And yet, from its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible. But within this impossibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning. Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.
Let us, therefore, forget for a while the technical discussions about the Church, its mission, its methods. Not that these discussions are wrong or unnecessary—but they can be useful and meaningful only within a fundamental context, and that context is the “great joy” from which everything else in Christianity developed and acquired its meaning. “For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy”—thus begins the Gospel, and its end is: “And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” (Lk. 2:10, 24:52). And we must recover the meaning of this great joy. We must if possible partake of it, before we discuss anything else—programs and missions, projects and techniques.
Joy, however, is not something one can define or analyze. One enters into joy. “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord” (Mt. 25:21). And we have no other means of entering into that joy, no way of understanding it, except through the one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “For the Life of the World”
Let us, therefore, forget for a while the technical discussions about the Church, its mission, its methods. Not that these discussions are wrong or unnecessary—but they can be useful and meaningful only within a fundamental context, and that context is the “great joy” from which everything else in Christianity developed and acquired its meaning. “For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy”—thus begins the Gospel, and its end is: “And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” (Lk. 2:10, 24:52). And we must recover the meaning of this great joy. We must if possible partake of it, before we discuss anything else—programs and missions, projects and techniques.
Joy, however, is not something one can define or analyze. One enters into joy. “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord” (Mt. 25:21). And we have no other means of entering into that joy, no way of understanding it, except through the one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “For the Life of the World”
