Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD TO COME

From “Sacraments and Orthodoxy” by Fr Alexander Schmemann3

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The liturgy of Christian death does not begin when one comes to the

inescapable end and their corpse lies in church for the last rites while we stand

around, the sad yet resigned witnesses of the dignified removal of one from the

world of the living. It begins every day as the Church ascending into heaven,

“puts aside all earthly care”; it begins every feast day; it begins especially in the

joy of Easter. The whole life of the Church is in a way the sacrament of our death,

because all of it is the proclamation of the Lord’s death, the confession of his

resurrection.

The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ, communion in life

eternal, “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” And it is the expectation of the “day

without evening” of the Kingdom; not of any “other world,” but of the fulfillment

of all things and all life in Christ. In him death itself has become an act of life,

for he has filled it with himself, with his love and light. In him “all things are

yours; whether the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come;

all are yours; and you are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.”

And if I make this new life mine, mine this hunger and thirst of the

Kingdom, mine this expectation of Christ, mine the certitude that Christ is Life,

my very death will be an act of communion with Life. For neither life nor death

can separate us from the love of Christ. I do not know when and how the

fulfillment will come. I do not know when all things will be consummated in

Christ. I know nothing about the “when’s” and “how’s.” But I know that in Christ

this great Passage, the Pascha of the world has begun, that the light of the “world

to come” comes to us in the joy and peace of the Holy Spirit, for Christ is risen

and Life reigns.