People Look East

You may know this lovely Advent carol by Eleanor Farjeon:

People, look east. The time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the guest, is on the way.

“People look east”: but why east? Jews face Jerusalem when they pray, and Muslims face Mecca – but the ancient custom for Christians was to face east in prayer. Why not north, south, or west? Because east is the quarter from which the sun rises. In Latin the word for “east” is oriens, “rising”, and so to face east in alignment with the rising sun is the proper meaning of the word orientation. When we turn east to pray, it is an outward bodily sign that we are orienting ourselves by the rising sun, to the risen Son. That word-play of ‘son’ and ‘sun’ only works in English, but Scripture connects the coming of the Messiah with the sun’s rising. The Old Testament ends with Malachi’s prophecy that “the sun of righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings” (4:2); in the New Testament Zacharias gives thanks for the coming of the promised Messiah as “the dayspring” or dawning “from on high” “to give light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” (St. Luke 1:78, 79). On Easter, the women come to the tomb of Jesus at the rising of the sun – only to discover the Son of Man already risen from the dead.

To turn to the east in prayer, is thus deliverance from the state of disorientation, deliverance from confusion and ignorance, darkness and the shadow of death. It is to orient oneself to the dawning of God’s new and eternal day of salvation, in the resurrection of the crucified Son. And in turning east to pray, worshippers are enacting bodily their conversion (‘turning’) to the Lord, as the giver of righteousness and life in faith eternal. That’s why the ancient practice was for the priest at the altar to pray standing and facing east (ad orientem): and though this was eventually ritualized to facing the altar, regardless of actual geographical coordinates (as is the case at St. John’s, where the altar for practical reasons has to be at the west end of the building), symbolically, it means that same thing. “People, look east and sing today: Love, the Lord, is on the way”.

In the 1970’s in Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches the custom took hold of the priest’s facing the people across the altar (versus populum), bartender-style. Liturgists said this was a return to genuine ancient practice, when the eucharist was celebrated by a Christian community gathered around ordinary tables in private houses. This historical claim is associated with a desacralized account of Christian worship, opposed to the idea of sacrificial worship associated with ministerial priesthood and liturgical altar, and strongly aligned with the liberal Protestant emphasis on human religious experience rather than divine revelation. This conventional view has always had its critics; recently it has come under comprehensive critique by Stefan Heid in Altar and Church (2023). He argues persuasively for the sacrificial and sacred character of Christian worship, especially the Eucharist, from the earliest days of the church; and the antiquity and universality of orientation in prayer.

The sacrificial character of Christian worship is indeed closely bound up with orientation in prayer. Sacrifice, in Augustine’s lapidary definition, is offered in every act that is done for the sake of fellowship and communion with God – it is the action that establishes and expresses the right relation of man to God. To face east, to turn to the Lord, is the posture of one who is presenting an offering to God. Because in his death Christ offered a full and finished sacrifice for sin, there is no other offering for sin to be made. But that’s not the only kind of sacrifice that the Bible speaks of. The New Testament speaks of the offering of alms and prayers, of soul and body, in the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving as the proper duty of Christians. “Let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. But to do good and to communicate [i.e. share what you have] forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased”. (Hebrews 13:15, 16). “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). When we commemorate Christ’s sacrifice for us in the Lord’s Supper, we are caught up by his Spirit in the same Godward motion, in being turned to the Lord, in praise and thanksgiving “not only with our lips but in our lives”. For the priest to stand praying versus populum gets the symbolism all wrong – as if life and salvation were to be found in turning away from Christ and to ourselves instead. There is a better way: “People, look east!”.