”Din uppståndelse bekänner vi” En sakramentalteologisk reflektion över påskmotivet i gudstjänsten

Abstract

This article, entitled “We Confess Your Resurrection” reflects on the theme of Easter in worship from the perspective of sacramental theology. 

The central importance of Easter for the worship of the Christian churches is obvious. In baptism a person dies and is raised again with Christ. Every Sunday, Christian congregations gather to celebrate the Day of the Lord - the day when death was conquered and Christ rose from the tomb. And in the eucharistic prayer most churches say that they proclaim the death of the Lord and confess his resurrection as the most central part of the celebration of the liturgy.

The theme of Easter may be considered as the most basic aspect of the Church’s worship, as well as of the Christian life and of the very nature of the Church. He, who makes all things new, has himself called the Church to be the new people of God. This calling, which is given to the Churches, is prefigured in the story of the people of God of the old covenant, of those who had been delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and who had made a break with that old way of life. The theme of Easter in the Church’s tradition of worship is intimately linked with the exodus theme in the passover celebration of the people of the old covenant.

The importance of the paschal mystery in the church’s tradition of worship has been the subject of special attention in recent years. Here this approach is applied to the Swedish context. The essay introduces the cur­ rent discussion on the paschal mystery in the life of the Church, seen from the Swedish perspective with the addition of some comments how the theory of church-life relates to actual practice.

If Christian worship is understood as the continuation of and a merging and a re-interpretation of synagogue worship and the tradition of the Jewish family meal, especially the of passover meal, the centrality of the paschal theme in all Christian worship is obvious. This is particularly true of the celebration of the eucharist, which is sprung from the Jewish passover meal, i.e., from the ritual meal on the eve of the liberation of the people from Egypt, which is repeated every year in a Jewish family.

The Jewish passover meal is not only a memorial meal. Nor is Christian worship - focused on the eucharistic celebration - only a celebration of a historic event. Both these celebrations are intended to be a re-actualisation, through which the participants are drawn into the events themselves, and through which God acts in order to save his people.

The theme of Easter is an integral part of Christian worship from the early Christian period onwards. In the main liturgy, the death and resurrection of Christ shall be proclaimed in the ante-communion (“the service of the word”), and, in the eucharistic prayer, the death of Christ is proclaimed and his resurrection confessed until he comes again. The anamnesis and the acclamation of the eucharistic prayer express these thoughts, although this has been more obvious in the Eastern churches than in the Western ones, where greater emphasis has traditionally been put on the sacrificial death of Christ, on reconciliation and on the forgiveness of sins.

The most obvious and most visible expression of the Easter mystery is in the service of baptism. The candidate is made a participant in the death and resurrection of Christ. Through the waters of baptism, the person dies and is raised again with Christ. The paschal night between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday was the original time for baptism, which focuses the connection between baptism and Easter even more clearly.

Applied to ecclesiology, it is primarily the metaphors of the Church as the people of God and as the body of Christ which are relevant to this discussion. The theme of Easter is most obvious when the Church is seen as the people of God, because the paschal events of the old covenant and the Jewish passover meal are then seen as direct anticipations of the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ by the new people of God.

In order to show more precisely the importance of the Easter mystery for worship from a sacramental perspective, I have chosen to consider developments in the Church of Sweden from the Reformation onwards.

By encouraging in its Service Book the view of the Church as the people of God, the Church of Sweden has opened up the possibilities of referring to the paschal celebration in the old covenant as an anticipation of what Christ has done and continues to do in and through his Church, when people are made members of the Church through baptism, and when the eucharist is celebrated. The theme of Easter was included in the celebration of baptism even in the first Order of Service in Swedish composed by Olaus Petrus, but it was removed in the Service Book of 1811. The 1982 experimental order of baptism was an attempt to restore the theme of Easter in the service of baptism, but this has been repressed again in the 1986 Service Book.

The Easter theme was strongly emphasised in the main Sunday service in Olaus Petrus’ Missal, 1531, in which the eucharistic prayer was built around the preface of Easter Day. In the 1811 Service Book, the Easter theme was completely removed, hut it was restored again in 1894- The inclusion of the congregational acclamations and the anamnesis in the revision of the eucharistic prayers in 1976 and in the Order of Service in the 1986 Service Book, clarifies the importance of the death and resurrection of Christ for worship. The passover and the passover meal of the old covenant as anticipations of Christian worship are, however, totally suppressed.

Yngve Brilioth has exerted a major influence on sacramental theology and liturgy. The community of the Church, baptism, and eucharistic fellow­ ship are often captured by the metaphor of membership of the body of Christ. By baptism, a person is made a member of the body of Christ. In worship, the whole body with its various gifts (1 Cor 12), is at work. The Church is a corporate community. The theology of the body of Christ has been complemented by the image of the people of God in the ecclesiology of the Church of Sweden Service Book. However, this has not been fully recognised in terms of sacramental theology.

By an application of the image of the people of God in sacramental theology, the continuity between the old covenant and the worship of the church could be more clearly expressed. It would then be obvious that it is the same God who is at work in order to save and lead his people. By the use of the image of the people of God, the perspective of the future and the eschatological perspective could also be more clearly expressed. The sacraments could be seen as a participation in the kingdom which is to come - a kingdom which the church is called to begin to realise already here and now. The theology of the body of Christ may, if it is not complemented by the theology of the people of God, cause a limitation of attention to mere fellowship with Christ and to the community of the church with its various gifts. If the image of the people of God is applied to the theology of the sacraments, the theme of Easter will be particularly evident. The saving exodus from Egypt and the passover meal will become important signs of the love of God for his people even today, and prefigurations of what Christ has done, through his death and resurrection, for all of humanity. With such an understanding, the Christian Church celebrates in its worship not only what Christ has achieved, but all that God has done for all people, both in the old and in the new covenant.

Should the Church of Sweden wish to clarify the theme of Easter to an even greater extent than has hitherto been done, there are several suitable areas of attention, which the report on international developments show. The Easter theme could be strengthened if the celebration of the Easter Vigil included baptism - with baptism more often performed through total immersion and accompanied by the reading of Romans 6 - if the emphasis of the liturgical year was more clearly laid on the celebration of Easter, and if the celebration of Sunday as the day of the Lord, the first day of the week, was made a weekly occurring actualisation of the Easter mystery. Translated by Gerd Swensson/Te Deum