Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

A reading about the Church and our anticipated victory over death, from Sacraments and Orthodoxy by Fr. Alexander Schmemann. ¹

The liturgy of Christian death does not begin when a man has come to the inescapable end and his corpse lies in church for the last rites while we stand around, the sad yet resigned witnesses of the dignified removal of a man 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” (1 Cor 3.21-23). 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 “whens” and “hows.” 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.

¹ New York, 1965, pp. 130-133.