earticle

영어

"Liturgy" derived from the Greek leitourgia used for ‘an act of public service’ has been applied to an act of worship since the early church. The liturgy is the act of the corporate worship conducted by Christians community and has been specially applied to the Eucharist. In this paper I explore what the primitive shape of the liturgy is. It is not easy to find out the primitive shape of the liturgy before the fourth century. Some scholars, however, explore an original apostolic liturgy and its shape based on the Scripture, and early documents such as Didache and Apostolic Tradition.
From the prototype of the Christian gathering, one of the essential components was what Jesus commanded at the table with his disciples, the Last Supper. The Christian Eucharist has its origin in the Last Supper. There, Jesus took bread, blessed God, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, telling them to take it and eat of it, because it was his body. In the same way, after they had eaten, he took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to his disciples, telling them all to take it and drink of it, because it was the cup of the covenant in his blood. At the end he said: "Do this in remembrance of me." With this action he set a model so that we might do the same, that is, do what he himself had done. To celebrate the Eucharist, then, is to obey Christ’s command and do what he himself did.
There was typically a didactic element which preceded the Eucharist- either in the form of lessons of the elements was possible in the giving of alms to those in need. A harvest in another field will reveal the differences and developments in anaphora prayer forms in the various known primitive liturgies. The common shape of those includes an opening dialogue of praise, followed by a thanksgiving over the bread and cup, leading toward a supplication for the gathering of the Church.