By Dr Andrew Kania
In the Northern Spring of 2000, I was nearing completion of my Doctoral thesis, studying at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
At that time, I was living at the Lutheran seminary, Sankt Ansgar in Uppsala, a religious house named after the ninth century missionary who brought Christianity to Scandinavia.
As student accommodation was at a premium in the city of Uppsala, one of the professors at the Faculty of Theology, Sven-Erik Brodd, who was also a board member at Sankt Ansgar, offered me an apartment at the seminary.
I can say that in all the time that I lived at Sankt Ansgar, I was treated only with kindness, openness and welcome.
Most of the seminarians, both male and female, thought it was wonderful that a Catholic theological student was living with them.
For me, it was an equally enjoyable and invigorating experience, it gave me an opportunity to come into contact with a dimension of Christianity that I knew existed, but only from a theoretical point of view.
Ironically, over the years that I lived at Sankt Ansgar, I came also not only to understand the Church of Sweden in a deeper fashion, but also to appreciate my Catholic faith, not only as theologically theoretical, but as a living belief. I thank my colleagues at Sankt Ansgar in large part for this.
As part of the Lutheran Theology Student Group of Wermlands Nation, I regularly attended the Thursday evening Gudtsjänst (Liturgy) that preceded our weekly meetings, celebrated at the ancient Helga Trefaldighets kyrka (in English, the Church of the Holy Trinity, founded in the 11th century).
At the early stages of my membership to that group, I didn’t understand Swedish, but came along to pray with my new friends.
I remember vividly the 800-year-old murals and sketches on the walls of the church – as well as the cold air, and the pews, kept warm by heated water passing through pipes under the wooden seats.
Some evenings the temperature outside was -20C or lower.
What struck me about the first Gudtsjänst that I attended was when the priest began speaking the words of Christ at the Last Supper.
The congregation, whose actions I was attempting to follow, split into thirds: one third kept standing; another third proceeded to kneel, and the last group remained seated. I was confused as I did not know how to act in this situation.
I knew by the priest’s actions that it was near the time of Holy Communion – but now I had a dilemma, what posture should I take?
I knelt, because although in the Byzantine Rite, to which I belong, we stand during the Consecration; in the Roman Rite, kneeling is the norm, and I felt that this would be the closest approximate to the Church of Sweden.
After the service concluded I quizzed a new friend over a cup of coffee at the Theology Group, why the congregation had not been unified in the posture they had taken. The answer surprised me.
My friend informed me that those who knelt believed that at that point of the liturgy, the elements of bread and wine became the Body and Blood of Christ; those who stood, did so out of respect for a solemn moment in the life of Christ; and those who sat, did so because they did not understand that part of the liturgy to be any more or less important than all the other rituals and traditions of the liturgy.
So here was a group of 40 seminarians, studying for the priesthood, who had completely disparate notions as to the Eucharist.
So, as we came to Easter 2000, the Swedish Radio decided to interview two senior Churchmen of the Church of Sweden.
The first was Bishop Karl Martin Lönnebo, the Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Linköping (pronounced, Lin – sher – ping); the second was his successor to the diocese, Bishop Martin Lind.
Both bishops were interviewed separately, and both were asked the same concluding question by the interviewer: “What would you say if one of your congregation came up to you and asked you whether or not you believed that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead in a literal sense, or only in a figurative sense?”
The fashion in which the bishops responded to this question became a talking point at Sankt Ansgar for many days to come.
The retired bishop, Lönnebo, who was much older than Lind, answered that of course he believed that Christ had risen bodily from the dead.
Yet it was Bishop Lind’s response that created the controversy.
Lind said that his response to the parishioner would be determined by the age of the person who was asking the question; if the parishioner was an older member of the congregation, he would say that of course Jesus rose bodily from the dead; however, Lind qualified, that if the parishioner was of a younger generation, he would tell them a different answer, that Christ’s Resurrection should be looked at in a purely figurative sense.
Two men who were, or had been bishops of the same diocese in the Church of Sweden, had offered two very distinct answers to the same question.
The problem was that Lind’s response indicated a very fluid belief or disbelief in the bodily Resurrection of Christ.
On one level, he was prepared to admit Christ’s physical rising from the dead, but his preparedness to also deny this, according to the age of the person who asked the question of him, meant that he could not believe in the answer he gave to the older hypothetical questioner.
The reason why Easter is the greatest moment on the Christian calendar is of course that it is the fulfilment of the prophets of old, and that through this fulfilment, salvation was provided to humanity.
God became man so that man could become God – and this could only occur through the defeat of man’s greatest nemesis – the evil one, and his prize – death (cf St Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54:3).
We can only become God if we partake in eternal life – finiteness incorporates corruption; infiniteness, divinity.
All men must die; thus it is death that robs us of temporal existence.
Christ, through his paschal sacrifice, and victory over death, through his bodily Resurrection, gives us not only hope, but substantial life, not merely figurative but real.
Easter defines the Christian for it requires a belief in the seemingly impossible.
When we look at the lifeless corpse of a friend or relative who has passed away, the bodily Resurrection of Christ seems an impossibility.
Yet there is also something deep within us, that cries out, that if there is no bodily Resurrection of Christ, that human life is ultimately meaningless, for all that we are and do in this life, is but only dust, and irrelevant.
How can we conclude that those we love and have loved are but mere fantasies, configurations of atoms that appear today, and are gone at the first light of dawn?
The victory of Christ over death makes everything whole, and complete. If there is a God at all – then that God would not want to leave us in a twilight zone, suspended somewhere between light and darkness.
Rather, that God, if he is a God of love, would want to make our lives eternal – or at least give us the opportunity of grasping such a reality.
Nothing in Christ’s earthly ministry indicated that he was concerned merely for the figurative.
When Christ healed the man born blind, he did not do this in a figurative sense – for this man’s parents were brought up later by the pharisees to testify that their son had indeed been born blind. Countless witnesses were also called. Would the pharisees have been concerned with a purely figurative healing? (cf Jn 9:1-41).
Something concerned the pharisees so much that they had to question, not only this miracle, but all the other quite literal miracles that took place.
Moreover, something occurred that Easter Sunday morning that irrevocably changed history.
Roman soldiers who, under the threat of penalty of death, would never abandon their post – fled.
The original doubting Thomas believed when he later saw. Frightened men and women became boldened.
A man named Saul conquered the world as an inspired missionary, blinded by a vision of the risen Lord. None of this refers to a ‘figurative event’.
Something happened – something real happened and, although Easter calls us to stand, kneel or sit, according to our level of belief – we cannot react to Easter with ambivalence, for to do so would indicate that we place no value on the reality of living and dying.
In the Byzantine tradition of the Ukrainian Church, parishioners during the Easter Season greet one another not with the usual, “Glory to Jesus Christ”, to which the response is: “Glory be to him forever”, but with the greeting: “Christ is risen” to which the person replies: “He has truly risen”.
At such times as Easter, we should consider the power and importance of words – and what they say about us, how we live, and what we believe.