The Journey of Bread

From Scattered Grains to One Body

This essay is based on presentations I gave to both the Men’s and Women’s groups at Christ the Saviour parish in Anderson, SC.

There is no better purpose for wheat than to become bread. There is no better purpose for bread than to become an offering. And there is no higher purpose for that offering than to become, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Body of Christ. The same is true of us. As with wheat, we were created good, but with the possibility and expectation of becoming something more: to be gathered, formed, offered, sanctified, and united to Christ. The journey of bread is therefore more than an interesting way of explaining the Divine Liturgy. The journey of bread is our journey.

This is more than just a metaphor. Orthodox worship is full of symbols, but its symbols are not illustrations of absent realities. They participate in the realities they reveal. The bread does not simply remind us of Christ. In the Eucharist, it becomes His Body. Nor does the gathering of the bread provide a convenient image of the Church. The bread is gathered, offered, sanctified, broken, and shared in the very action by which the Church is gathered and made manifest as the Body of Christ. These are capital-S Symbols: they do not just tell us what God is doing; they are caught up in how He does it.

Scattered Wheat

The journey begins before there is bread. It begins with wheat.

Our Lord uses the grain of wheat as an image of His own death and resurrection: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24). The grain goes into the earth; what looks like burial becomes the beginning of new life. This is one reason kutya or kolivo has such a natural place in Orthodox memorial customs. The grain points toward the mystery proclaimed at every Christian burial: death in Christ is not annihilation but passage toward resurrection. This is not just pointing to our eventual resurrection at the great remaking; but, mysteriously, to our baptism as well.

But there is another movement in the wheat. The grains are not only buried and raised; they are gathered.

One of the earliest surviving Christian Eucharistic prayers, found in the Didache, asks that just as the bread was once scattered upon the mountains and then gathered together and made one, so the Church might be gathered from the ends of the earth into God’s Kingdom (Schaff 1886, p. 193).

That is the beginning of our journey. We are scattered grains.

Christianity does not offer salvation as a collection of isolated spiritual projects. We are gathered. Individual grains become flour; flour becomes dough; dough becomes a loaf. Something new is made by bringing what had been scattered together. The Church is not an aggregation of people pursuing Christ individually in the same building. She is an assembly, a synaxis, gathered into one in Christ.

This gathering becomes visible in prosphora, the bread offered for the Divine Liturgy.

Prosphora is deliberately simple: wheat flour, water, yeast, and, according to some recipes, salt. Yet even this simplicity speaks. Leaven gives life and rise to the dough. Salt recalls both preservation and sacrifice (Leviticus 2:13), as well as Christ’s command that His disciples be the salt of the earth. The dough is formed into loaves and impressed with a seal bearing the sign IC XC NIKA: Jesus Christ conquers. Here again the bread’s journey resonates with our own. The prosphoron is marked as belonging to Christ, just as we are sealed in Chrismation with “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” We bear the name and mark of the One to whom we belong.

Traditionally, the prosphoron is formed from two layers of dough joined together with water. These signify the two natures of Christ, divine and human, united in one Person. The seal is pressed into the upper surface, and the loaf is pierced before baking so that it remains dense and suitable for its Eucharistic purpose. These are intensely practical actions: dough rises, air needs somewhere to escape, and the bread needs sufficient density to hold together when placed into the chalice. Yet the material and theological dimensions are not competitors. Christianity is a religion of the Incarnation: matter matters.

The wheat has now become bread, but its journey has barely begun.

The Lamb and the Cosmos

Before the public beginning of the Divine Liturgy, the priest says the appointed prayers, vests, and goes to the table of oblation. There he performs the Proskomedia, or Prothesis: the service in which the bread and wine are prepared for the Eucharist.

From the prosphoron he cuts the central portion bearing the seal of Christ. This is the Lamb. The actions are accompanied by the language of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53:7–8). The Lamb is placed upon the diskos and pierced with the liturgical spear while the priest recalls the soldier piercing Christ’s side and the blood and water flowing forth. Wine and water are then placed into the chalice.

Already the bread is taking us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. But another story is unfolding simultaneously.

The diskos becomes an icon of the cosmos.

Christ the Lamb occupies the center. A portion is placed on His right in honor of the Theotokos. Then come the ranks of the saints: prophets, apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, ascetics, unmercenary healers, and the rest of the heavenly assembly. Greek and Slavic usages differ in some details, but the theological vision is the same. Christ does not stand alone. Around Him is gathered His glorified Church.

And then something particularly beautiful happens.

We are added.

Particles are removed for the living. Then particles are removed for the departed. The priest commemorates his bishop, clergy, parishioners, family, friends, those who have asked for prayer, and those who have fallen asleep in the hope of resurrection. One by one, names are spoken and particles are placed upon the diskos.

This is not private devotion tucked away before the “real” Liturgy begins. Look at the diskos and you see ecclesiology rendered in bread.

Christ is at the center. His Mother is there. The angels and saints are there. The living are there. The dead are there. Heaven and earth are there. The Church on earth and the Church in glory are not two Churches. The boundary of death has not divided the Body of Christ.

The scattered wheat has been gathered, and so have we.

From Manger to Tomb

The gifts are then covered.

The asterisk—the small metal star placed over the diskos—is set in place with the words recalling the star that came and stood over the place where the Child was. The veils are placed over the gifts. Symbolically, wheat now joins itself to Christ’s Incarnation at His Nativity. The table of oblation becomes Bethlehem; the diskos becomes the manger; the bread’s journey becomes a liturgical entrance into the Incarnation.

But the Church’s symbols are densely layered. They refuse to remain frozen in a single moment.

The next movement involving the journey of bread occurs during the Great Entrance. Before this, the Gospel is brought out among the people during the Little Entrance. This is followed by the reading of the Gospel and the preaching of the word. These rituals symbolize Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom. Later, at the Great Entrance, the bread and wine begin moving again.

Historically, the entrance developed from the practical bringing of the people’s offerings to the altar. Theologically, however, it has become saturated with the mystery of Christ’s saving work and His entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The gifts pass among the people. The mood is reverent and joyful. The imagery almost invites the acclamation: “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord!” In some traditions, people reach toward the gifts as they pass. This can evoke the woman who reached out and touched the hem of Christ’s garment seeking healing.

It is worth being very clear about the symbolism. The priest carrying the gifts is not representing Christ. Remember, the prosphoron representing Christ is on the diskos the priest—or deacon—is carrying. If we need to assign him a role in the Great Entrance, the safer comparison is the donkey: the priest carries Christ. That distinction matters. Liturgical reverence must never become clerical aggrandizement. The holiness belongs to Christ. The priest’s dignity consists precisely in bearing—and offering—what is not his own.

The mood of the Great Entrance then changes; the joy of the Lord’s Entrance becomes the solemnity of His death and burial. The gifts are carried through the church, up onto the amvon, and into the altar—the movement now evoking the ascent to Golgotha. As the priest sets the gifts on the altar and wraps them in the aer, he quietly intones a prayer recalling Joseph of Arimathea taking the Body of Christ down from the Cross, wrapping it in clean linen, anointing it with spices, and laying it in a new tomb. That which had been the cave of Bethlehem has become the cave of the Lord’s tomb.

The same bread has carried us from Nativity through the Passion. But it is still bread. Something more must happen.

Thine Own of Thine Own

Here we arrive at the center of the journey.

Human beings have a priestly vocation within creation. God creates, and what He creates is good. As the royal priesthood, we receive those things made good and cultivate them into better and more perfect forms. Wheat is good, but bread is a better form, with a higher purpose. Grapes are good, but wine is the fruit of the vine cultivated and transformed. We receive the goodness already present in creation and, through labor and skill, draw out possibilities placed within it by the Creator as He commanded us in the beginning.

This is part of what human beings were made to do.

We cultivate wheat, harvest it, grind it, mix it, knead it, seal it, bake it, and make bread. We cultivate grapes, harvest them, press them, ferment their juice, and make wine. Again, we take what God has made good and, cooperating with God and working with the possibilities He has placed within creation, move it toward something better and more perfect.

This is not creation from nothing. Only God creates ex nihilo. Nor is it the correction of a defective creation; God’s creation is already good. Our work is instead the blessed response to that goodness: receiving what God gives, discovering its possibilities, cultivating them faithfully, and bringing them toward fulfillment.

Nor does this only apply to bread and wine. God gives trees; human beings make tables and houses and churches and icons—the very best purpose of wood! God gives sound; human beings make music. God gives language; human beings make poetry and prayer. God gives human beings to one another, and through love, asceticism, repentance, patience, and grace He forms us into persons capable of the oneness He desires for us (John 17).

Our royal priesthood is exercised by receiving the world as gift, cultivating it faithfully, bringing what is good toward better and more perfect forms, and then offering it back to the Giver.

The Eucharist is the great exclamation point on that vocation; the archetype of our cooperation with God.

At the anaphora we remember the whole saving economy: the Cross, the grave, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand, and even the second and glorious coming. Then the deacon or priest elevates the gifts as the priest proclaims: “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all.”

This is a good reminder: everything on the altar is already God’s. The wheat was His. The soil was His. The rain was His. The sun was His. The hands that cultivated the field were His gifts. The intelligence that learned to make bread was His gift. The community that gathered was His. Even our capacity to offer is His.

We give God what belongs to God. And God gives it back transformed.

The Church invokes the Holy Spirit upon us and upon the gifts. The bread becomes the Body of Christ; the wine becomes His Blood. Here the movement of human cooperation with God reaches a fulfillment that we could never accomplish by our own power. We cultivate the wheat God gives. We make bread from it. We tend the vine and make wine. We bring these gifts to the altar and offer them back to the One from whom they came. None of this is done apart from God; it is already a participation in His creative work. And now, in the Eucharist, God receives this human offering and brings it to a perfection that human labor could never give it.

This is why the movement of the bread reveals something essential about theosis. Grace does not replace or annihilate creation; it fulfills it. The wheat does not achieve its Eucharistic destiny by ceasing to be material. Material creation is taken up into a purpose beyond anything it could accomplish by itself. So too theosis does not destroy the human person. Grace does not make us less human. It makes us more fully what God created human beings to become.

And what were we created to become? Saints. We were created to bear the image of God and grow into His likeness; to become holy as He is holy; to live in communion with Him and with one another; to exercise our royal and priestly vocation within His creation; and ultimately to inherit His Kingdom. We were created not just to survive death or to receive forgiveness for the things we have done wrong, but to become, by grace, what God is by nature; to become participants in the divine life—to become the sort of human beings who belong in the Kingdom of God because His life has become our life.

This is theosis: not the replacement of humanity by something else, but humanity brought toward its proper perfection in Christ. A saint is not less human because he has become holy. He is more fully human. Christ Himself reveals what humanity is for, and the Holy Spirit forms us according to that revelation. In Christ we become sons and daughters of God by adoption, members of His Body, citizens of His Kingdom, a royal priesthood and a holy people. We become capable of the communion with God and one another for which humanity was made.

Here again the bread teaches us. Wheat is good as wheat. Bread is good as bread. Neither is despised or discarded. Each is received as gift and, through our cooperation with God, brought toward the fulfillment for which it was given. We cultivate the wheat, bake the bread, and offer it back to God, but at every stage we are working with what He has given and through capacities He sustains. And in the Eucharist, that cooperation reaches a fulfillment that remains entirely gift: the bread becomes the Body of Christ.

A similar pattern holds in the Christian life. Asceticism, discipline, education, moral effort, and participation in a healthy community are not techniques we use to improve ourselves until grace becomes necessary. Rather, they are forms of cooperation with grace through which we offer ourselves to God and become increasingly receptive to His work within us. Sainthood is never something we manufacture or earn. From beginning to end, it is the work of God in which He graciously allows—and requires—our participation. Once again, the Eucharist is the model and archetype of this process.

Broken but Not Divided

After the anaphora the Lamb is elevated with the priest proclaiming: “Holy things are for the holy.”

Then it is broken: the priest divides the Lamb into the portions marked by the seal: IC, XC, NI, KA. As he does so, he confesses one of the great mysteries of the Eucharist: the Lamb of God is broken but not divided, ever eaten yet never consumed. Christ continually gives Himself to us without ever diminishing. The five loaves that fed the five thousand were a preparation for our understanding this greater wonder.

The priest then takes the portion marked IC—Jesus—and makes the sign of the Cross with it over the chalice. As he places it into the Blood of Christ, he says:

“The fullness of the Holy Spirit.”

There is a powerful ecclesiological resonance here. The Eucharist celebrated on a particular altar is never the private possession of a priest or an isolated congregation. It is the one Eucharist of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

An ancient Christian practice makes the point especially vivid. As Christianity grew, it became impossible for all the faithful of a city to gather around their bishop for a single Eucharistic celebration. A portion of the Eucharistic bread consecrated by the bishop could therefore be carried to Eucharistic assemblies celebrated by his presbyters and placed into their chalices. This practice, commonly called the fermentum, made visible the unity of separated Eucharistic assemblies with the bishop and with one another. The many celebrations were not competing or independent Eucharists. They belonged to the one ecclesial communion.

While our ritual use of the IC portion may not be a direct descendant of that practice, the ecclesiological resonance is strong. There are many altars, many priests, many parishes, and many celebrations, but there is only one Eucharist because there is only one Christ and one Church. The bread’s journey is never only local. In this chalice, every parish participates in the catholicity of the whole Church in every time and place.

Hot water is then added, signifying warmth and life. The clergy commune, and the remaining portions of the Lamb are prepared for the Communion of the faithful.

Then the doors open.

This is one of the most powerful movements in the entire journey. What was prepared quietly at the table of oblation, carried solemnly through the church, placed upon the altar, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit now comes forth from the Holy Place.

“With the fear of God, faith, and love, draw near.”

Christ comes to His people as food.

The journey of the bread reaches its purpose only when the bread is eaten. Orthodox Christianity therefore resists treating the Eucharist as something to be adored apart from Communion. Christ commands us to eat and drink. Communion is communion because the gift is given and received.

And when we receive Christ, something happens to our journey.

The bread that began as scattered wheat has been gathered into one loaf, offered, sanctified, broken, and distributed among many. Yet the movement is simultaneously reversed: the many who receive the one Christ are made one in Him.

The journey of bread has become the journey of the ecclesia, the people of God, the Church.

All Together in Him

There is one more action involving the bread that is easily missed by those who are not in the altar. Remember the particles placed upon the diskos during the Proskomedia: the Theotokos, the saints, the living, the departed. They include the people whose names were handed to the priest: the parishioner undergoing surgery, the godchild struggling with faith, the grandmother who died twenty years ago, the bishop who ordained the priest, the founders of the parish, the people whose names we remember every week.

They have remained there throughout the Liturgy, each piece of bread representing someone who has been brought before God in prayer. After Communion, those particles are placed into the chalice as the priest prays, “Grant, O Lord, remission of sins to all those who are commemorated here, by Thy Blood, and the prayers of Thy saints.”

The movement begun at the Proskomedia now reaches its culmination. What had been arranged visibly around Christ is gathered together in the chalice with His Body and Blood. The image has moved from the Church gathered around Christ to the Church gathered in Christ.

At the beginning, we were scattered. Then we were gathered around Christ. Now we are gathered in Christ. The ancient Eucharistic instinct expressed in the Didache has flowered into an elaborate liturgical enactment: as scattered grain becomes one bread, the scattered Church is gathered into the Kingdom.

This also helps explain why Orthodox Christianity refuses to make death the ultimate boundary of communion. The departed remain in Christ. We pray for them because they belong to the same journey. Their particles rest beside ours on the diskos and finally enter the same chalice. All together in Him, through His Blood.

Be Exalted Above the Heavens

And still the bread moves.

The priest takes the chalice—containing the Body and Blood of Christ and now bearing this image of the whole ecclesia gathered in Him—and raises it before the people, saying: “Be exalted above the heavens, O Lord, and let Thy glory be over all the earth; always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.”

This is an image of the Ascension.

But seen in the context of everything that has happened to the bread, it reveals something more than Christ simply going up into heaven: Christ ascends and makes a way for us. He does not save humanity only by coming down to where we are. He takes our humanity into Himself and carries it where we could not go on our own.

This is the trajectory of the Incarnation itself. The Son of God descends and takes what is ours so that we may receive what is His. He assumes human nature, lives a human life, suffers a human death, rises bodily from the grave, and then carries that humanity into the heavens. The Ascension is therefore not Christ leaving humanity behind. It is humanity, in Christ, entering into the life of God.

And the journey of the bread has made that mystery visible.

At Proskomedia we were represented by particles gathered around the Lamb. Christ was at the center, and we were gathered around Him. After Communion those particles were swept into the chalice. Now we are no longer just around Him. We are in Him. And when the chalice is lifted before the people, the image is now of Christ ascending with His ecclesia gathered into Him.

The priest then carries the Holy Gifts from the altar, places them on the table of oblation, and censes them with reverence. The liturgical journey that has taken us through Bethlehem, Christ’s earthly ministry, Jerusalem, Golgotha, the tomb, and the Resurrection has reached the Ascension.

Christ ascends. And He makes a way for us all.

That last point is crucial. We are part of this process. The entire journey has been drawing us into Him. The scattered grains became one loaf. The scattered people became the ecclesia. The ecclesia was gathered around the Lamb. The ecclesia, represented by those particles, was gathered into the chalice. And now, united with Christ, the Church is caught up in His ascent.

Yet His Body also remains.

Again, that sentence has two meanings, and both matter.

The Eucharistic Gifts remain and must be consumed with reverence. Nothing is discarded. The chalice is carefully cleansed, and the journey of this particular bread reaches its end.

But the Body of Christ also remains in the communicants. We have received Him. We have participated sacramentally in the journey we have just watched unfold. And so the Ascension does not end the story any more than Christ’s Ascension ended the life of the apostolic Church. We came in scattered. We were gathered around Christ. We were united in Christ. And now we are sent back into the world bearing Christ.

There is a beautiful circularity here. The wheat begins scattered throughout the world. It is gathered and made into bread. The bread is offered to God. God gives it back as communion. The Church receives Christ and is united in Him. Christ ascends, opening the way into the Kingdom, and His people go forth again into the world bearing within themselves the One who has already carried their humanity into heaven.

The Journey Is Ours

The journey of bread is therefore the journey of salvation rendered in matter.

The grain falls into the earth and dies. It rises. Scattered grains are gathered. They are ground, mixed, leavened, formed, sealed, and baked. What God made good is cultivated into something better. The bread is offered. From it the Lamb is taken. Around the Lamb the whole Church is assembled: the Theotokos and saints, the living and departed. The bread enters the mystery of Bethlehem and the tomb, procession and sacrifice, offering and thanksgiving. The Holy Spirit descends. What has been received from God, cultivated through our cooperation with Him, and offered back to Him is brought by God to a perfection we could never produce for ourselves. The bread becomes the Body of Christ. The Lamb is broken without being divided and eaten without being consumed. Christ gives Himself to His people. Those who were gathered around Him are gathered in Him. Christ ascends, and the ecclesia united in Him is caught up into that ascent.

That is the journey of bread. And that is our journey.

We were created good, but we have not yet reached our end. God gathers us from our isolation, joins us to one another, seals us with Christ, works upon us through prayer and repentance, and forms us into something we could never become alone. We offer ourselves back to the One from whom we received everything. And He does not return us unchanged.

He sanctifies. He transforms. He unites. And He raises us up.

The Christian life is our participation in creation’s movement from the goodness God gave it toward its fulfillment and perfection in Christ. And for human beings that perfection has a name: holiness. We were made to become saints—to become by grace what God has called us to be, members of Christ’s Body and citizens of His Kingdom, living in communion with God and with one another.

Wheat becomes bread. Bread becomes offering. The offering becomes Eucharist. The scattered become Church. The Church is gathered into Christ. And Christ, ascending into heaven, makes a way for us all.

Then, having received Him, we return to the world bearing within ourselves the One in whom heaven and earth have already been united.

The journey of bread is our journey: from scattered grains to one Body, from what was made good toward its perfection, from the earth to the Kingdom, in Christ.

Selected Annotated Bibliography

Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Translated by J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. Especially useful for the anaphora, offering, consecration, communion, and the way the Liturgy draws the faithful into Christ’s saving work.

Germanus I of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy. Translated by Paul Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. Especially useful for the symbolic interpretation of the church, altar, liturgical vessels, entrances, and the relationship between the rites of the Liturgy and the saving work of Christ.

Gogol, Nikolai. Meditations on the Divine Liturgy. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2014. Valuable for the devotional and narrative reading of the Liturgy as a movement through the life and saving work of Christ, especially where the essay follows the bread from preparation through Communion.

Linsenbigler, Harry. Orthodox Ecclesiology. United States: Amazon Digital Services LLC–KDP Print US, 2020. A useful resource on the ecclesia and the gathering of God’s people into one.

Schaff, Philip. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. 2nd ed. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886. Chapter 9 provides the image of bread once scattered and then gathered into one as an image of the Church being gathered into the Kingdom.

Taft, Robert F. The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and Other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. 2nd rev. ed. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1978. One of the principal historical sources on the development of the Great Entrance and especially useful for distinguishing later mystical interpretations from the historical development of the rite.

Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. Provides the broader communion ecclesiology: the Church as Eucharistic assembly, the movement from the many into one, and personhood as communion.

Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. Translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001. Especially useful for its teaching on the bishop, the local Eucharistic assembly, catholicity, and the relationship between the one Eucharist and the many local celebrations.