Liturgical World

"Jesus' Jewish world was a deeply liturgical world, a world in which the central activity for an entire culture and community was the cycle of annual events, in the Temple, though not exclusively so, that had to do with the restoration of humanity to its proper place in creation. The divine image overlaid by the passage of time and the corruption of sin had to be laid bare and restored to its full glory. Humanity had to clothe itself afresh in the garments of light, lost at the beginning. In this process, humanity was revealed in its proper relationship to God and to creation as a whole. Liturgy in the Temple 'activated God-wards' the buried divine image. And all of this language was at hand for those early Christian believers seeking to make sense of the impact of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. In the wake of those events, humanity had discovered itself afresh. Humanity had been clothed anew in the garments of light, restored in its place before God and its relationship with the rest of the created order -- and all of that because humanity had been invited, summoned to stand in the place of Jesus the New Adam, the Son of Man, the focus of God's creative and re-creative work and power.

So as the New Testament evolves and as its theology takes sharper and deeper form, part at least of what is going on is that the new Christian identity is being thought through and imagined in terms of that legacy of liturgy. The whole process of becoming a Christian and growing up as a Christian, growing into your full humanity as a believer, is to do with what the Temple liturgy was all about. It's a restoration to the place of Adam. It's a clothing with light and the uncovering (to use the opposite image) of the naked likeness of God in human nature."

Rowan Williams
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2449