In the exodus event, God created a people and brought them into a covenant relationship. The covenant specified that Israelite worshipers display loyalty and faithfulness both to Yahweh, the King of the covenant and to their fellow Israelites covenanted to that same King. In a corresponding way, God has created a people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; these people are bound together with him and with one another in a new covenant community. Jesus’ commandment for this community, or church, is that they love him with their entire being, and their covenant brothers as themselves. It is out of this relationship with God and one’s fellow believers that worship arises. Biblical worship is intended as a corporate expression of the covenant relationship.
The Church as a Body
In the liturgy there is a vertical movement, the out-going of the person to God; but there is also a horizontal movement. Liturgy is celebrated with others and the relationships between the members of the worshiping community are of the highest importance. Private acts of public worship are a contradiction in terms, as a statement in the Roman Catholic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy suggests: “Liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church, which is the sacrament of unity” (section 26). At the practical level, all liturgical rites are arranged for the participation of the community. Rites enable people to relate to each other (the kiss, the handshake—both symbolic gestures) and also to the community. One can become part of the congregation and enter more deeply into its life. The sociologists tell us that for true community to exist there must be a face-to-face relationship. For the Christian, this means that the members of the community are persons bound together by faith and love. In principle, they are already related to one another. In the worshiping community, this relationship is deepened and enhanced—or will be, if the members try to act as a community.
The Pauline teaching on the church as “body” emphasizes at once the closeness of the relationship between Christ and the people—they are members, limbs, of the body—and of the horizontal relationships between the members of the body (1 Cor. 12:12–31). In other words, perhaps more strongly than before, it is indicated that the priestly people is also a community, the community of Christ with which he has a vital relationship. He is the source of all its life; it is totally dependent on him as the branches of a tree are on its trunk (John 15:1–5). And the relationships of faith and love between its members are in the first instance created by Christ, though they are to be realized and strengthened by Eucharist, which is the sacramental sign of koinonia of communion, the union of minds and hearts in faith and love. If the church can be said to “make” the Eucharist, in a much deeper sense the Eucharist makes the church. But the depth and richness of the relationship is best seen in Ephesians 5, where Christ is said to be the head of the church of which he is also Savior; and this church is his bride (vv. 25–26), which he brought into existence by the “fragrant offering and sacrifice” that he offered to his Father (v. 2).
It is this people, then, the priestly people, the body of Christ, and the community of Christ, who are the “subject” of liturgical celebrations. In other words, it is they who celebrate the liturgy, and the form of the liturgy must be of such sort as to make this possible. The Christian liturgy by its nature cannot be the monologue of a single participant. It is the action of a whole community.