We are a kingdom of priests

Deacon Douglas McManaman
We are a kingdom of priests @ Where Peter Is

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature. St. Hildegard of Bingen

I’d like to begin this reflection on the royal priesthood of the faithful with Paul’s letter to the Colossians:

He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him (1, 15-16).

It is this last line in this text that is so important. All things were created for him, in view of him, for the sake of him. What this means is that everything finds its ultimate meaning in Christ, just as the meaning of anything is discovered in its final cause, its ultimate end. Christ is the ultimate meaning of creation, and since time is a part of creation, it follows that Christ is the ultimate meaning of history.

Christ is the Second Adam who sheds light on the very existence of the First Adam and his offspring (GS 22), revealing our original vocation. And what is that original vocation? The Epiphany sets us on a course to uncover it: a star led the Magi to the Christ child. This is fitting, because the cosmos exists through Christ and for Christ. The world that God created and sustains in existence, the cosmos in its entirety, is really an epiphany (manifestation). The created world manifests the divine; it speaks of God, of his divine generosity. It praises the beauty of God through its own proper beauty, and it speaks of the mind of God through its own order, inexhaustible intelligibility, and complexity. In Psalm 19, we read:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament proclaims the works of his hands. Day unto day pours forth speech; night unto night whispers knowledge. There is no speech, no words; their voice is not heard; A report goes forth through all the earth, their messages, to the ends of the world. He has pitched a tent there for the sun; which comes forth like a bridegroom from his bridal chamber, and like a hero joyfully runs its course. From one end of the heavens it comes forth; its course runs through to the other; nothing escapes its heat (2-7).

In the prologue of the gospel of John, we read that the Word was made flesh and “set up his tent” among us (Greek: eskenosen, “booths”, “tabernacles”). The sun, mentioned in the psalm, is really a hierophany, a manifestation of the divine; for the ultimate meaning of the sun and its entire movement from one end of the sky to the other, is the very life of Christ the bridegroom, who made his tent among us and who is the light of the world, the true light that enlightens every person who comes into the world (1, 9). The sun is an image of the Son, the Logos, as is everything in the cosmos. 

Everything in creation in some way (often hidden) announces, proclaims, speaks of the mystery of the Incarnation. Creation is language; it is full of words of the Word. More to the point, creation is a genuine liturgy, and like the liturgy of the new covenant it moves towards an end, which is communion, just as the six days of creation depict a movement towards the sabbath rest. The end of this liturgy of creation, of course, is communion with Christ.  

Just as a work of art is in many ways an epiphany of the artist, revealing much about the artist, creation in all its diversity and complexity manifests and praises God. And the content of this manifestation becomes increasingly Trinitarian the closer we look. For example, light proceeds from the sun, but the light by which we see the sun cannot itself be seen. Similarly, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, but the third Person, like an invisible and formal sign, directs us immediately to the Son. As Sergei Bulgakov writes: “The hypostasis of the Spirit does not have its own Face, as it were, but is only the Face of the Son in His Glory….in the light of this Glory we can discern the glorified Face of the Logos-Christ, but not the proper Face of Glory itself” (The Comforter, translated by Boris Jakim, p. 188).

But there is more. In the first story of creation in Genesis, God says to man:

“Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (1, 28-29).

In other words, God created the world as a banquet, to feed us. For the Jews, a meal is a source of communion with all those at table, because food is a source of life, and if we all partake of the same source from the same table, we become one life, one blood, one family. Thus, creation, which is given to man for food, is a source of communion with God. 

Whatever God created, He created through the utterance of His Word, but to speak words is to communicate, and to communicate is to enter into communion. We speak in order to bring about a communion with the person we are addressing. And of course, God speaks all things into being, and so creation in all its diversity are words of the Word, uttered in order to bring about communion, in this case, communion with God. 

Now a priest is one who offers sacrifice, in particular the sacrifice of thanksgiving. The word Eucharist is from the Greek eukharistia, which means “thanksgiving, gratitude”. Man’s task is to receive the food that is creation and give thanks for it, and we give thanks by blessing the giver. A blessing, however, is a benediction, and benediction, as the etymology of the word indicates, is the act of speaking well of something. God blesses each day of creation, for each day has its origin in a benediction: God said: “… Let there be …” God’s speaking is creative, effective, it brings into being, but what He brings into being blesses Him in return, that is, it speaks well of Him, as we see in the book of Daniel: “Sun and moon, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever. Stars of heaven, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever. Every shower and dew, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever. All you winds, bless the Lord…” (3, 62-65).

To bless is to receive what God gives, recognizing it for what it is, namely sheer gift. Of course, gratitude begins with such a recognition, and thanksgiving arises out of it. This recognition gives rise to a spirit of thanksgiving, or Eucharist. And since a priest is one who offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving, man was created to be a priest of creation–he was created to offer, to thank, to praise, to adore. We are to take what is given and raise it, lift it up to God, which involves a recognition of its origin. This raising up to God is benediction, blessing, a speaking well of…, and it is offered that it may become what God intended for it to become–namely, a means of communion with him. 

This priestly pattern is visible at every level of creation. The lowest level of the hierarchy of being in the physical universe is the level of non-living matter, but non-living matter is food for the level above it, which consists of living things, i.e., plants, which take non-living matter and consume it, but in consuming it, plant life raises it up through the power of nutrition and transforms it into living matter (this is what happens when we water plants). But brute animals eat plants, and through the process of metabolism change plant life into living animal tissue, a higher mode of life. It does this, however, by killing it first and then raising it up. In other words, plants must be sacrificed first, that is, reduced to non-living matter, in order to be lifted up to serve something higher. Man exercises dominion over the animal kingdom, raising it up to serve human needs in a number of ways, not always for food (dogs can pull sleds, horses can pull carriages, as well as providing meat). But, when animals become food for man, the animal must first be slaughtered. And so, the communion of a meal is once again preceded and made possible through a sacrifice, a dying. 

The rough details of this priesthood are there in the first two chapters of Genesis, in the command to creativity, to raise up creation to serve the needs of man, to cultivate the garden; moreover, we see it in the command to leave mother and father and cling to one another in the one flesh union of marriage. This “leaving” of mother and father receives its full significance in the paschal mystery, in Christ’s leaving of this world in order to go to the Father, as we read in the high priestly prayer of Christ (Jn 17, 1ff; Eph 5, 25-27). 

Man, who is set apart (consecrated) from the rest of material creation in so far as he is created in the image and likeness of God, is to take all that he is and has become, and all that he possesses, and offer it to God, in the service of God, in a spirit of thanksgiving or Eucharist. In doing so, he offers to God the entire order of creation, which he contains within himself. Thus, man is a mediator between the cosmos and God, joining the two. In the first creation story, God is depicted as building a “house” (time, place, foundation, furnishings, etc.), but to build is to take raw materials and give them a new and elevated form, as in the creation of a house or work of art. And so, creativity has a priestly character to it. It emulates God, for the artist is speaking, communicating what he sees, and he is trying to speak well of what sees and admires. Genuine creativity is benediction, or blessing. 

But the fall of man was a rejection of this priesthood. Adam chose to make himself his own god. As a result, he, including his offspring, the entire human race, gradually became deaf to the praises sung by creation; he no longer possessed the eyes and ears to understand the universe as an epiphany. And so, he no longer gave thanks. His life ceased to be Eucharistic; his life gradually ceased to be sacrificial. However, God made a covenant with Abraham, the father of Israel, in order to make her a holy nation, consecrated, that is, set apart from all others, a priestly people: “Now, if you obey me completely and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured possession among all peoples, though all the earth is mine. You will be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Ex 19, 5-6). 

The Word was made flesh in order to restore the world to its status as God’s kingdom (house, palace, covenanted family). Christ, who is God, is everything that the human person longs for, his kingdom is everything that the great religions of the world are seeking – namely, God become man. And what man was and is called to be is right there in the image of the Magi, priests of Persia, who begin a procession from the east, who follow the lead of a star, which leads them right to Christ, and they do homage to Christ. We were created “through him and for him”, ultimately for Christ’s priesthood, which we enter through baptism. We were created to worship, to adore, to offer; homo adorans expresses man’s deepest nature.

If we were created through him and for him, then we were created to become Christ, which is what happens in an ordinary Mass. Every day is to be a sacrifice of thanksgiving, a constant lifting up of all we have and are to God, to receive what the Lord gives us and to offer it to him in thanksgiving. This lifting up of what we have includes the lifting up of our work, our labor, which takes place throughout the six-day workweek, and this labor is a “building up”, a raising up, which includes the raising of our children, which is fundamentally a lifting up and an act of “building”. Every moment of our lives, every day of the six-day workweek, is to be an imitation of God in the act of creating, the act of blessing, and so each day is a benediction that we carry out. We bless God in the work we do; for in both creation stories, work is revealed as holy; in short, the work week is a priestly existence. 

In baptism, this priestly identity, which is our deepest identity, is elevated and perfected, for we are anointed and thus made to participate in Christ’s priesthood: “He now anoints you with the chrism of salvation. As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet, and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life” (Rite of Baptism for Infants). Thus, we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own” (1 Pt 2, 9). In the book of Revelation, we read: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen” (1, 5). 

On the sabbath, we begin our procession as we leave the house and make our way to the altar. At the altar, we offer our sacrifices, our daily stresses and frustrations, all our efforts and the love behind that labor, and all this is represented in the bread and wine, which are universal signs of nourishment. They are food, the fruits of our labor, the matter of the earth. What the ordained ministerial priest does is he takes what we offer, that bread and wine, which is the fruit of our labor throughout the week, lifts it up on our behalf, and Christ, who is the priest at the altar, receives that bread and wine, the matter of creation, the food of creation that we have offered to him, and changes it into himself, his own body and blood, which in turn is the eternal sacrifice that the Son offers to the Father. And that is returned to us as food, but it is no longer bread and wine, but is precisely what the matter of this world is destined to become, namely the actual food of his body and blood: “For my body is real food”, he says, and “my blood real drink” (Jn 6, 55). The Eucharist is the completion of creation, and through it we are deified, united to the sacrificial offering of the Son to the Father, drawn into the intimate life of the Trinity. 

And so, the ordained priesthood is ultimately at the service of the royal priesthood of the faithful. He is indeed set apart, but this does not mean a literal ‘being taken out of the world’, that is, an escape from the world, which characterizes Clichtove’s image of the priesthood; rather, the priest is to be set apart in the depths of his charity and humility, and his willingness to follow Christ, who emptied himself and entered into human suffering. By this kenotic life, the ministerial priest calls the faithful to an ever-deeper self-understanding and appreciation of the significance of this anointing, that is, their priestly, prophetic and royal identity.