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SUMMARY:Reading: Lenten Weekday
DESCRIPTION:The Origin of Death 5\nFrom the writing of Fr. Alexander Schmemann \n…Death as the liberation from the oppressiveness of the body; death as the\nliberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing\, busy\, evil world;\ndeath as the beginning of eternity. Here\, in fact\, is the sum total of religious and\nphilosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity… But Christ\nweeps at the grave of his friend\, and in so doing he reveals his own struggle with\ndeath\, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly\,\ndeath ceases to be a normal and natural fact\, it appears as something foreign\, as\nunnatural\, as fearsome and perverted\, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: “The\nlast enemy to be destroyed is death.” \nIn order to feel the whole depth and revolutionary force of this change we\nmust begin at the beginning\, at the source of this new and unprecedented\napproach to death. We find it as a brief statement in Holy Scripture: “God did\nnot make death\, and he does not delight in the death of the living”. This means\nthat in the world\, in creation\, there is a power that does not have its origin in\nGod\, which he did not desire\, which he did not create\, which opposes him and is\nindependent of him…Death is the denial of God\, and if death is natural\, if it is the\nultimate truth about life and about the world\, if it is the highest and immutable\nlaw about all of creation\, then there is no God\, then this whole story about\ncreation\, about joy\, and about the light of life is a total lie. \nTherefore\, the most important and more profound question of the\nChristian faith must be\, How and from where did death arise\, and why has it\nbecome 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\ncondemned to death live either in fear or terror\, or in their efforts to forget about\ndeath find themselves rushing around one great big burial plot? \nTo this question Christianity answers with equal force\, brevity\, and\nconviction. Here is the text: “and through sin death has come into the world”. In\nother words\, for Christianity\, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral\norder\, as a spiritual catastrophe. In some final and indescribable sense man\ndesired death\, or perhaps one might say\, he did not desire that life that was given\nto him by God freely\, with love and joy… Man did not desire this life with God\nand for God. He desired life for himself\, and in himself he found the purpose\, the\ngoal\, and the content of life. And in this free choice of himself\, and not of God\, in\nhis preference for himself over God\, without realizing it\, man became inextricably\na slave of the world\, a slave of his own dependence on the world…\n“God did not create death.” It is man who introduced death into the world\,\nfreely desiring life only for himself and in himself\, cutting himself off from the\nsource\, the goal\, and content of life – from God. And this is why death -as\ndisintegration\, as separation\, as temporality\, transitoriness – has become the\nsupreme law of life\, revealing the illusory nature of everything on earth. \nIn order to console himself\, man created a dream of another world where\nthere is no death\, and for that dream he forfeited this world\, gave it up decidedly\nto death. Only if we fully return to the Christian understanding about death\, as\nthe root of man’s own perversion of the understanding of the very content of life\,\ncan we hear once more\, as new\, the Christian proclamation about the destruction\nof death in the resurrection. \n5 \nSchmemann\, Alexander. O Death Where is Thy Sting?. Crestwood\, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press\, 2003. 29-36.
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/reading-lenten-weekday-4/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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