PaddlingPadre

When Moses read out the law to the Israelites on the far side of the Jordan, he concluded by listing the blessings that would come upon Israel if they were obedient to the covenant, as well as the punishments with which God would inflict them if they were not. And when you consider those blessings, which you can find in chapter 28 of Deuteronomy, they intuitively make sense to us, even at a distance of three-thousand years. Blessed will you be in the city and blessed in the field, says the Lord, Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Israel’s enemies will flee before them, promises the Lord, and he will pour out his blessing upon their barns and upon all that they undertake.

In a word, then, you could say that in exchange for obedience, the Lord is promising the Israelite’s prosperity, and prosperity of a very practical sort. Even the most worldly sort of person, for instance, could recognize the goodness and desirability of these kinds of earthly blessings, of wealth and prosperity and power. But the Lord also promises another blessing if the people will be faithful to the covenant: that he will establish the Israelites as a people holy to himself. This brings to mind the last line of our first reading, where the Lord says to Moses: You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. This blessing is a bit more interesting. What does it mean to be a kingdom of priests, and why is this something desirable?

Well, what is it that a priest does? In our case, we might think first of those things that Christian priests do, but before moving to that, we might ask what it was that Aaron and his sons did? What was the priestly task entrusted to the Levites? It was, above all, to offer sacrifices to God, and in this way to stand in a mediating role between God and the nation, so as to be able to reconcile the people with God, to praise God, and to sanctify the people, thereby achieving a union in worship between God and Israel. And so if a priest is a kind of mediator between God and man, then a kingdom of priests will be a kingdom that mediates between God and the world, a kingdom that works to reconcile and sanctify the world and bring it into union with God. And I think we can all see why that is desirable, and how, among all the promises God makes in exchange for obedience, this one is above the others.

But like so many other things in the Old Testament, this call for Israel to be a nation of priests was something that would have to wait to find its fulfillment. In the first place, due to the idolatry of the golden calf, the priesthood of the old covenant was restricted to a single tribe. But even more profoundly, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews, the law was but a shadow of the good things to come rather than the true form of these realities. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins; it was impossible for the Temple sacrifices to achieve a true union between God and his people.

And so, that true union, that true mediation between God and humanity awaited the coming of a true mediator, the arrival of the one of whom these ancient rites were the prophetic foreshadowing, namely Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, in whom divinity and humanity are perfectly united without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. And so, if a priest is someone who unites God and humanity, then it is Jesus who shows us what it truly means to be a priest. This is hymned in a wonderful way in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Colossians:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creatures.
In him everything in heaven and on earth was created,
things visible and invisible.
All were created through him;
all were created for him.
He is before all else that is.
In him everything continues in being.
It is he who is head of the body, the church!

he who is the beginning, the first-born of the dead,
so that primacy may be his in everything.
For it pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him
and, by means of him, to reconcile everything in his person,
both on earth and in the heavens,
making peace through the blood of his cross.

In Christ, then, this ancient promise has been fulfilled. For if Christ is our priest, and if we are members of Christ through baptism, confirmation, and the Holy Eucharist, then, as members of his body, we have truly become a kingdom of priests, all of us sharing in the one priesthood of Christ, as Saint Peter tells us: You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the wonders of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

And that is our task, that is our vocation as Christians: to live out our priestly identity by proclaiming to the world the wonders of the one who has rescued us from darkness, announcing that the kingdom of heaven is at hand so that the world may come to know the one who has reconciled God and man, while at the same time working to free ourselves from all impurity and sin in order to be perfect, just as the union to which we are called and the one to whom we are united is perfect. The true priesthood, then, is nothing other than making present the unique priesthood of Jesus Christ, and each of us does this by living our Christian identity according to our state of life. Now, it is true that some of us, myself included, have been called apart to the ministerial priesthood. But this priesthood, by which a man is sacramentally configured to Christ the Head, is for the sake of the body—that is, the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood of the baptized.

Which means that your task of purifying, reconciling, and evangelizing the world is truly the main thing, the most important thing. It is not the task of bishops, priests, and deacons to be holy and to make the world holy; it is the task of the baptized to be holy and to make the world holy. And that is truly great news. There are 1.4 billion Catholics throughout the world, but only about four hundred thousand priests, so from a purely numerical perspective, we can accomplish so much more if we remember that ours is a universal call to holiness; that everyone, both the ordained and lay, is called to perfect love of God and neighbor, if we remember that each of us participates in the common priestly task of making Christ present in our lives and in the world, as we become agents of that union between God and his creation in such a way that it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us, so that God may be all in all.