Christianity is not a highly refined “spiritual” religion. It has a persistent connection with the ash and the dust of this world. Christian life is not a Manichean struggle where the good spirit battles against the evil flesh. No, for the Christian, all creation is sacred both because of its creation by God and because it is caught up in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.
“For creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom 8:19-21)
The Incarnation has changed forever the spiritual state not just of Christians, nor just of humans, but of all creation. The physical world then, including our bodies, is not a barrier to the grace of God but rather a vehicle for it. This is why the Church has sacraments. They are visible signs, using the materials of the physical world, of God’s invisible grace.
The Church, both East and West, believes that the sacraments were instituted, at least implicitly, by Christ. Yet for nearly 1,000 years, the seven sacraments as we now know them were not closely defined. The Church knew that there were sacraments and that there were many other actions which were in some way similar to them in nature. The precise number and character of the sacraments were left to the mystery of Christ’s action in his Church. Eventually, the seven great sacraments of the Church became defined around the great events and constant realities of normal human life — birth, growth, food, work marriage, sickness and death. Characteristically, this definition of the seven great sacraments happened first in the Western Church and was picked up later by the Eastern Church, who were less concerned with definition and placed greater emphasis on the general sacramental character of Christian life.
However, neither in the East nor the West is the ritual life of the Church limited to these seven great sacraments of the church. Rather, this life extends through a variety of actions to bring the grace of God to every facet of human life (e.g., blessing a house, blessing a fishing fleet, and even blessing pets and other animals) and so make it sacred. Sacraments, in their broadest sense, link the Church to the community and make the stuff of the everyday lives of the people of God sacred.
The word used for sacrament in the Byzantine Church is mystery. Sacrament as a word comes from the Latin word sacramentum and it relates to a legal sign or dedication. It is a word for a legal contract which goes beyond mere legal application to include the personal honor of the individual. An example was the sacramentum militia, which was the oath taken by a Roman legionnaire as they joined the army. They would do
so by parading past the legion’s eagle standard as a sign of their loyalty. The Latin sacramentum means that you dedicate yourself and receive dedication in return. The Church adapted the term and in religious terms it is a sign of the covenant between God and his Church. The Church’s sacraments are then at the core of God’s relationship with His people.
The Byzantine Church has never used this term, which has a quasi-legal resonance. Rather, it uses the term mysterion, or mystery. The term mysterion referred to something that was only revealed to those who had been initiated.
“… in the Christian context, we do not mean by ‘mystery’ merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we can never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God.”
In church usage, there are three senses in which the revelation of these mysteries occurs. The first is the revelation of God in the person of Christ Jesus, which can only be known by the initiation of faith (the mystery of the Incarnation), and the second is the symbolic but real participation in the life of the Word of God made man, made possible through the faithful celebration of his Church. This revelation is only possible to the person of faith. An unbeliever may have well have academic knowledge about the mystery, but the core of the mystery will always escape them. Thus St. John Chrysostom writes of the Eucharist:
“It is called a mystery because what we believe is not the same as what we see, but we see one thing and believe another … When I hear the body of Christ mentioned, I understand what is said in one sense, the unbeliever in another.”