DIFFICULT QUESTIONS. PRAY FOR DISCERNMENT . . .

I have been reading the second volume of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, on Holy Week, the Passion and the Resurrection, and find it staggering in its intelligence and understanding. I will be putting up a few quotations here from time to time,  but for now I’m just trying to come to terms with what it has made me understand, or understand better.

For example, the Last Supper. While Mark, Matthew and Luke see it as a Passover meal, John does not. Benedict, I think intelligently, agrees with John, as the Jewish authorities themselves at one point say, “We can’t arrest and kill him on the feast” (of Passover) as they were afraid it would cause riots and might in any case be seen as blasphemous. However, as one scholar B cites puts it, Jesus knows he is going to die, and as he is now himself both priest and sacrificial victim, he institutes a new Passover on the night before the old official one. The Last Supper is the institution of the new Passover. And the early Church understood the intense link between the Last Supper and the Resurrection in instituting the “breaking of bread”, i.e. the first Eucharist, on the morning of the Resurrection, i.e. the “first day of the week”, Sunday.

Jesus as “priest and victim both” of a new Passover leads to another thought. Our local parish priest Jean-Kamel regularly insists on the fact that "at your baptism you were made a priest, a prophet, and a king!” He is referring, of course, to 1 Peter 2:9, as well as  Exodus 19:5–6, First Peter 2:4–8, Book of Revelation 1:4–6, 5:6–10, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. He uses this mainly to encourage the congregation to witness and evangelisation (as I said earlier, he is a convert, and an enthusiastic and somewhat charismatic one). It does, though, raise the old question, more urgent in and since Luther, of the “priesthood of all believers”. This is mainly a Protestant concept, yet the Catholic church accepts it also – as long as it doesn’t interfere with the ordained priesthood.

It leads me to two questions. First: if Jesus is priest and victim in his Passover, i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection, is the “priest” that I am also priest and victim in my own little Passover? After all, I shall die, and as a believer I am promised a resurrection. Is that process my own Passover, and part of my imitatio Christi? If so, to be true my Passover, like his, must be in some way and measure for others. Second, if I am by my baptism a priest, does that allow me – for example, in an extreme situation where no ordained priest is present – to consecrate bread and wine and forgive sins? If so, my faith has just taken on a huge new dimension of seriousness and responsibility.

But if the answer to both those questions is No, then what Jean-Kamel tells us is simply a figure of speech, an edifying image. A priest? Well, no. A prophet? Not really. A king? You’re kidding.

This links up with all sorts of other difficult questions, like the ones developed in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; but those will have to wait for another time.