Each book of the Bible has impacted in its own unique way on the life of the Church over the course of history. Some have never had to struggle for attention: Genesis with its richly evocative myths of origin, Isaiah, the pilgrim’s necessary companion in Advent, and Exodus, providing that unavoidable undertow to Lent, drawing us ineluctably into the Paschal Mystery. But eminent in their priority as they are, the Gospels have not been equally deployed. For centuries it was Matthew who possessed a primacy of honour as the Catholic Church’s default Gospel. If the Song of Songs is treated today as more or less decorative, the monastics of the Middle Ages cherished every verse, drawing on it seemingly as the source of all contemplative truth. One book, to my mind, has needed a protracted period to come into its true relevancy: theEpistle to the Hebrews. And understanding why that should be is the major part of understanding why it has also taken the Church nearly two thousand years to institute a feast of Christ the High Priest.
Hebrews was written, as its name suggests, to Jewish Christians desirous of an account of the continuity between the old paradigm of faith which had obtained hitherto and the newness of the Gospel. If the majority report adopted the Passover story as its principal reference, buttressed by its reiteration in the Babylonian exile, now definitively ended and resolved in Christ, the author of Hebrews – who may or may not be St Paul – sought inspiration in the Temple worship of Jerusalem. Jesus’s death on a cross was the once-and-for-all sacrifice which rendered superfluous the routine of sacrificial worship in the Temple. And this made Jesus not just the victim but also the priest who offered the sacrifice. And if Jesus is a priest then he has to beof a higher order of priests than the Levites who officiated in the Temple – for he was a member of the tribe not of Levi but of Judah. Melchizedek, a name which appears just twice in the Hebrew scriptures finds his place in Hebrews as offering the perfect explanation for the kind of priesthood Jesus exercises: the eternal cult of the Most High God. That the liturgy of Melchizedek also involved offerings of bread and wine surprisingly seems to have gone unnoticed. Jesus’ priestly action, then, involves the offering of His own life as expiation and his entrance into the Holy of Holies where he intercedes for sinners. This vision helped countless Jewish Christians to understand how their Judaism was fulfilled by discipleship of a Galilean Messiah. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that of plethora of titles which have been applied historically to Christ, “eternal high priest” comes a long way down the list. Perhaps there was anxiety that a self-sacrificing priest would sound suicidal to simple ears. More likely to blame was the destiny of the word “priest” itself, as it became uncoupled from its Jewish referent and came to be applied to the clergy of the Church herself. What confusion it would have caused to make it sound as though the Lord Himself was a Catholic priest!
It is only in the Reformation period, when the question of ministry in the Church becomes a neuralgic issue, that Christ’s priesthood starts to figure as a vital theological notion itself. Because it is by understanding the kind of priesthood that Jesus exercises that the Church would come to understand its own priests. And for a time a controversy will rage about the nature of the Church’s ministers. Is the priest a profoundly altered being, endowed with the miraculous power of summoning the deity from heaven itself to take the form of bread and wine on the altar? Or is he the servant of the Word, a fiery preacher able to instil faith in the hearts of believers? I simplify for pedagogical and, indeed, dramatic purposes… but on the Catholic side, there could be a tendency to focus on the powers of individual priests as if they were themselves sources of salvific potency. But this is not how the Church in fact went in her understanding of her priests.
And this is where Hebrews comes into its own, because the letter enables the Church to do what she must always do when faced with difficulty – to go back to Christ. If there were individual priests offering the sacrifice of the Eucharist, they did so not in their own right but as humble participants in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. In fact, strictly speaking, they were not really priests in the old sense at all but disciples charged with the representation of the one sacrifice on Calvary which had redeemed humankind. Christ’s was the only priesthood that really counted. From that point we arrive at the present day thanks to one of those incredibly rare but effective cases of Anglo-French co-operation, the kind of joint effort that gave us Concorde. First on the scene was the famous “French school”. The immense effort which went into the reform of clerical life after the Council of Trent was most significantly carried out by a small group of seminarian formators in Paris: Pierre de érulle, Charles de Condren, Jean-Jacques Olier and St Jean Eudes. The principal intent of their work with young priests was to inspire them to practice a devotion to and imitation of the Lord able to foster a truly self-sacrificial lifestyle. They had a vision of the priest as a humble man, centred on Christ, devoted to the pastoral service of the eople, hard-working, living simply, sharing what he had with the poor and always placing the needs of others before his own. If this now seems obvious to us then it is a tribute to the power of Bérulle’s pen and example. Catholic priests have not always been held to such an ideal!
And if the expression “sacrificial life” leads you spontaneously to imagine a gaunt, earnest young man obsessed with his own suffering, real or imagined, then thinkagain, because when St Augustine or St Thomas uses the word “sacrifice” they don’t mean some tragic renouncement but simple anything laid before the Father which raises the mind to God. A sacrifice might well be an encounter with a stranger, the reading of a poem or the memory of a kind gesture. A sacrificial life is one constantly drawn towards the memory of the living God. And central to that vision, too, is the image of the priestly Christ interceding for His people before the Father. That is where the seventeenth Chapter of John’s Gospel comes in, taking on a new vibrant role in the canon as the priestly prayer in which Jesus offers intercession for his followers. The spirituality of the French school is unsurpassed in its influence on the identity of the modern Catholic priest. And at its heart is an insistence on the imitation of a priestly Christ, perpetually adoring the Father.
The English contribution has been no less decisive. And you will not be surprised to learn that its main protagonist was St John Henry Newman himself, quondam vicar of this University church and who preached eloquently from this very pulpit just under
two hundred years ago his first reflections on Jesus as priest. He was, of course, the champion of the munus triplex, the threefold office of Christ as priest, prophet and king, an idea which Calvin had explored in some depth. Newman saw in this framework a powerful way of drawing out the complex. multi-dimensional vocation of every Christian believer, called to share with Christ in the exercise of each of these roles. Newman’s interest was not so much in the piety of the ordained but rather the holiness of the baptised. And so, by speaking insistently and repeatedly of the priesthood of Christ, he was able to articulate a vision of how every believer could live a priestly life. This was a wonderful way of taking up one of the best of the intuitions of the Reformers: the notion of the priesthood of all believers.
Newman’s precious insight found its way into the documents of the Second VaticanCouncil. It’s a vertiginous thought that words spoken in this church about Christ’s priesthood helped the entire People of God to understand the priestly vocation of all the baptised in the latter half of the twentieth century. The vocation to take full and active part in the celebration of the Eucharist. The vocation to inspire others to live holy lives by simple actions of holiness in our own lives. The vocation to align our lives with that of Jesus Christ, the servant who kneels in front of his disciples to wash their feet and to remedy their sufferings.
But let me leave the last word to another great priestly servant of Christ whose ministry unfolded in a way that surprised and transformed him in the light of the insights gained for the People of God by Bérulle and Newman: St Oscar Romero, martyr Archbishop of San Salvador. He had a gift for saying these things with simplicity and poignancy. Just three years before his assassination in 1980, he shared the following reflections with his priests. May he pray for us, for our Church under Pope Leo, and for all those who share in Christ’s eternal high priesthood.
One day, there will be no more Masses, no more need of temporal priests, because all of us, through the labours of priests, of bishops, of catechists, of lay ministers of the Word, of all God’s priestly people, will have achieved humanity’s incorporation into Christ, and Christ will be the one priest, formed in his historical and eternal fullness by all of us who in the course of history have made with him one sole priesthood, one sole offertory, one sole Mass that will last eternally to sing God’s glory.
This is the destiny, the objective for which we priests work in history. There, my brother priests, in everlasting glory along with all of our people, our people glorified, we shall feel the boundless satisfaction of having worked with Christ to make humanity God’s living temple, the living image of God’s Spirit in eternity
Fr Damian Howard, SJ
Senior Catholic Chaplain, University of Oxford
St John Henry Newman preaching at the University Church