on Last Things First...

From Concluding remarks "Last Things First" pp.99-100.

"   Liturgy, as divine drama, tells again the old, old story. It is not playacting, but an acting out of God's love for the world. This sacred dramaturgy demands words and images of wisdom and power, theologically significant body language, lights and colours, smells and food. If we are asking our contemporary culture to 'come and see', we must have something to show them as well as something to say. Liturgical renewal is not archaeological and antiquarian, not the restraining of the Spirit in a formal straitjacket of tradition. It is nothing less than a preparation for mission in a world where literary culture is moribund.

     That mission can only proceed, however, if we put first things first. To renew liturgy is to recapture the gospel handed down to us from oral culture, through literary culture, until today. The hand-downess of things reminds us that they have a history, an embeddedness in past cultures: they are a treasury of blessings to be appropiated by every new generation. The gospel comes from the past to us as a sacred and precious deposit of faith. We so not offer the world a new doctrine, but that which we have received from the beginning. 

     Yet in a profound sense the gospel which we have received from the past also comes from the future, from the end. It is not the 'first things' (protologia) which gives us faith in our future, but the fact that the 'last things' (eschatalogia) have already begun. Christ's resurrection, witnessed by the apostles in the past, is in fact the beginning of the end, the ground of hope for the world. Eschatalogical time entered the universe in the incarnation and is now drawing natural time after itself like a magnetic bullseye capturing a wayward arrow. Those of us who believe in the gospel know that 'the one short tale we feel to be true' leads home."

Excerpt from:

Walker, Andrew. Telling the Story.  Gospel, Mission and Culture Gospel & Culture. London: SPCK, 1996.