Being a Priest Today. Rosalind Brown

Chrysostom was quite clear on the personal qualities needed for this priestly life. John attempts to explain to his very dear friend Basil why he felt utterly unable to join him in being ordained. John and Basil were both monks. They knew that the Church wanted to ordain them but John was sure that he was not ready to serve the Church in this way, at least at this time. The problem was that he could not bring himself to tell Basil. Convinced that his hesitation would undermine Basil’s sense of vocation, John pretends to go along with the plan to be ordained but when members of the local church come to collect them he makes himself very scarce, leaving Basil to be ordained alone. Basil is heartbroken at the deceit but vows never to force John to justify himself. Nevertheless, John is keen to try to show Basil both why he could not go through with it and why he was sure that it was right for Basil to be ordained. ‘Do you know the power of love?’, he asks Basil. ‘Yes I do,’ responded Basil. He knew that love worked, even if he also knew that he had ‘not performed the half of it’. John tells him that ‘this choice virtue, the badge of the disciples of Christ, which is higher than the spiritual gifts, was, I saw, nobly implanted in your spirit and laden with much fruit’.26 John then goes on to recount a recent story of Basil standing by a friend who had been wrongfully accused and so exposing himself to great personal risk. Basil cannot deny the incident and confesses to John, ‘I know no other form of love than to be willing to sacrifice my own life when one of my friends who is in danger needs to be saved’. This is enough to prove John’s case. After reminding him of Jesus’ saying, that ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:13), he says to Basil, ‘If no greater love than this can be found, you have already reached the height of it, and both by your deeds and your words you have stood on love’s summit’.27

      The power of love is the essence of Jesus’ priesthood and the fundamental calling of the Church. The marks of people’s readiness to serve Christ in the presbyteral ministry are the depth of their desire to see the Church realize its calling and the consistency of their commitment to help it to do so by the power of love: ‘I, therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called’ (Ephesians 4:1). This desire and commitment for the forming of Christ’s life in his people lies at the heart of the presbyteral ministry. In the Anglican rite, the bishop says on behalf of the people, ‘We trust that . . . you are fully determined, by the grace of God, to . . . grow up into [Christ’s] likeness, and sanctify those with whom you have to do’. This expresses well the dynamic of the presbyter’s calling to be an example to the people of God. Presbyters are called to be holy as every Christian is called to be holy but the particular quality of their calling has a priestly dimension. They are called to be holy so that others may be holy. They are to be enabling examples, activators as well as indicators of the Church’s true being and life. In sacramental language, they are not just signs of the priestly identity of the Church but effectual signs of its priestly life, catalysts as well as paradigms. They are to effect what they signify, means of grace which God uses to form his people into that which Christ has initiated them: one, holy, catholic and apostolic royal priesthood declaring in word and deed, in praise and prayer, the mighty acts of God before the world (1 Peter 2:9). Presbyters are called to be animators of the priestly people of God, tools in the hand of Christ by which he draws his people more fully into his life and fashions his image in them:

See that you never cease your labour, your care and diligence, until you have done all that lieth in you, according to your bounden duty, to bring all such are or shall be committed to your charge, unto that agreement in the faith and knowledge of God, to that ripeness and perfectness of age in Christ, that there be no place left among you, either for error in religion, or for viciousness in life.28

By placing the ordained in this particular relationship to other members of the people of God – a relationship of pastoral responsibility for the priestly fulfilment of the people of God – the Church is, at the same time, placing the ordained in a par-ticular vocational relationship to Christ. This is not to deny Lightfoot’s principle that ‘the priesthood of the ministry springs from the priesthood of the whole body’. It is simply to say that one way the priesthood of the whole body acknowledges its dependence upon the discipling and training of Christ is by appointing some of its members to watch over the Church with the eyes of Christ and to see that it grows into what it is called to be. The vocation of presbyters is to ‘to serve Christ the Teacher, Priest, and Shepherd in his ministry which is to make his own body, the Church, grow into the people of God, a holy temple’.29

      The concentrated priestly ministry of the presbyter

The priestly ministry of presbyters finds its most intensive form in those focused moments when they are entrusted, as Lightfoot put it, with ‘the performance of certain sacerdotal functions belonging properly to the whole congregation’.30 Martin Luther, the great sixteenth-century reformer and passionate advocate of the priesthood of all believers, used to talk of the ‘common priesthood’ of all the faithful appointing the ‘called priesthood’ of the ordained to act in its name. This notion of the ordained priest being – as the catholic Anglicans, Charles Gore and Robert Moberly contended – organs of the priestly people, through whom the body operates at particular times and in particular ways, seems to run across the traditions. Richard Baxter, a leading Puritan of the seventeenth century and author of the pastoral classic The Reformed Pastor, told the clergy who gathered at his regular conferences that:

Another part of our work is to guide our people, and be as their mouth in the public prayers of the Church, and the public praises of God: as also to bless them in the name of the Lord. This sacerdotal part of the work is not the least. A great part of God’s service was wont in all ages to the Church to consist in public praises and eucharistical acts in Holy Communion.31

      The Church agrees that for some purposes it will shape itself like an hour glass. It determines, for example, that in certain of its liturgical actions it will concentrate its priestly prerogative to mediate the forgiveness of God on to one person, who speaks this word of forgiveness so that the people can be freed to minister reconciliation in their relationships with each other and through their life in the world.

      The danger, of course, with this image is that it could imply that the local congregation is the repository of the priesthood of the whole. In fact, the local church is a local manifestation of the one Church and part of the priest’s role as a sign of the catholicity of the Church is to represent the priesthood of the whole Church. This is one reason why priests are ordained by bishops whose ministry of oversight over various congregations connects them with each other. Hence, the blessing a priest pronounces over a congregation is not part of a collusive circle of self- congratulation. Its authority is not derived from this particular congregation, even though the ministry of a priest in any one place requires a delicate ecology of care and consent between priest and people. The blessing is the voice of Christ spoken through the whole Church to the expression of the Church in this place. It is Christ, through one part of his body, speaking words of peace and strength to another.

      This focused form of the ‘priesthood of the presbyteral order’ is keenly felt in one’s ministry beyond the life of the immediate congregation. Although funerals, marriages and certainly baptisms are very much actions of the Church that properly involve more ministries than the priest’s, it is possible as a priest to find the priestly calling of the Church to commend the departed to God, bring the joining of the betrothed to each other before God and welcome a child into the family of God concentrated in your words and gestures, your presence and person. This is even more likely in the sort of quasi-sacramental action which we are called upon to perform because in some way we are identified with, or even as, the Church – house-blessings, naming ceremonies, prayers – in that quaint liturgical expression – on ‘various occasions’, ranging from the death of a pet to the opening of a sports