The Protestant Reformation in Europe shed new, revolutionary light on many religious traditions of the day, including how people observed the Easter season. In the spring of 1522, a Swiss reformer named Ulrich Zwingli took a stand at a dinner party that sent shockwaves through Zurich and cemented the changes that were sweeping across the continent.
Before Easter that year, Zwingli, a priest, attended a feast held by a local printer. The meal was on a Friday during Lent, recounted Reformation scholar Stephen Nichols in his “5 Minutes in Church History” podcast, but some of the guests ate sausages—a strictly forbidden practice during the season traditionally dedicated to fasting from meat.
While Zwingli himself didn’t eat the sausages, Nichols said, he did lend the group his support in a subsequent sermon titled “On the Choice and Freedom of Foods.”
“In this sermon, Zwingli makes a very simple argument,” Nichols said. “He can’t find Lent in Scripture. He’s looked far and wide and he can’t find these restrictions that the church has imposed upon people.
“And not only is it about Lent, but Zwingli’s beginning to see that there’s this almost like a scaffolding that is being built around the gospel of all these regulations, all of these things that we are to be doing to somehow earn God’s favor, or earn God’s merit, or somehow achieve some level of righteousness.”
Zwingli’s involvement in the Reformation continued the next year, when he published 67 theses which Christianity Today called “more persuasive” than Martin Luther’s earlier complaints against the Catholic establishment. At the very least, Zwingli’s country was more responsive—he was allowed to continue preaching, and within two years, the traditional Mass was abolished in Zurich in favor of a simpler service, and images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints were removed from churches.
The lasting mark of Zwingli’s ministry was his devotion to the Bible. “For God’s sake, do not put yourself at odds with the Word of God,” he wrote. “For truly it will persist as surely as the Rhine follows its course. One can perhaps dam it up for a while, but it is impossible to stop it.”
– Meredith Flynn, with information from Christianity Today and “5 Minutes in Church History”