Seeing the Father
20 April 2008
Did your spine tingle a little, and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, when you heard this morning’s second reading? I hope so. For listening to that passage of Scripture puts us very close to the experience of early Christians gathered to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord. Much of the first Epistle of St Peter is composed of material that is drawn from homilies or addresses delivered to the newly baptised: and it was at Easter that our fathers in the faith celebrated the rites of Christian initiation, the holy mysteries of baptism, anointing, and the first reception of the Sacraments. Easter is the Lord’s Passover: Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, passes through death to life eternal; and by virtue of our baptism, we are given a share in what Jesus has done. No wonder that Eastertide is the proper season for making new Christians, and no wonder that the liturgies of this great fifty days are so redolent with baptismal imagery, with the language of new birth and new life. Our Western emphasis on the Cross – and on the season of Lent – can blind us to the centrality of Eastertide in the Christian life. It is a fifty day festival, in which – according to Orthodox canons – both fasting, and kneeling in church, are forbidden.
How, then, does the author of 1 Peter address these newly baptised Christians; and how, likewise, do we find ourselves named and described? They – and we – are a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood: as well as a chosen race, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. But stay for a moment with the holy or royal priesthood. Those who have been baptised, those who have passed over with Christ from death to life are, collectively, called priests; and the Greek word is the same as that used to denote both the levitical priesthood of the Old Covenant, and the High Priesthood of Christ: hiereus. The other word in the New Testament which comes to be translated as ‘priest’ is, of course, presbyter: and here we get into a great muddle. When Protestants speak, polemically, about the priesthood of all believers, what they really mean is the presbyterate of all believers: in other words, they want to argue that the Christian dispensation admits of no distinctive ministries – and certainly not a ministerial priesthood – and that the Christian community must not be hierarchically ordered. But what the New Testament says, as we find in 1 Peter and also in the Revelation of St John the Divine, is that the whole people of God together is priestly: that is, it is called to offer sacrifice – as the levitical priesthood did of old – save that in our case, it is to be the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, the unbloody sacrifice, which finds its perfection in this liturgical rite in which together we are engaged: the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is why (even if we haven’t yet woken up to the new term), hearing the first letter of Peter read liturgically must be a little bit thrilling. If we are a royal priesthood, then here is our royal charter, here is our mandate to be a liturgical people, a worshipping people, a people distinguished by our participation in the sacrifices of the new covenant. Ye choirs of new Jerusalem, we sang just now in the words of the eleventh century Chartreuse schoolmaster and bishop, and that’s us, too: we – all of us, not just that lot at the back – we are the choirs of the new Jerusalem, the heavenly places, to which (as the Collect for Ascension Day will teach us) we have already followed Our Lord in heart and mind, and where hereafter we shall dwell everlastingly.
A priestly people, called to offer sacrifice of worship to God. As the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann has written, ‘‘All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man distinguishing him from other creatures have their focus and ultimate fulfilment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitute his life. ‘Homo Sapien,’ ‘Homo Faber’ the wise man, man the maker…yes, but first of all, ‘Homo adorans.’ The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest.’’ While the animal world – indeed the whole of creation – might be said to worship its Creator through the sheer fact of existence, humanity alone is endowed with the gift of consciously offering such adoration. It is not merely by chance that the Creed of St Athanasius begins – or very nearly – by telling us that the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship…
Of course, our corporate priestly character, our ability to be those ‘choirs of New Jerusalem,’ depends entirely on our participation in the worship which the Jesus offers to the Father, perfected on the Cross and proclaimed as wholly acceptable in the Resurrection. And the offering of Jesus to the Father is, in turn, only decisive – and offers us the possibility of becoming that royal priesthood of which St Peter speaks – if Jesus is God as well as man, so that the offering of the Cross is the sacrifice – the worship – of God to God. Our worship, our configuration as the royal priesthood, depends on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Here we can turn to the Gospel of St John, and the justly familiar and resonant text which we have heard this morning. We need to listen to it with the Book of Exodus in mind. There, we read how Moses asked God for his name, and received the answer enshrined in the (barely translatable) Tetragrammaton, ‘I am who I am.’ There we read also that the same Moses who asked to know God’s name later asked that he might see Him, only to be told that none could see God’s face and live: and Moses is allowed only a glimpse of the Lords’ back as he passes by. We have already, in St John’s Gospel, (and in St John’s Gospel among all the Gospels par excellence) been led to see that the God of Moses whose sacred Name is (literally) unspeakable can be named Father; and we have been further led to associate the I AM of Mount Sinai with Jesus, who has said to the disciples ‘I AM the bread of life…the light of the world…the resurrection and the life,’ and now, ‘the way, and the truth, and the life.’ And now also, in response to Philip’s question, Our Lord not only takes to himself God’s name, but God’s face: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father.’ Father and Son are one. God has taken to himself not generalised human nature, but humanity visibly, concretely existing in one specific human being: Jesus Christ. It is only this which can make sense of those other words which Our Lord speaks in today’s Gospel: ‘no one comes to the Father but by me.’ That is not a piece of polemic about the ‘exclusive’ claims of Christianity against other faiths, Moslems, say, or Hindus: that would, in any case, be a meaninglessly anachronistic way to use this text. Rather, it unfolds the mystery of humanity and divinity being united, without confusion or separation, in the one person Jesus Christ, through whom alone our human nature can be raised to a participation in the divine.
So we might return to our anointing as the Royal and Holy Priesthood of the New Covenant, our commission to sing the songs of New Jerusalem. As Christ who is both God and Man offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice, the perfect act of worship, to the Father, so we are to offer, in Him and through Him, our sacrifices of praise, perfected in the Eucharist. Yet our worship does not exhaust, but rather gathers up, that priestly ministry which all Christians must exercise. If a priest is one called to offer sacrifice to God, then we know that the sacrifice acceptable to God is that demonstrated equally in what St John Chrysostom famously called the two altars of sacrifice, the altar of stone in the sanctuary, and the altar of the poor outside. To be the Royal Priesthood of the New Covenant means to be orientated as much to that second altar as to the first. Neither can we neglect the fact that the Christian priesthood of all the baptised is exercised on behalf of all creation, via a participation in him ‘through whom all things were made,’ to present that entire creation to its Creator with thanksgiving, both within and beyond the Liturgy: as Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical on the Eucharist, Cenae Dominae (1980), the Eucharist is ‘a true sacrifice which brings all creation back to God.’ This exercise of priesthood will encompass both the proper stewardship of that creation, and the orientation of music, art, language and architecture to the glory of God.
You are a royal priesthood. How must those words have sounded to the new initiates into the Christian mysteries: a few perhaps, women and men, who had met secretly, and over many months, and in the face of persecution; and whose journey had ended in nakedness, in immersion in the waters of rebirth, in anointing with oil, we might well believe, from head to toe, and in being clothed with the white garments of the saints. This Eastertide, this term, this year: can we make them our own?
The Principal