The Great Entrance

At the Great Entrance, the holy gifts are transferred from the table of oblation to the altar. This recalls Jesus Christ going voluntarily to suffer, as a victim to the slaughter, while more than twelve legions of angels stood ready to guard him as their King (Mat 26:53). The Church sings at the Liturgy of Holy Saturday: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and stand with fear and trembling, pondering nothing earthly-minded: for the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to be slain, to give himself as food to the faithful. Before him go the ranks of angels: all the principalities and powers, the many-eyed cherubim and the six-winged seraphim, covering their faces, singing the hymn: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” (Hymn of the Liturgy of St James, sung at the Liturgy of the Great and Holy Sabbath in place of the Cherubic Hymn).

If the Little Entrance is the Gospel’s arrival, Christ coming forth to preach, the Great Entrance is the arc’s darker and more glorious span: Christ going to his voluntary Passion and burial. The Lamb who now travels in procession has already been “slain” in figure at the Proskomedia. What is carried through the church at the Great Entrance, therefore, is Christ imaged in his sacrifice: the Lamb upon the diskos as upon a bier, veiled in the aer as in a winding-sheet, attended by candles and incense as by the myrrh-bearers’ lamps and Nicodemus’ hundred pounds of spices (Joh 19:39–40). The Church has just sung the Cherubic Hymn, for this cortege is royal precisely in the manner of Great and Holy Friday: the King goes to his burial, and heaven marches with him. This is how St Germanus of Constantinople reads the rite: the transfer of the gifts is the image of Christ carried from Golgotha to the grave by Joseph and Nicodemus (St Germanus, On the Divine Liturgy; cf. Nicholas Cabasilas, Commentary on the Divine Liturgy).

The people take the only part in this procession that Scripture assigns to a bystander at the Passion. As the gifts pass, the priest commemorates the assembly: “May the Lord God remember all of you in his Kingdom, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages”, and the words are the good thief’s, given back to us: for it was to the dying Christ, at the very hour these gifts now signify, that a condemned man cried, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” and heard, “today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luk 23:42–43; see Q484). At every Great Entrance, the whole Church stands in reverence and awe; at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, when the Gifts carried in procession are already consecrated, the faithful make a full prostration.

Then the gifts are borne through the holy doors and laid upon the altar. The Lamb is deposited upon the antimension, the consecrated cloth which bears the icon of the Lord’s burial and contains the relics of the martyrs (cf. Rev 6:9, the souls beneath the altar; see Q167, Q265): the deposition in the tomb, enacted upon an image of the deposition. The priest says over the gifts the troparia of Great Friday and Great Saturday:

The noble Joseph, taking down Your most pure Body from the Tree, wrapped it in clean linen with spices and laid it in a new tomb. In the tomb with the body, in Hades with the soul as God, in Paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, You were, O Christ, filling all things, Yourself uncircumscribed. How life-giving, how much more beautiful than Paradise, and truly more resplendent than any royal palace, was Your tomb shown to be, O Christ, the fountain of our resurrection. (Prayer after the Great Entrance)

It is for this reason that, in many churches, the royal doors are closed after the Great Entrance, and the curtain is drawn: the tomb is sealed. “And Joseph rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb… so they went and made the Sepulchre secure, sealing the stone” (Mat 27:60, 66). The closed doors and drawn veil are not an exclusion of the faithful but a proclamation to them: what lies within is now the sealed tomb of the Lord, and the Church waits before it as the myrrh-bearers waited, knowing what the guards did not.

Thus, every Orthodox altar becomes, mystically, the Holy Sepulchre itself: what Jerusalem possesses in one place and in stone, every altar possesses in mystery, which is why the Church needs no pilgrimage to stand at the Sepulchre: she stands there at every Liturgy.

The Great Entrance teaches the faithful to stand at every Liturgy where the Church has always stood: between Great Friday and Pascha, before a sealed tomb that is brighter than any palace, certain of the morning (cf. Study on the Cycles of Worship, on the royal doors as the doors of the bridal chamber, for the tomb and the bridal chamber, in the Church’s hymns, are one mystery: “I behold Thy bridal chamber adorned, O my Savior”).