Chrystus – Kościół – liturgia

Abstract

The paper constitutes a contribution to the deepening of the theological reflection upon outward, visible element of the Church liturgy. The essence of Christian liturgy is the salutary and ritualistic meeting of God with man through Christ in the Holy Ghost, that means, in the Church community. This process is always accomplished through signs and symbols, so to say, it “materializes” in persons, words, gestures, ceremonial, and material elements. This fact has not only its anthropological justification, but also christological and ecclesiastical. The author shows that mystery and sacramental character is the feature of the wholl history of salvation, in which the invisible, God’s salvation is always realized in people, through sensual events and signs. The central sign of salvation: Jesus Christ, as the picture of God and proto-sacrament of salvation, has been presented against this background. Christ as the absolute symbol of God in the world, through His words and deeds revealed not only the Father, but also salutary intentions of the Father towards the world. The Church continues Christ’s sacramentality up to Parusia, as a common sacrament of salvation; it’s sacramental dimension is strictly connected with Christ’s incarnation, with this paschal mistery, and eschatic fulness of salvation. The Church is the sacrament of Christ incarnated and worshipped, it is the sign and the tool, through which Christ gives Himself to man. The Church reveals and realizesits sacramentality through prophesying the Gospel (martyria), serving the world in love (diacony), and particulary through ritualistic ceremoniales: Eucharist, and through other sacraments and sacramentalia (liturgy). Liturgy, as a set of different signs, can be called ’’sacramentum”, that means the sign which reveals the nature of the Church, and at the same time, realizes, materializes, and builds the Church. Liturgy, in its character of a sign, is therefore the consequenthy realized continuation of the God’s plan of salvation, in which the son of God, incarnated as the fulness of revelation, is the sign of God the Father, the Church is the sign of incarnated and worshipped Christ, and liturgy, the sign of the Church and Christ. The character of God’s economics of salvation consequently demands godly and human, material and spiritual, visible and invisible, symbolic and mystery structure of liturgy.