Liturgy — The Why

For our benefit and God's glory

Mar 04, 2024

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Collect, where I, a professional1 Catholic liturgist, send you a rambling reflection each Monday about whatever happens to be on my mind. You’re about to (finally!) read Part Two of my RCIA lecture about the Liturgy; if you missed Part One, it’s here:

Liturgy — The What

Jason Link

February 5, 2024

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After discussing the definition of Liturgy, especially the features of Liturgy that we can draw from the definition of the Greek λειτουργία (leitourgia), we can then move into asking the question of why we do Liturgy. While I obviously encourage you to go read the first article (linked at the top) to understand where I’m starting from, I’ll go ahead and give you the bullet-point summary from the conclusion to be nice.

Liturgy is a work.
Liturgy is done by a priest (leitourgos).
Liturgy is done for us.
We participate in Liturgy by reception.

So, as with any work, especially weird and sometimes difficult work, we must ask the question — why?

For God’s Glory

The entirety of the Old Testament is ordered around worship.

Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’ (Exodus 5:1)

This line, from the first confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh, highlights an oft-overlooked part of the Exodus account: the Israelites are freed in order to worship. The request of God for a ‘feast in the wilderness’ is not some clever scheme to try and trick Pharaoh into letting the Israelites go; there is no duplicity in God.2 If Pharaoh had softened his heart and let the Israelites go, they truly would have been instructed to return after three days, as per the original request.3 It is through foreknowledge of Pharaoh’s hardening of his heart4 that God determines to free his people entirely from Egypt.

This concept, that freedom is ordered towards worship of God, permeates the rest of the Bible.

Later on in the Exodus account, the Lord calls the Israelites to the mountain of Sinai, where he incorporates them into a People for himself. This event, which is the origin of Identity for the People of Israel, comes with a covenant, an agreement between God and man.

Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:5-6)

God incorporates the People of Israel to worship. He who calls things by their true names calls his people to be priests, worshipers of his glory.

Worship, of course, has structure. There are right and wrong ways to worship, and God knows this, though it takes the People of Israel a little time to figure out (see: the Golden Calf). Rather than let his chosen kingdom of priests just go full trial-and-error, though, the Lord God decides to help them along with a nice instruction book that could easily be titled “How to Worship God 101” but you probably know under its Greek name, the book of Leviticus.

While I won’t bore you with all of the ~~super cool and wonderfully enlightening and AH I could talk about Leviticus for hours~~ details, one thing comes up over and again throughout Leviticus — God wants to be worshiped in a particular manner. In fact, God demands to be worshiped in a particular manner. “As the LORD commanded Moses” is possibly the most common phrase in the book.

The takeaway here is that worship has a purpose, and that purpose is ordered by God. Why do we worship? Because God commands us to, and because our worship gives God glory.

Without giving you a completely in-depth definition of what exactly glory is,5 I would like to draw out one particular thing that some people have problems with: how can we cause God’s glory to increase? Isn’t he already perfect and glorious without us?

Yes. Next question.

…

Okay, fine, I guess I can give you a little more than that.

A few years ago, I would have answered this like a mathematician, and said that because God is infinite, and infinity can always increase (but never shrink), we can make God more glorious without being able to make him less glorious. And there is some truth in that (especially the infinity part), but it lacks in a certain nuance. Let me try to give it to you here.

God is infinite6 and omnipotent7. It would be a denial of his infinity to say that he lacks in any way in Being or Perfection, and it would be a denial of his Omnipotence to say that he lacks in Power. When applied to man, the idea to increase in glory implies a present lack that will be filled by a future quality which is as yet unpossessed. With that definition, it would make sense to say that God cannot receive glory, because he is not lacking in anything.

Yet, in Scripture we read:

And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his chariots, and his horsemen. (Exodus 14:17)

What’s up with that?

At least in the sense that is relevant for this discussion, glory is understood to be an exercised quality;8 I am considered glorious in relation to someone else. Glory is a true quality of God; when we say that men have earned/gained glory, we are saying that they are more perfectly (than before) participating in the quality of God we call glory.

In our worship of God, he draws near to us, and enters into the story of our lives. God, who is glorious inherently by his nature, makes himself participate in his own glory, the glory of creation, which he has bestowed on us. Worship behaves like a feedback loop of glory — we worship by God’s gift of glory to us, and by his response to our worship he makes himself participant in the glory that worship brings to him.

Confused? No worries, it’s a weird concept to grasp. The long and short of it is that we worship to give God glory. And because it’s what God asks us to do.

For our Benefit

But wait! There’s more!

Not only do we worship for God’s glory, but we also worship for our benefit. God, in his infinitude, is constantly giving to us, and it’s in worship that we receive.

The Fathers of the Church talk frequently about the οἰκονομία (oikonomia), or economy, of salvation. Now, when we hear the term economy, we usually think about dollars and stock markets, but the definition of the term for the ancients (like liturgy; see part one of this series) is more intense than that. I’ll start with what you can find in your Catechism:

The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). "Theology" refers to the mystery of God's inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and "economy" to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God's works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. (CCC 236)

Make sense to you? I’ll be honest, on my first read it didn’t make sense to me. I had to sit with it for a while.

Essentially, an economy is a system or space through which things are exchanged; in the economy of the United States, goods and services are exchanged, while in the Economy of Salvation, Grace and glory are exchanged — that is, Grace is given by God and received by us, while glory is also received by us and given back to God (see above). The method of exchange is the Liturgy — the Celebration of the Christian Mystery.

Within the Economy of Salvation, God “reveals himself and communicates his life” to us through the Sacraments, so the Economy is also called the Sacramental Economy. By receiving Grace through the Sacraments (which all take place within liturgy) we are drawn more deeply into the life of God; the Divine Romance of the Trinity, the heart of which is our ultimate end.

See, in the vocabulary of the Church, the Sacraments are ‘efficacious signs,’ meaning that they cause real effects by their reception; they possess the power to actually do what they claim to do, a power that is given to them by God. Baptism, for instance, claims to provide spiritual cleansing; and, by the Grace of God and ex opere operato (Latin for ‘by the working of the work’, as opposed to ex opere operantis, ‘by the working of the worker’), Baptism actually does provide spiritual cleansing, presuming that it is done correctly (see above for God caring about how worship is performed). In the same way, Confirmation does actually provide a strengthening in spiritual gifts, Penance does actually provide forgiveness of sins and a strengthening against temptation, et cetera et cetera.

So while on the one hand we do Liturgy for the Glory of God, we also do Liturgy because we get something out of it, namely, Sacramental Grace. This Grace is a free gift of God; but just as when I give you a gift for Christmas, you have to unwrap it, we too have to ‘unwrap’ our gift from God in the Liturgy.

From the visible to the invisible

Now, I just gave you almost two thousand words attempting to answer the question of “Why do we do Liturgy?” from the perspective of “Why do we worship?”

But many of you may have expected “Why do we do Liturgy?” to have more to do with “Why do we use incense? Why do we fold our hands? Why do we sing hymns? Why do we process into a Church for Mass?” and things like that. Good questions, all! While I won’t drill down into the specifics of individual actions and ceremonial, let me see what I can say in summary about “Why do we do Liturgy with ceremony?”

Part of this, of course, is answered above, as “because God told us to,” and while that may seem like a dissatisfying answer there’s quite a bit of truth to it. For those of you who are believers, you understand that when you really comprehend the vastness of God the Omnipotent Creator, him saying “Do this, this way,” is absolutely a legitimate reason to do something a certain way. For those of you who are not believers, I don’t think I’ll be able to explain that to you in any satisfactory manner. As someone9 once said, “For those who have faith, no explanation is necessary; for those without faith, no explanation is possible.”

As with all things, though, there’s some nuance here that I would be remiss to leave unaddressed. I mentioned above that the Sacraments are ‘efficacious signs,’ and I talked a decent amount on the efficacious part of that definition. But Sacraments are also signs, and there’s some significance (pun not intended) to that part of the definition too.

In the Catechism, and indeed in Catholic theology, the terms ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ are often used interchangeably or at least in the same contexts. Like so many other things, that’s due to them essentially being the same word but from different languages.

‘Sign’ comes from Latin signum, which can translate to ‘identifying mark;’ in essence, a sign is something by which we recognize something else. Like so many other Latin-root words, it has major connections to military action in Roman writings; a ‘sign’ on a battle standard or shield allows troops to recognize a particular officer’s troops, or a division of the army, et cetera.

This becomes even more clear with ‘symbol,’ which comes from Greek σύμβολον (symbolon) which itself derives from συμβάλλω (symballo) meaning ‘to throw together’. If you just found a Greek dictionary and looked up σύμβολον, you would probably find the definition of “a sign or token by which one infers a thing” which again supports the idea that sign and symbol are interchangeable terms.

The ancient definition of symbol is a touch more (as are most ancient definitions; are we seeing the theme here?) and actually gets a reference in the Catechism:

The Greek word symbolon meant half of a broken object, for example, a seal presented as a token of recognition. The broken parts were placed together to verify the bearer's identity. (CCC 188)

The paragraph continues to explain the term ‘Symbol of Faith’ (in reference to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) but I want to keep looking at the Sacraments. First, though, a story.

Picture yourself in ancient Greece. You’ve been living it up in Athens with your buddy Theophanes, when suddenly he is called away on some urgent business. During your tearful goodbye (or your last call toast, this is your imagination) he promises to send you a message when he arrives safely in Halicarnassus or wherever he’s going. All is well.

But then, you remember that you’re not the most popular person in Athens, but you’re pretty influential (if you do say so yourself). You become worried that someone may try to write you a letter claiming to be Theophanes, and manipulate you into doing something for their benefit. So you ask Theophanes how you’ll know that the letter he sends is truly from him.

Theophanes thinks for a moment, and then a ~~lightbulb~~ lantern goes off over his head.

“I have the perfect idea!” he says, taking from his satchel a round clay tablet. As you watch, Theophanes carves a sign on the tablet (maybe a heart with your initials in it, or just your name, or a picture of a squirrel, whatever floats your boat) and then smashes it on the counter, breaking the tablet in two.

“Take this half,” he says, offering you part of the tablet. “When I send my message, I will include my half, and you can fit it against yours (or throw them together, συμβάλλω) to see if they match. If they do, then you know that it is truly from me, but if they don’t you know you are being deceived.”

Problem solved!

So, just like with the Latin signum, when we see a symbolon, we are reminded of something else; in this case, our friend Theophanes. Both terms have this meaning: a thing which makes you understand a different thing.

The Sacraments, especially the ceremony surrounding the Sacraments (the ‘smells and bells’ as they say), are the same. We see and experience the ceremony and our souls are drawn past these physical signs to the spiritual realities that they communicate. Liturgy interacts with our physical senses to reach into our spiritual senses.

(The whole reason behind this is that man is body-soul composite, not purely one or the other, and so man is most fully himself when both his body and his soul are involved in a thing; but that’s a whole ‘nother article and I’m already thousands of words into this one so maybe I’ll write that later.)

A simple example of this is liturgical colors, which change with liturgical seasons. Currently, we’re in Lent, which means at Catholic Churches throughout the world you’ll see a lot of violet, a color meant to draw us past the physical colored things we see into an experience of the penitential season; during the Easter season, everything will be white and gold, drawing us into the glory of the Resurrection; on feasts of martyrs, the liturgical color is red, reminding us of the sacrifice of the Cross that the martyrs are united to; in Ordinary Time we see green, a color of growing things that reminds us of our own need for growth in the Christian life. These symbols draw us from the visible reality into the invisible reality, both of which are filled with the Presence of God — and both of which are given to us as gift.

Now, some of these signs and symbols are obviously impacted by the cultural context of a local community, and that’s a big discussion in the Church right now — where is it appropriate to introduce cultural signs/symbols into the Liturgy and where is it not — but the general idea is always that signs and symbols, though physical and perceptible, lead us beyond ourselves to God. That’s a big deal, and that’s why we have so many of them.

Some takeaways

This piece has ended up being quite a bit longer than Part One, but I think that’s reasonable, because the ‘Why?’ question is always more significant than the ‘What?’ question.

I’ve tried to give you some reasons as to why we do Liturgy, which I can sum up here:

We do Liturgy for God’s glory.
We do Liturgy for our benefit.
We have signs and symbols in Liturgy to draw us from the visible to the invisible.

And, of course, at the end of the day we do Liturgy because God told us to.

This has been Part Two of my three-part series on the Liturgy, based on a lecture I gave to an RCIA class back in early February 2024. Part One attempted to answer the question of “What is Liturgy?” while this Part attempted to answer the question of “Why do we do Liturgy?” and Part Three, whenever it arrives, will attempt to answer the question “How do we do Liturgy?”

As always, I necessarily write from a Catholic perspective because I am Catholic and am fully convinced that the Fullness of Truth is in the Catholic Church. I typically write while making assumptions about my reader’s familiarity with the Catholic Church, but if I have said anything that you don’t understand or referred to anything that you’ve never heard of, please let me know in the comments, by tagging me on Notes, sending me a Substack DM, or by emailing me at thecollect @ substack.com. I’ll be happy to answer you or point you towards someone who can answer you better than I can.