Vigils Reading – Office of the Dead

Trampling Down Death by Death4 A reflection by Alexander Schmemann

To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that he is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men”. All Christian doctrines – those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement – are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent”. But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ himself as the Life and the light of life. For “the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us”. In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile. “For our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophecy is imperfect… as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.” Only “love never ends”. And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the “content” of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess him as the Life of my life.

Only this possession of Christ as Life, the “joy and peace” of communion with him, the certitude of his presence, makes meaningful the proclamation of Christ’s death and the confession of his resurrection. In this world Christ’s resurrection can never be made an “objective fact.” The risen Lord appeared to Mary and “she saw him standing and knew not it was Jesus.” He stood on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias “but the disciples knew not it was Jesus.” And on the way to Emmaus the eyes of the disciples “were kept from recognizing him.” The preaching of the resurrection remains foolishness to this world, and no wonder even Christians themselves somehow “explain it away” by virtually reducing it to the old pre- Christian doctrines of immortality and survival…

Whether it is the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body – I know nothing of them and all discussion here is mere “speculation.” Death remains the same mysterious passage into a mysterious future. The great joy that the disciples felt when they saw the risen Lord, that “burning of heart” that they experienced on the way to Emmaus were not because the mysteries of an “other world” were revealed to them, but because they saw the Lord. And he sent them to preach and to proclaim not the resurrection of the dead – not a doctrine of death – but repentance and remission of sins, the new life, the kingdom. They announced what they knew, that in Christ the new life has already begun, that he is Life Eternal, the Fulfillment, the Resurrection and the Joy of the world.

The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ; it is 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 the present or the future, 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 for the kingdom, mine this expectation of Christ, mine the certitude that Christ is Life, then my very death will be an act of communion with Life