Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

We hear, in the Epistle today, a discussion of the priesthood of Christ. A priest, primarily, is one who makes sacrifices on behalf of the people. In some forms of priesthood we see priests offering sheep or goats or oxen. In our own tradition, the priest offers a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving — the sacrifice of the Eucharist — in which we offer, in addition to bread and wine, as the Eucharistic prayer says, “our selves, souls, and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.” This is why church’s have Altars — because Altars are the place where sacrifices are made.

Christ is referred to as “our great high priest.” The Eucharistic prayer says of his sacrifice that he is the one “who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction…” For those who attend 7:45 or many of our weekday services, that language will be familiar. In our curt, clipped contemporary way of writing, this seems a wordy and dense sentence. And it is!

It is full of the theology of just what Christ gave, in making the sacrifice of himself upon the Altar of the Cross. The sentence is actually remarkable in its dense consolidation of so much of our theology.

Christ offered himself — chose to make that offering. That offering was a perfect one and is all that we need for all time and needed only to happen once. It was an oblation, which means something was truly given up and lost, as he died on the cross. And it was a satisfaction — it satisfied all the requirements of all the myriad kinds of sacrifices that were once made for sins at Altars across time. It satisfied all of the debts of humanity.

Our Eucharist is a participation in that sacrifice. We are called to add to it our own gifts and to add our praise and thanksgiving. What we do at the Altar is take part, by receiving Christ in Bread and Wine, in the sacrifice Christ made of himself. The priest, in the moment, stands as two things. He or she stands as Christ extending grace and mercy and he or she stands on behalf of the gathered people, offering our gifts and our thanks and praise. Our gifts are added to Christ’s and made new signs of grace in an unending cycle of grace and gratitude.

The priesthood of Christ is an immensely comforting thing. He has done all that we could ask and more than we can possibly imagine in his sacrifice of himself. He has done all of those so that the blood of birds, goats, and sheep need never be shed in an attempt to plea for mercy. By going to the Cross, as the lamb who was slain, he took upon himself all the wrong we could do, and showed us all the love God has for us despite it.

So when we hear of the priesthood of Christ today, let us give thanks for the gift of himself once offered. Let us be thankful that it is a full and sufficient mercy. Let us rejoice that he is our great high priest. For now we are simply charged with offering our own small sacrifice of thanks and praise for all that flows from that Altar, the Cross, to us now and always. We simply come bearing our selves, souls, and bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, as we strive, day by day, to be worthy of the promises of Christ.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert

The image below is from a Lutheran church and shows Christ from the Cross vested as a priest in the traditional manner (you will see the chasuble and stole as well as the maniple on his arm).