Across all historical Christian liturgical traditions, the Eucharistic celebration is divided up into two sections, the liturgy of the Word (focused on reading and teaching of the Scriptures), and the liturgy of the Eucharist itself. And across all of these traditions, since at least the third century, the Eucharistic rite has been prefaced with the same ritual dialogue between the celebrant priest and those gathered. Known in the West as the Sursum Corda, Latin for ‘Hearts up high’, it goes like this:
Priest: The Lord be with you
Congregation: And with your spirit
P: Lift up your hearts
C: We lift them up unto the Lord
P: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God
C: It is worthy and right [so to do]
The first part of the dialogue is a common liturgical greeting. While it’s complete as it is, the Eastern rite here expands on it to be explicitly Trinitarian: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” The idea is simply a prayer (praying what we believe) asking for God’s presence to be with the whole gathered community.
The priest then exhorts the congregation to ‘lift up their hearts’. This is the unique piece of this prayer, and it recognizes that the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus stands as a sacrament for our own inner transformation. The ‘offering’ is the bread and wine, but the real offering is our whole self. This is made more explicit in the Eastern rite, which introduces the Sursum Corda with the following interaction:
Deacon: Let us stand well, let us stand with fear! Let us attend, that we may offer the holy offering in peace.
Congregation: Our love is peaceful, our sacrifice is glorifying*
In other words, the true holy offering is our peace-making love and our self-sacrificial service to God. As much as in the sacrament, the bread becomes the body of Christ, we must always remember that first and foremost it is us as the community of faith who are Christ’s body on earth: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12.27).
And as the final part of the dialogue reminds us, this sacrifice is no drudgery, but is joyful, full of praise and thanksgiving. The word translated ‘worthy’ above (traditionally ‘meet’) is a form of the same word used in Revelation for the praise of the Lamb: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!’” (Revelation 5.12). That word is also used in Eastern services of ordination: When the candidate is presented, the congregation shouts “Axios! Axios! Axios!” (“Worthy! Worthy! Worthy!”) in assent. Maybe it says something about our own culture and language (probably the long reach of Victorian sensibilities) that words like “worthy,” “appropriate,” “fitting,” or “meet” sound weak to our ears. But this is not a weak sentiment at all. It’s glorious and glorifying. God is worthy of our praise and thanksgiving, and our praise and thanksgiving is a worthy celebration of what God has done.
So this beautiful and most ancient liturgical dialogue sets us up wonderfully to celebrate the Eucharist as a celebration. It reminds us that we are ourselves the true offering that is to be transformed, and that this offering is joyful, full of thanksgiving and praise, and worthy.
This sentiment is just as true on a Monday or Tuesday morning as we go to work as it is in our Sunday services. So, as we get on with our daily work, let us remember the true work before us, and offer our selves and souls and bodies joyfully up to God as a living sacrifice.
Lift up your hearts
We lift them up unto the Lord
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God
It is worthy and right
* In contemporary translations this tends to read something like “A mercy of peace, a sacrifice of praise”, which is both weird in English and a poor translation of the original. What I’ve rendered above is a direct translation from the Greek liturgy (”Eirenike he agape mas, doxastike he thysia mas”)
Matthew Root 