The worship of Christians is in response to God’s saving action in the living, dying, and rising again of Jesus Christ; it is patterned on the history of salvation, offered to the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.
Through the centuries of the Old Testament, God was offering his love to the people, but they did not “know” him; he did not reveal his inner nature. Jesus came as the revelation of the Father (Matt. 11:25–27). The mystery of God, hidden for ages and generations, is now made manifest (Col. 1:26), and the essence of that mystery is that God is love (1 John 4:8). This Jesus made plain by his life, his words, and his passion, death, and resurrection. That is why he has been called “the sacrament” of the Father, the showing forth of the Father, and the revelation of his saving purpose, adumbrated throughout the ages but now made known in Jesus Christ.
But Jesus is not only the revelation of the Father; he is in himself the communication of the Father’s love, the primary and supreme gift of God to humankind. Christ makes God present to people with all his redeeming power and love, principally through his passion, death, and resurrection. In the terminology of St. Paul, Christ is the mystery (mustērion) “which is … in [en] you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Christ, then, makes effective in people the self-giving of God, who calls and urges them to respond to him in self-giving of faith and love through the word and sacrament of the liturgy. In the dialogue that is set up, in the exchange that takes place, we meet God and are able to enter into union with him, which is the end purpose of all worship.
The culmination, however, of God’s self-revelation and self-giving in Christ were the passion, death, and resurrection, to which we must add, as the liturgies do, his ascension into heaven, the apparent end of the Lord’s earthly work of redemption. All this has been called the paschal mystery, and the term is useful for putting Christ’s redeeming work in the context of the Passover. The Passover of Christ fulfilled and transcended the Jewish Passover. It is in the Passover context that the Eucharist was instituted, thus indicating that it is through the Eucharist that the Passover of Christ, his redeeming work, is made available to all. It is of the Passover of Christ that the Eucharist is the anamnēsis, or memorial. Just as the paschal mystery was the culmination of Christ’s redeeming work, so the Eucharist becomes the culmination and center of Christian worship.
The liturgy, then, is the making present in word, symbol, and sacrament of the paschal mystery of Christ so that through its celebration the men and women of today may make a saving encounter with God. Stopping here, however, excludes a whole dimension of saving history as well as of Christian worship. If the Pentecost event has never formed part of the anamnēsis of the Eucharist, the giving of the Spirit is always in view. In the liturgical context, the ascension (which has normally been one of the events mentioned in the anamnēsis) can be seen as the bridge between the paschal mystery of Christ and the giving of the Spirit. This is based on the New Testament perspective: Christ returns to his Father that he may send upon his church the Spirit he promised (Acts 2:33). But the presence of the Spirit in the liturgical celebration is not to be seen simply in terms of the epiclēsis, as if he comes into the action only at a certain point. The liturgy is always celebrated in the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as prayer is made in the Spirit (Rom. 8:26–27), so is the celebration of the liturgy. If it looks back to Christ in his redeeming work, it looks to Christ as he now is, filled with the Spirit, as Lord (1 Tim. 3:16). It is possible to see that the historic Christian liturgy is patterned on the history of salvation. There is the original initiative of God, who throughout the ages offers humankind his love. The history is carried forward by the redeeming events of Christ, the Son of God, who on the cross gives himself totally to his Father and for the salvation of humankind. He ascends to the Father and sends upon his church the Holy Spirit so that his ekklēsia may continue, in time and space and by the power of the Holy Spirit, his redeeming work. The church looks to the consummation of all things, when Christ will hand all things to his Father so that he may be all in all things (1 Cor. 15:28). “To the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit” is the underlying pattern of the history of salvation and of the liturgy. In the eucharistic prayer we give praise and thanksgiving to the Father, through the Son, whose redeeming acts are recalled, and to the Holy Spirit, who is invoked on the offering (epiclēsis). The doxology at the end of the prayer expresses the whole truth succinctly but explicitly. Almost all collects begin with an ascription of praise to the Father, make petition through the Son, and conclude with a mention of the Holy Spirit. The phrase serves to remind us that the aim of the whole liturgy is entrance into communion with God, a communion in the divine life and love that constitute the Trinity.