The feast of Jesus Christ, Eternal High Priest

Br Reginald reflects on Christ as eternal high priest and how the incarnation fulfills our priestly nature.

Reading: Jer 31:31-34

The following homily was preached to the student brothers during compline. You can watch here or read below:

Tomorrow, we celebrate a fairly new feast: the Feast of Jesus Christ Eternal High Priest, and I spent really the last week thinking about the implications of what it means, that Jesus Christ is not just high priest but eternal high priest, and also the implications that Jesus Christ being eternal high priest, has on us. I was reminded of one story that happened in the past and one question that I’d mused on a few years ago. I’ll start with the story.

There was this one time, when I was a teenager, and I went to Mass. With all due respect to the priest, he didn’t do a very good job; he got the words of consecration muddled up, he forgot a chunk of the mass and at the end he said the mass is just so complicated, I wish Pope Francis would come along and simplify all of it. And I was just sitting in the nave, fuming. Thanks be to God I didn’t do anything to the priest. But I went to my Parish priest (who wasn’t this priest by the way) afterwards, and I said to him, you know, I’m absolutely enraged that this priest would say Mass like this. And he said I completely understand where you’re coming from, but there is one thing that’s worth noting. He said even if you were to get all of the riches in the world; if you were to get the nicest possible music in the nicest possible Basilica; do you really think any of those would be worthy of God? The thing that makes the mass worthy of God is Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. I thought, okay that’s really interesting.

A few years later I think, reading St Catherine of Sienna’s Dialogue, the Father makes a similar point to St Catherine, because St Catherine is here, again enraged looking at the church and how awful things are, and she says to the Father, you know, I wish I could do more, I wish I could fast more, I wish I could suffer more. And the Father looks at her and says do you really think that it’s the things that you’re doing that’s going to do any good? Do you think it’s the things that you’re doing that are going to get forgiveness for people? It’s the infinite love of the Son, as he died on the cross that forgives sins, and we participate in that when we unite ourselves to the infinite Love Of Christ on the cross. So that’s our premise.

The question that I was musing on, is how anthropologically human beings across cultures always seem to have some some aspect of sacrifice. It almost seems as if humans innately have a kind of priestly nature. This for a time distressed me because I thought, well, if we’re made to sacrifice to God then it’s almost as if God made us because he wants us to worship Him. Is God some kind of narcissist? Are we made to submit? Are we made as servants? Are we inherently made to serve God in a kind of submissive way? This didn’t seem right to me. So thinking about this problem this week I realised, well actually, there’s something deeper about what it means to sacrifice that I was missing.

Now sacrifices, yes, they took place to gods they took place to idols, but more fundamentally there’s a sense of giving something up for something that you want. So sacrifice presupposes a sense of seeking for something. Seeking for something presupposes a desire for some kind of good and I dare say we desire something as good because we have some kind of relation to it. I desire more sausages at dinner because I have a relation to food where I enjoy nice sausages. So in a sense I’m driven by a love for delicious food to seek it. Perhaps I would have to sacrifice the comfort of my chair in order to get up and get more sausages! That’s a rather trivial example of this, but the point I’m making is that sacrifice can be as trivial as giving some small thing up for some other good that we’re seeking. This is most manifest in relationships between people: a mother sacrificing for their child; a husband sacrificing for their wife. Love seems to always involve sacrifice. So, if you want to know a little bit more about your culture, if you want to know a little bit more about yourself, perhaps you need to think about what you would sacrifice for. The scriptures say: “where your treasure is, there also is your heart.” What are the treasures that we’re sacrificing for? that we’re willing to sacrifice for?

Now, going a step further we could almost take the scriptures as a pedagogy of teaching us what it means to love, what it means to sacrifice. This story, this lesson that the scriptures are giving us is all to do with our relationship with God, the ultimate good, the thing that we really should be seeking. And so when we read about covenants, when we read about this contractual relationship between God and his people, we are being led on a journey to discover how it is that we can love God and how it is that we can sacrifice to God. Now we also see that the great enemy of our relationship with God in scripture is the worship of idols, and together with this, injustice towards other people. I would say that both of these have their root in two things: one is a falsehood in an understanding of our relationship with God, the second one is a sort of prideful self-indulgence. Now this pedagogy of scripture teaching us the truth about love and sacrifice culminates in the of Christ: Christ who is true God and true man.

Now I think we can think of Christ, already showing us what it is to be priest in the Trinity. The Son receives everything that he is from the Father. He says in John 17, “everything you have given me is from you.” Now Christ knows the Father, is known by the Father. He loves the Father and is the Beloved of the Father. And so, in the Trinity, in this Dynamic relationship of being begotten and in spirating, we see the very archetype of where sacrifice is going to come from, at least in as much as we see love, Infinite charity present in the Trinity.

Now when Christ becomes man taking on our Humanity, sharing it with us, we see this infinite love being manifest in a particular way through time in a particular place. In particular we see it expressed in Christ’s humble obedience, we see it expressed in his selfless poverty and we see it expressed in his love which is always willing to give selflessly. Now by taking on human flesh as St Catherine of Sienna, would say Christ becomes Himself the bridge between our human nature and God. Of course, the Latin “pontifex”- priest is related to bridge building. So Christ as priest is the bridge.

Now I remember hearing a Dominican talking about how Christ’s whole life is an expression of what love looks like. He said that if you were to take love and project it, but you have a broken projector, it looks like the cross. But then, if you fix the projector, and that same love is being projected it looks like the glory of the resurrection. I think that’s something that we should take seriously. The culmination of love, the source of our sacrifices is nothing less than the infinite love which burns as the Trinity; but for us in a fallen world, love takes the form of suffering, it takes the form of sacrifice. We have to choose to say no to things that are bad for us in order to say yes to those things which are really good.

So how does Christ’s death, that infinite charity, become applied to us today? Well that’s through the sacramental life where we become Christ’s body. Now as members of Christ’s body we are vivified by the Spirit: we receive life from the Spirit just as Christ in the Trinity receives life from the Father. The Spirit makes known the fullness of Truth in the Church and so we now know about God as our final good: we no longer have to suffer under the falsehood and ignorance that led to idol worship. Above all, the Spirit fills us with His love because He is the love between the Father and the Son. So we have been taught, by looking at the Life of Christ, by looking at the crucifixion of Christ, by looking at the love of Christ which held him onto the cross, to sacrifice anew- where we too in the Spirit can be led and Sanctified so that we are united in our choices, when we take up our cross daily, to the infinite charity of Christ.

Now Christ is at the right side of the Father, He’s at the bosom of the Father from where he came to make the Father known to us. But he’s carved out a space for His humanity and therefore, in turn, for all of us united to him as his body, the members of his Church.

Christ before he died, in the Gospel of John, prays with the following words the prayer that’s often called the high Priestly prayer: “The glory that you have given me I have given them… I desire that those also whom you have given me may be with me where I am, to see my glory which you have given me because you love me before the foundation of the world.”

So, this is why we are innately sacrificial, innately priestly, innately devotional. Now our nature is fulfilled in the eternal priesthood of the Son-made-man. He has given us His Spirit and we are now adopted as Sons and Daughters of God. We are known by God and we can know God. We are beloved of God and we can love God.

St Augustine says that when God loves us, He loves Himself in us. But I want to be bold and say that due to the Eternal priesthood of Christ, when God loves his Son, He also loves us in the Son.