COMPASSIONATE HIGH PRIEST - 2

THE COMPASSIONATE HIGH PRIEST

(Part II)

Even though I grew up in a very encouraging and constructive parish environment, I came to realize that morality was not normally a matter of doing violence to myself, and the action of God’s grace respects my present limitations. People must be charmed into righteousness. The desire to change others, as the desire to change oneself, can too easily come from a basic intolerance, and that is why it is vitiated at the source. Change is welcome, if it is sweetened by reasonableness and understanding. But as often as not, there is an element of intolerance in it, and this is what we must warn ourselves against.

            You know, for example, when you take seriously the call to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” a curious twist occurs with the first fervour of conversion. We want to institutionalise our spirituality; we want to domesticate and tame the Spirit of God, living by law rather than spirit. So we construct systems, invent rules, and settle for a religious externalism. It’s the instinct within us to be in control of everything, including the Spirit of God.

Our late dear Holy Father, Blessed Pope John XXIII, when he was Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, wrote in his Journal of a Soul: “Watchful kindness, patience and forbearance get one along much further and more quickly than severity and the rod. I would not mind being thought a fool if this could help people to understand what I firmly believe and shall assert as long as I live, that the Gospel teaching in unalterable and that in the Gospel Jesus teaches us to be gentle and humble; naturally this is not the same as being weak and easy-going. Like John XXIII, most long-lived people have a sense of discipline. This does not mean driving the self despotically but imposing a pattern on the ordinary events of the day. Pope John also had the other qualities needed to age well: a sense of humour, a twinkle in the eye and impishness, and something to live for.

            We do not know all the mixed questionable motives that lie behind our actions. We are not called to know everything or to justify ourselves. Fortunately we are called to lay ourselves and our actions upon the altar. It is only there, where we and our actions are received, blessed, broken and used by Christ our Priest in God’s work that we can speak of good deeds, of humbly rendering to God and his creation.

            Back to the heavy stuff. Properly speaking, sovereign priesthood belongs to the risen Jesus Christ, and to him alone. “There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind – Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” On this the New Testament is adamant. By his offering of himself in life and death, and by virtue of his being forever in an eternal present before God as God and man, he is the eternal High Priest who has made a once-for-all sacrifice.

 Jesus Christ, by the very fact of his Incarnation, is the primordial priest, since the Son of God takes upon himself human nature that includes all created nature. By the Incarnation man and God have a purchase on each other, for Jesus is God turned towards man, and man turned towards God. This is the essence of mediatorship, and comes into play every time the Eucharist is celebrated. Christ is the mediator par excellence.

If you think that you are left out, think of the first man and woman who were placed on this earth precisely to develop and enhance creation, which is what the priestly office is all about. The priesthood of all believers, which is based on their Baptism, demands their services to others, their “living sacrifice” of self to God, the daily attempt to close the gap between the words of prayer and a life that is one seamless prayer. In Baptism the Christian is assimilated to Christ who is priest, prophet and shepherd-king.

 Here is the prayer of a great anthropologist who was alone on the vast grasslands of Asia, without altar, candles, and prayer book; a prayer you can make your own. This prayer is a superb example of an imagination that is eminently catholic and priestly.

PRAYER OF TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

O Lord, since I have neither bread nor wine nor altar here on the Asian steppes, I lift myself, far above symbols, to the pure majesty of the Real; and I, your priest, offer to you, on the altar of the entire earth, the travail and suffering of the world.

Yonder breaks the sun, to light the uttermost east, and then to send its sheets of fire over the living surface of the earth, which wakens, shudders and resumes its relentless struggle.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which, in a moment, will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit.

Amen

(concluded)