The Prayer Of Thanksgiving

Scholars played an important role in rediscovering how central the eucharistic prayer was in the very earliest history of the church. Although the earliest texts of the eucharistic prayers often survive only in fragments embedded in later works, diligent comparison has permitted the piecing together of the model prayer of thanksgiving given by Hippolytus of Rome (c. 215).

When Christians assemble to celebrate the Lord's Supper, they take the bread and cup in memory of Jesus. Just as Jesus at the Last Supper said a prayer of thanksgiving or blessing, Christians, too, have a prayer of thanksgiving, whose diverse elements are listed as follows in the Ecumenical Consensus Statement Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper 111. [Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982]; para. 27 of the Eucharist): (1) thanksgiving to the Father for the marvels of creation, redemption, and sanctification; (2) the words of Christ's institution of the sacrament according to the New Testament tradition; (3) the memorial of the great acts of redemption, passion, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, which brought the church into being; (4) the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the community and the elements of bread and wine; (5) the consecration of the faithful to God, a reference to the communion of the saints; (6) the prayer for the return of the Lord and the definitive manifestation of the kingdom; and (7) the amen of the whole community. A concrete realization of these elements of the prayer of thanksgiving is found in the Lima Liturgy, the prayer of thanksgiving, used for the first time at the 1982 plenary session of the Faith and Order Commission in Lima, Peru, and subsequently at the Sixth General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983. The recovery of the prayer of thanksgiving has been one of the principal outcomes of the contemporary liturgical movement in the Western churches throughout the world. As a result of the sixteenth-century Reformers' great dissatisfaction with the Roman canon, many liturgical orders whose origins lie in the Reformation separated the narrative of the institution of the Eucharist from its place in the prayer of thanksgiving in favor of reciting one of its four scriptural accounts before the distribution and reception of Holy Communion. This had the effect also of distributing elsewhere in the service as separate prayers what could have formed part of a unified prayer of thanksgiving and, in some cases, adding didactic exhortations. Modern liturgical historians played a great role in the recovery of a prayer of thanksgiving in the West. Scholars studied the implications of the brief description of the presider's prayers and thanksgiving in Justin Martyr's First Apology, (see chapters 65–67; [c. 150]), commented on the model episcopal prayer of thanksgiving proposed in the Apostolic Tradition (c. 215) of Hippolytus of Rome, drew attention to the variety of prayers of thanksgiving in the Eastern rites, and began to present theories on the origins and development of the prayer of thanksgiving. In 1968 the Roman Catholic church, whose Eucharist had a single prayer of thanksgiving (Roman Canon) for nearly fifteen hundred years, introduced three new optional eucharistic prayers. This introduction was a major step in contemporary liturgical reform. The Roman Canon, which had been a major obstacle to ecumenical dialogue because of its heavy use of the language of offering, was now only one of several eucharistic prayers approved for the Roman rite. This accomplishment of the Commission, which was appointed to implement the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Liturgy, influenced favorably the work of several liturgical committees engaged in recovering a prayer of thanksgiving for their own churches.