Reading: Lenten Weekday

The Origin of Death 5
From the writing of Fr. Alexander Schmemann

…Death as the liberation from the oppressiveness of the body; death as the
liberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing, busy, evil world;
death as the beginning of eternity. Here, in fact, is the sum total of religious and
philosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity… But Christ
weeps at the grave of his friend, and in so doing he reveals his own struggle with
death, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly,
death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as
unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: “The
last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

In order to feel the whole depth and revolutionary force of this change we
must begin at the beginning, at the source of this new and unprecedented
approach to death. We find it as a brief statement in Holy Scripture: “God did
not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living”. This means
that in the world, in creation, there is a power that does not have its origin in
God, which he did not desire, which he did not create, which opposes him and is
independent of him…Death is the denial of God, and if death is natural, if it is the
ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable
law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about
creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.

Therefore, the most important and more profound question of the
Christian faith must be, How and from where did death arise, and why has it
become stronger than life? Why has it become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of cosmic cemetery, a place where a collection of people
condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or in their efforts to forget about
death find themselves rushing around one great big burial plot?

To this question Christianity answers with equal force, brevity, and
conviction. Here is the text: “and through sin death has come into the world”. In
other words, for Christianity, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral
order, as a spiritual catastrophe. In some final and indescribable sense man
desired death, or perhaps one might say, he did not desire that life that was given
to him by God freely, with love and joy… Man did not desire this life with God
and for God. He desired life for himself, and in himself he found the purpose, the
goal, and the content of life. And in this free choice of himself, and not of God, in
his preference for himself over God, without realizing it, man became inextricably
a slave of the world, a slave of his own dependence on the world…
“God did not create death.” It is man who introduced death into the world,
freely desiring life only for himself and in himself, cutting himself off from the
source, the goal, and content of life – from God. And this is why death -as
disintegration, as separation, as temporality, transitoriness – has become the
supreme law of life, revealing the illusory nature of everything on earth.

In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where
there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited this world, gave it up decidedly
to death. Only if we fully return to the Christian understanding about death, as
the root of man’s own perversion of the understanding of the very content of life,
can we hear once more, as new, the Christian proclamation about the destruction
of death in the resurrection.

5

Schmemann, Alexander. O Death Where is Thy Sting?. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. 29-36.