, writing about Christians outside the Orthodox Church, refused to treat such people as strangers.
there is no reason why we should regard them as totally estranged or as equal to pagans
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Why Orthodoxy stops short of an explanation
Orthodoxy differs from all of these, and the difference should be stated without apology. The Church holds that the gifts are changed, that what lies on the altar after the epiclesis is not bread with something added but the Body of Christ, and that this is true independently of the faith of any particular communicant. That is a real disagreement with the memorial view, and a real disagreement with the Reformed account, and it is not dissolved by good manners.
But the Orthodox reluctance to explain is just as firm. Greek Orthodox confessional documents of the seventeenth century, notably the Confession of Dositheus adopted at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, did borrow the term metousiosis in reply to Reformed arguments then circulating. Later Orthodox theologians have generally been wary of treating that word as an endorsement of the Latin scholastic analysis of substance and accidents, and have preferred the older language of mystery.
Saint John of Damascus had already set the tone in the eighth century. In his exposition of the faith he considers the question how the bread becomes the Body, and answers, in substance, that the Holy Spirit does it, that the manner is beyond us, and that it is enough to know the word of God is true (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV.13). The Liturgy itself calls the gifts “the holy mysteries,” and that is not a decorative word. It names a boundary the Church has chosen not to cross.
There is a pastoral reason for the boundary as well as a theological one. A mechanism can be argued about, improved, defended and eventually believed in for its own sake. A mystery can only be approached, and approached in a particular way, with fasting, confession and preparation. Orthodoxy would rather have communicants who tremble a little than communicants who have a satisfactory theory.
Why the chalice is not offered to every visitor
Orthodox parishes practise what is usually called closed communion. A visitor who is not an Orthodox Christian is asked not to receive the gifts. This is the point at which the most hurt is caused, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not mean, because it is often heard as a judgement on the visitor's faith, and it is not that.
In Orthodox understanding, the chalice is not a means of building unity but the sign and seal of a unity that already exists. To come to it is to say, publicly, that one holds the faith of this Church, lives under her discipline, confesses her sacraments and is in communion with her bishop. Asking a guest to say all that by an action, when it is not yet true, would be asking him to say something untrue, and it would be unkind as well as untrue.
The practice is also very old. In the second century Justin Martyr wrote that no one is allowed to share the eucharistic food except one who believes the Church's teaching, has been washed in the bath of regeneration, and lives as Christ commanded (First Apology 66). For centuries the catechumens were dismissed by name before the anaphora began, and the deacon's summons “the doors, the doors” survives in the Liturgy still.
It should also be said that Orthodox Christians do not simply walk up either. Communion follows preparation: a rule of prayers, a fast from the previous evening, and in Russian practice confession beforehand. Someone baptised Orthodox forty years ago who has not confessed in a decade is in the same queue of questions as anybody else. The restriction is not a ranking of persons, and where a person stands before God is a separate matter which the Church declines to pronounce upon.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
What you can actually do if you come on Sunday
Nobody is turned away from the building, and there is a great deal more to the Liturgy than the few minutes at the chalice. In practice, a visitor at our parish in Kovan can do all of the following without any awkwardness, and it is worth knowing beforehand so that Sunday is not spent guessing.
If you would like to come forward for a blessing at communion time rather than remain in your place, mention it to the priest before the service, since the custom differs between Orthodox parishes and it is easier to arrange than to improvise.
- Stay for the whole service, stand or sit where you like, and leave when you need to.
- Light a candle before an icon and pray in your own words.
- Come forward at the end of the Liturgy to venerate the cross, as everyone does.
- Take a piece of antidoron, the blessed bread cut from the same loaf as the eucharistic Lamb but not consecrated; in Russian parishes it is commonly offered to all who are present.
- Stay for the meal afterwards, which in Singapore is usually better attended than the sermon deserves.
- Ask the priest for a conversation, in English or in Russian, about anything in this article.
Where this leaves us
The disagreement described here is genuine, and it would be dishonest to end by suggesting that all Christians mean the same thing by the Lord's table. They do not. What can be said is that the Orthodox position is not a claim to have solved the mystery, and that any Orthodox Christian who uses the chalice as a way of feeling superior has misunderstood what he is receiving.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, who came to Orthodoxy from a Protestant family in California, wrote in print against exactly that temptation among converts, and his warning applies to this subject as much as any other. The door at Kovan stands open on Sunday mornings, and the conversation afterwards costs nothing.
Even when it is worded in a theologically correct manner, this attitude is spiritually wrong
Fr. Seraphim Rose, “In Defense of Fr. Dimitri Dudko”, The Orthodox Word no. 2 (1980), p. 131, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)