It is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a ‘passover,’ a ‘Pascha’—into the Kingdom of God. Alexander Schmemann, quoted in Matthew Levering, Jesus and the Demise of Death: Resurrection, Afterlife, and the Fate of the Christian
Brilliant observation from Fr. Schmemann: All of civilization seems to be permeated with a passionate obsession to stifle this fear of death and the sense of the meaninglessness of life that oozes out of it like a slow-dripping poison. What is this intense conflict with religion, if nothing other than a mindless attempt to root out of human consciousness the memory and concern with death and consequently the question: why do I live in this brief and fragile life? -O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?, pp23f That, I think, is an important question for the church to answer in her Good Friday and Easter preaching.
Tagged: Alexander Schmemann, death
More Schmemann: Only Christ has risen from the dead, but in doing so He destroyed our death, He destroyed its dominion, its hopelessness, its finality. No, it is not nirvana or a shadowy life beyond the grave that Christ promises us, but an eruption of life, a new heaven and a new earth, joy in the universal resurrection. “The dead shall arise and those in the tombs shall rejoice.” Christ is risen and life reigns, life lives. This, then, is the meaning and endless joy of the Symbol of faith’s [i.e., the Creed's] central and essential affirmation: “And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures…”
More profundity from Schmemann: Christianity is above all the belief that Christ did not remain in the grave, that the light of life erupted out of death, and that in Christ’s resurrection the absolute, all-encompassing and uncompromising law of mortality and death has been torn apart and overthrown from within. As an Orthodox theologian, he not surprisingly lacks the necessary emphasis on the atonement. I would say Christianity is above all both that Christ died for our sins and that he defeated death. But Schmemann is always worth reading.
Some of you have journeyed with the church every step of the way this Holy Week. Rejoice! This is the day for which you have longed. Some of you have not been here in a long time. You too, rejoice in this day! On this day everything is made new. But whatever joys or sorrows, whatever faithfulness or sins this Lent brought us, my fear is that you and I will go away from here today happy, but unchanged. The resurrection of Jesus turned the lives of the first Christians upside-down. That event shook them to their core; it not only changed what they thought, changing their belief, their doctrine – it changed everything about their lives. Many who heard the eyewitness testimony…
It wasn’t until my late twenties, as a newly-minted pastor, that I had my first real encounters with common beliefs about death and afterlife among Christians. My vicarage was at a fairly large congregation, but no one died that year, and I had few family experiences of death at that point. The most significant death in my family to that point had been my grandfather’s, who died a faithful Lutheran in a family of committed Lutherans. What I discovered as a pastor in all the circumstances surrounding death, from the hospital to the “funeral home” to the church (maybe) for the funeral service to the graveside, was people deriving their comfort from a contemporary form of Gnosticism: the body is merely a shell, and…
Lent is at our door. Are we ready? Ready for the change that God demands of us – change that should have been our program all along? Since Transfiguration Sunday on February 1, I have been consciously reminding my people, and myself, at every opportunity, that the Gesima-tide is our time to prepare for and map out the journey that we are going to undergo in following Christ in the way of the cross. With Quinquagesima yesterday, there was the stark reminder that the journey is upon us: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem,” and the things that are written about the Son of Man are about to come to pass. I have done what I observed at Redeemer, Fort Wayne, back in…
Tagged: Alexander Schmemann, Church Year, Fasting, Lent, Pre-Lent, Quinquagesima, Transfiguration