Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 4

So new and so holy was this company that joining it is already defined in the Gospels as a new birth, accomplished through a symbolic act. This is baptism, the liturgical immersion in water of the new Christian, which commemorates and symbolizes Christ’s death and resurrection.
On the day of Pentecost those who believed in St. Peter’s preaching asked him what they must do. “Repent,” Peter said to them, “and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). The early Church lived by the experience of baptism, men were brought to it by the call of the Gospel preachings; the community’s liturgical life was bound up with baptism, and the symbols and allegories of the earliest Christian paintings on the walls of the catacombs testify again and again to the tremendous power of regeneration the first Christians experienced in the baptismal water.1

Baptism ushers men into the new life which is still “hid with Christ in God,” and into the kingdom of God, which in this world is as yet only the kingdom of the age to come. In early Christian experience the Church was the anticipation of the future by faith; she was the mysterious growth of the seed that had been cast upon the earth and was now hidden in it. “Maranatha . . . the Lord cometh” — with this triumphant liturgical cry Christians express both their expectation that Christ will come again in glory and their faith that He is implicitly present among them now.

But if this new life begins with baptism, the central act of the community, in which it professed its essential nature as Christ’s kingdom, was the breaking of bread. On the night before His Passion, Christ Himself commanded His followers to continue this act. It was a meal in common, modeled after the supper Christ had eaten with His disciples. At this meal the Eucharist, or thanksgiving to God for Christ’s sacrifice, was offered up, after which all who were present divided the bread and wine among them and through it became partakers of the Body and Blood of Christ, that is, of the life of Christ Himself. All the records of the time which have come down to us testify that then, as always, Christians believed that in the breaking of bread they were united with Christ Himself.

The breaking of bread took place from house to house, at gatherings of the community separate from its attendance at the Temple. And the special day of the Eucharist was the first day of the week, the day following the Sabbath, on which, according to the apostles’ testimony, Christ had risen. Christians call this day the “Lord’s day.” Here was perhaps the most vigorous expression of the early Church’s awareness of herself as an absolutely new beginning which was leading Christians beyond the framework of the traditional religion. During the three centuries that preceded Constantine, the Christian holy day was not a day of rest but an ordinary working day. It was not the “seventh” day, which men since ancient times had reckoned as the final day of the week; it was the following day. In this conscious departure from the earlier emphasis of the week, the Church bears witness to the fact that her own life, as it flows onward in this world, is a foretaste of that eternal day which dawned on the morning of the first victory over death. “For ye are dead,” said the Apostle Paul, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.
When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:3f.). At that time these words were understood literally: into our familiar, everyday world and natural human existence had come a great and growing light — the dazzling radiance of another world, of eternal life.

Thus the little Judean sect, almost unnoticed by the world when it first emerged, felt itself to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world the source of the new light, called to enlighten men and save them.

 

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