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St. John Chrysostom

The ordinary rite — the liturgy the East prays most days of its life

“Offering You Your own of Your own — in all things and for all things.”
The Anaphora — the offering
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The Liturgy

The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the standard Eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine rite — the service celebrated whenever a full Liturgy is appointed and no other is prescribed, which is to say: most Sundays, most feasts, most days of the church’s year. If the Divine Liturgy is the center of Eastern Christian life, this is the form in which that center is almost always met — the rite a convert learns by heart without trying, simply by standing in it week after week.

Its shape is threefold. First the Prothesis (or Proskomedia): the quiet preparation before the Liturgy proper, in which the priest cuts the Lamb from the loaf and arranges particles for the Theotokos, the saints, the living, and the dead — the whole church gathered on one paten before a word is sung. Then the Liturgy of the Catechumens: the Great Litany (“In peace let us pray to the Lord”), the antiphons, the Little Entrance with the Gospel book, the Trisagion (“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal”), the Epistle, the Gospel, and the homily. Then the Liturgy of the Faithful: the Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance with the gifts, the litanies, the kiss of peace and the Creed, and the anaphora itself — the thanksgiving recounting creation and redemption, the words of institution, “Take, eat; this is My Body… Drink of it, all of you; this is My Blood of the New Covenant,” the offering — “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee” — and the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. There follow the hymn to the Theotokos (“It is truly right,” the Axion estin), the Lord’s Prayer, communion in both kinds from the spoon, and the dismissal: “Let us go forth in peace.”

Its character among the East’s liturgies is brevity and directness — its anaphora is the shortest of the family, which is much of why it became the everyday rite. Scholars trace it to the Antiochene tradition (it is close kin to the Syriac Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles), and it is plausible that John himself, formed as priest and preacher in Antioch, brought that tradition with him to Constantinople and adapted it. The full attribution of the liturgy to his pen is medieval, and grew with his fame — but it is not groundless: the oldest core prayers stand credibly in the line of the church he came from.

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The History

The everyday liturgy of the East got its place not by decree but by quiet displacement — the shorter prayer slowly outlasting the longer.

4th c.
The Antiochene anaphora tradition from which the liturgy descends takes literary form — the Eucharistic prayers of Syria, kin to the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, praying salvation history in ordered thanksgiving.
398–404
John of Antioch — the city’s greatest preacher, later surnamed Chrysostomos, “golden-mouthed” — serves as archbishop of Constantinople until his deposition; he dies on the road in exile in 407. Whatever of the liturgy is his, it came to the capital with an Antiochene’s voice.
c. 790s
The Barberini Euchologion, the oldest surviving Byzantine service book, contains the liturgy — with only some of its prayers yet titled with John’s name. Tellingly, the manuscript places St. Basil’s liturgy first: Basil’s was then still the principal Sunday rite of Constantinople.
c. 1000–1200
The quiet reversal: Chrysostom’s shorter liturgy displaces Basil’s as the everyday rite of the Byzantine church, and Basil’s retreats to the ten appointed days a year it holds still.
14th c.
The diataxis of Patriarch Philotheos of Constantinople fixes the celebrant’s order of service in detail — essentially the order a visitor sees today.
Since
The most-celebrated Christian liturgy on earth: served every Sunday in dozens of languages, by the Eastern Orthodox churches and by Byzantine-rite Catholics alike — the common daily bread of the Christian East.