For the Life of the World - Classics Series, Vol. 1

by Fr. Alexander Schmemann

if Christian worship, being the fulfillment and the end of all worship, is at the same time a beginning, a radically new worship, it is not because of any ontological impossibility for the world to be the sacrament of Christ. No, it is because the world rejected Christ by killing him, and by doing so rejected its own destiny and fulfillment. Therefore, if the basis of all Christian worship is the incarnation, its true content is always the cross and the resurrection. Through these events the new life in Christ, the incarnate Lord, is “hid with Christ in God,”8 and made into a life “not of this world.”9 The world which rejected Christ must itself die in man if it is to become again a means of communion, a means of participation in the life which shone forth from the grave, in the Kingdom which is not “of this world,” and which in terms of this world is still to come.