Our Great High Priest
25 October 2009
THE image of the Suffering Servant, highlighted in the reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning, is central to our understanding of the high priesthood of Christ, and our understanding of our own priesthood: both the ministerial priesthood of those ordained to Holy Orders, and the priesthood we all share and we all express as disciples and contemporary apostles of Christ. Priesthood, yours and mine, is a ministry of service, service to God and service to his people, lived through the Cross: “Take up your cross and follow me,” were his words to his first disciples and they are his words to us today. That cross is not a burden, it is not a thankless imposition, not a difficult relationship or personal neurosis. Rather, it is a symbol of atonement, that being at one with Christ that he achieved on the Cross, a symbol of forgiveness, of grace, of liberation, and of love.
The image of the Suffering Servant developed in Isaiah reaches its conclusion in the Passion of Christ. The prophecy is fulfilled, the shadow is given substance, the figure is made real. The meaning of Christ’s messianic kingship and of his priesthood is revealed fully only when he is raised high on the Cross. His kingship is revealed in his crown of thorns and his priesthood is accomplished in that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Foreshadowed in Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi: “You are the Christ,” on the Cross is witnessed the perfect identity of the transcendent Son of Man who came down from heaven, and the accomplishment of the mission of his humanity as the Suffering Servant, the redemption and salvation of man.
“For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” It is by that obedience to the will of his heavenly Father that Jesus accomplished his mission as the Suffering Servant by making himself, as an expression of his free will, an offering for sin, and expiation for sin, which “he bore for the sin of many.” “He shall bear our iniquities,” prophesised Isaiah, “whereby he will make many to be accounted righteous.” Jesus atoned for our faults and he made a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for our sins to the Father on the Cross. Jesus’ redemptive death fulfils Isaiah’s prophecy and the teaching and meaning of the Cross.
On the Cross we see Jesus perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity: truly God and truly man; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity, consubstantial with us as to his humanity; begotten of the Father before all ages as to his divinity, born of the Virgin Mary as to his humanity. That is what the Council of Chalcedon set out in the doctrine that we know as the hypostatic union: Jesus fully God and fully man, fully divine and fully human. The Cross is the articulation of the unique sacrifice of Christ because here in his incarnate divine person he has united himself to man, to everyman, and has opened for us “the possibility of being made partners … in the Paschal Mystery” of his Passion, Death and Resurrection.
We see in Christ’s Baptism at the beginning of his active earthly ministry and mission, his willing acceptance as the Suffering Servant of the lot of fallen, suffering humanity, of our human condition. Christ allows himself to be numbered among the sinners to be baptised by John the Baptist. Although without sin, he, with them was washed in the waters of Baptism. And so he anticipates the baptism of his entry into glory washed in the Blood of his Passion.
John the Baptist recognised this destiny when he saw Jesus and pointed him out as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” – the Lamb without blemish, the pure, spotless, immaculate Lamb of sacrifice. He foresees that Jesus is, at the same time, the Suffering Servant who silently allows himself to be led to the slaughter, and who bears the sins of the multitudes, and also the Paschal Lamb, the symbol of Israel’s redemption at the first Passover, the sign and seal of our redemption. Christ’s whole life, encapsulated in his years of ministry, expresses his mission to the Cross, the Via Dolorosa, “to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” to suffer for us, to give up his Body for us, to pour out his Blood as a libation for us.
In his human heart, Jesus embraced his Father’s love for humankind and Jesus loved them, loved us, to the end: for “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In his suffering and death Christ’s perfect humanity became the perfect instrument of his divine love which brought salvation to us all. It is out of his perfect love for humankind, and out of his perfect love for his Father, that Jesus accepted his Passion and Death: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” There was vulnerability in that humanity. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when he asks the Father “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” Jesus is vividly aware of the horror that death represented for his human nature. Like ours, his human nature is destined for eternal life, although, unlike ours, perfectly exempt from sin. By submitting himself to the Father’s will, by accepting in his human will that the Father’s will be done, Jesus fulfils his divine mission of redemption achieved and accomplished through his death. For “he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”
In Jesus on the Cross we look upon the supreme, the great high priest: we have there a high priest capable of understanding our weaknesses and failings, one tempted in every way but never wavering and falling into sin, tempted as we are but unsinning; that understanding of the human predicament leads to mercy and grace. Hanging on the Cross Jesus is the head of our redeemed humanity. From there he calls us to take up our cross, to embrace his way, and to follow him so that our individual lives mirror his life, mirror the life of Christ: the Christ that suffered for us, leaving us an example so that we should follow in his steps, stepping out in faith and hope and love on the self-same path of service and sacrifice. From the Cross he bids us to follow the road of Christian vocation and discipleship, to pursue our priestly vocation.
We are a priestly people; we all have a priestly vocation in emulation of the life of service exemplified to perfection by Christ. Within that priesthood some are called out of the community of Faith to the ministerial priesthood through the Sacrament of Holy Order, to embody in a particular and indelible way that office of service which Christ committed to the pastors of his faithful people. That Sacrament of Holy Order confers, irrespective of the personal qualities of the individual priest, or more often the lack of them, confers an authority that is of Christ himself but an authority that must always be measured against the model of Christ himself who out of love made himself the least and the servant of all: something the disciples learn in this morning’s Gospel. The scrabbling for the best seats in glory by James and John, the sons of Zebedee, which precedes the section we heard earlier is what results in Jesus’ gentle admonition that the first among the disciples must be the servant of all because Jesus did not come to be served but to serve.
It is here, in our identification with the Cross, that our mutual priesthood finds its most complete and fulfilled expression. Calvary is the triumph of suffering. Calvary is neither an imaginary nor a mythic creation: it is historical reality in all its noise and drama, its physicality, its flesh and blood reality. It does not represent the sin and sorrow of the world, it does not merely illustrate their meaning: rather, its sums up, it encapsulates within itself all the sins and shadows of the world. It does not remind us merely of the torments and horrors the world and mankind has endured: it includes them, they tear at his flesh. It does not merely illustrate the injustices and the intolerance of the world: it contains them. Calvary is the Mass and the Mass is Calvary in its physical reality and in its Real Presence, the Body broken and the Blood spilled. The Mass does not represent the divine Sacrifice: it is that Sacrifice brought before us, re-presenting today what was divinely confected for all time two thousand yesterdays ago. The Mass is not a folk memory: it is the anamnesis, the re-presentation of a past reality in the immediacy of the present. The Mass is not the action of a priest: it is the action of Christ, priest and victim. The Mass is not an intimation of love, not an apprehension of love, not a substitution for love: it is the sacrament of love, the love of God in Christ Jesus spilled out into the world and into our lives, as the Blood and water flowed from his stricken side. In this Mass, as in every Mass, as we receive Christ reverently in our hands or lightly and courteously on the tongue, we embrace the Cross, suffering transformed and transfigured into love: we embrace the assurance of forgiveness: we embrace the liberation from the oppression of sin: we embrace, in that disc of divine encounter, and we celebrate the inevitability of love.
Fr William Davage