Maundy Thursday, April 13, 1525

When Zurich residents gathered at the central church of Zurich, known as the Grossmünster, on the evening of Maundy Thursday, they were about to participate in a worship service that was radically changed from the ones they knew before. Two days before, the Zurich city council agreed to abolish the “Mass,” the celebration of the Lord’s Supper that had followed a particular liturgy that Catholic churches throughout western Europe had used for centuries, with few variations. Zwingli and his fellow Grossmünster priests had lobbied the Council to institute in its place a commemoration of the Lord’s Supper that would rehearse words and actions that were more directly derived from New Testament texts.

Adherents to the “Old Faith” on the Council had been successful at forestalling this day for two years, amid their losses to the reformers on the removal of imagery from the Zurich churches, the cancellation of saints’ feast days, and the dissolution of monks’ and nuns’ monasteries. But the reformers on the Council were now ready to assert their narrow majority and press ahead with this more notable break from the practice of the Catholic church. By ceasing the Mass, the priests of Zurich would no longer be leading their parishioners in a “universal” service that Catholics throughout Europe were experiencing simultaneously on holy days. They would also be declining to present the elements of bread and wine to their parishioners as the actual body and blood of Christ, sacrificed for them.

Instead, when Zwingli rose before the congregation on Maundy Thursday, he followed a liturgy that he had published and distributed to Zurichers earlier in Holy Week. The people were to understand the service strictly as a “practice” or “ceremony” of remembrance and thanksgiving for the sacrifice that Christ had performed once, and only once, some 1500 years earlier. It was a memorial, not a miracle. Zwingli did not preside at the altar where priests once elevated the elements and uttered words of consecration. Rather, he had the bread and wine placed on a plain table closer to the people, offered to the people in a wooden bowl and a wooden cup.¹ In contrast to the jewel-laden chalice that the priests once used for the wine, the simple wooden cup would tempt no one, Zwingli hoped, to revere the physical elements. At the middle of the new liturgy were Christ’s words: “I am the bread of life…It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is of no avail. The words that I speak to you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:35, 63). Believing that “whatever binds the senses diminishes the spirit,” Zwingli wanted to emphasize the purely spiritual, non-fleshly nature of this reformed feast.²

Zwingli also thought the simplicity of the serving vessels would be more akin to those that Christ and the early church would have used. And just as Christ had humbly served his disciples at the Last Supper, Zwingli had his assistants take the bread and wine to the people, rather than have the people come to the priests. The people still kneeled to receive the bread and wine, but they passed them around to each other. The congregation, as a community spared by Christ’s sacrifice, was to understand itself as joined together through God’s covenant, like the children of Israel who assembled after being spared by the Passover.³

An important underlying rationale for Zwingli’s revision of the Lord’s Supper can be found in his concept of a sacrament. In humanist fashion, he went back to the original meaning of sacramentum in Latin and found it was an oath or pledge that the Roman soldiers swore to their generals to enter the army, or a security deposit that Roman litigants pledged at the start of legal cases. So sacraments for Zwingli were pledges that conveyed outward signs of belonging—of union with a greater body, the church community. As he would define them in his Commentary on True and False Religion, which he was writing at the time, sacraments are “signs or ceremonials…by which a man proves to the church that he either aims to be, or is, a soldier of Christ, and which inform the whole church rather than yourself of your faith.” Applied to Lord’s Supper, Zwingli wrote, “we give proof that we trust in the death of Christ, glad and thankful to be in the company which gives thanks to the Lord for the blessing of redemption which He freely gave us by dying for us.”⁴ A year earlier, in A Proposal Concerning Images and the Mass from Spring 1524, he had already written that Christians eat and drink together “so that we may testify to all men that we are one body and one brotherhood.”⁵ Notably, sacraments did not have any salvific significance to purify or regenerate a Christian. A sacrament “cannot have any power to free the conscience,” he wrote. “That can be freed by God alone.”⁶ Zwingli was very concerned to order his theology under a strong principle of God’s sovereignty and transcendence. He therefore rejected any notion that God would be bound to recognize a person’s interior state in a new way on account of any outward action.⁷ Zwingli presented here a horizontal, socially-oriented concept of sacraments instead of the vertically-oriented Catholic concept of sacraments as signs for sacred moments when God communicated special graces to individuals through the pastoral offices of the church.

Zwingli’s social concept of a sacrament proved to be important for Anabaptists and later free-church movements. They desired the church to be a visible community set apart from the “the world” by its members’ conformity with Christ’s way of life. So they looked to both the Lord’s Supper and Baptism to become moments when a Christian community exercised accountability over its aspiring disciples to live according to Christ’s rule. Before receiving baptism, they wanted individuals to “prove to the church”—in Zwingli’s terms—that they aimed to be “soldiers of Christ” by presenting a testimony of conversion and voluntarily pledging to accept the authority of the congregation to discipline them if they started to stray from their common commander, Christ. And the sacrament of the eucharist became the ordinance of “Communion,” when baptized members presented an outward sign, again, to “inform the whole church” that they desired to stay in a relationship of accountability—to stay in communion—with their “brotherhood” in pursuing Christ. No member was to approach the Supper table if he was not willing to accept the admonitions or authority of the shepherds who represented the spiritual discernment of the congregation. This concept of the sacraments heightened expectations of unity within the “brotherhood” in regards to belief and worship, as well as lifestyle, making a parish-based church that embraced all residents of a territory feel hopelessly diverse and diffuse. Despite Zwingli’s belief that such a territorial church could still be pleasing to God, when defined by its worship and doctrine, the people who were joining separate Anabaptist worship services by the Spring of 1525 were showing their discontentment with a lack of discipline and unity in their parish churches. Instead, they voiced excitement about joining gatherings that were serious about living righteously and holding each other accountable to do so.

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 96-98. ↩︎
2. Ulrich Zwingli, Letter to Martin Bucer (June 3, 1525), in Correspondence de Martin Bucer, vol. 1, ed. Jean Rott (Brill, 1979), 257, quoted in Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 233. ↩︎
3. Gordon, 97. ↩︎
4. Ulrich Zwingli, “On True and False Religion,” in Clarence Nevin Heller, ed., The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. 3, trans. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Philadelphia: Heidelberg Press, 1929), 180, 184. ↩︎
5. Quoted in W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), 181. ↩︎
6. Zwingli, “On True and False Religion,” 181. ↩︎
7. Stephens, 20-21, 68-70. ↩︎