“You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

 Homily for the London Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests

18 November 2021

Votive Mass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Eternal High Priest

 

Laurent de La Hyre  (1606–1656): The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

From the tabernacle of the Capuchin convent in the Marais, Paris.

Eucharistic Lectionary: 1 Maccabees 2.15-29; Luke 19.41-44

One of the, I think, weirdest arguments I have ever heard against the ordination of women came from a former priest of the US Episcopal Church, a woman, who had renounced her orders and joined one of the continuing churches. She had come to the conclusion that the essence of priesthood was offering sacrifice, that is, killing things – and killing things was the business of men.

For a less impoverished theology of the priesthood of Christ, and therefore of the Church, we need to look more closely at the New Testament. In particular, it is the Letter to the Hebrews which is the exposition par excellence of the priesthood of Christ, of the way in which he is a priest, and what his priesthood means:

“You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

That is Hebrews 5.6, quoting Psalm 110, which in turn looks back to Genesis 14. These are the only places in the Bible where Melchizedek appears, but, for the author of Hebrews, he is critical to understanding the priestly ministry of Christ.

Hebrews does of course go on quite a bit about the priesthood of Aaron, the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the sprinkling of blood and the rite of atonement. But after all these elaborate analogies the point, in the end, is that the priesthood of Christ is not like that.

The Aaronic priesthood offers blood that is not its own (Hebrews 9.25); indeed, the origin of the priesthood, according to Exodus 32, is in an act of savage violence: after the Sons of Levi had slaughtered 3,000 Israelites for worshipping the golden calf, Moses says to them, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother.” A scene which has echoes in today’s reading from Maccabees, and its assumption that sacred violence is the correct response to people worshipping in the wrong way. But which contrasts with Our Lord’s lament over Jerusalem because the ways of peace were hidden from its eyes.

Christ’s priesthood is radically different from that. It arises from a different source, not by descent but by virtue of a life that cannot die, a priesthood not like that of Aaron but like that of Melchizedek.

The figure of Melchizedek just pops up in Genesis without explanation. He has no ancestry or later story attached to him, which enables the author of Hebrews to stress that he is literally “a priest for ever”. What Hebrews does not mention, but perhaps simply takes as read, is the kind of offering that Melchizdek makes: not blood sacrifices, but simply bread and wine.

And, if it is correct that the first Christians read the epistles with the other scriptures at their gathering to celebrate the Eucharist, then the connection between the Eucharist and the priesthood of Melchizedek would have been obvious. Indeed, Melchizedek is there in the Roman Canon, parts of which are very ancient indeed; Aaron is not.

But the unique nature of the priesthood of Christ is something that needs to be stressed again and again. The work of René Girard uncovered how sacred violence tends to evolve in human societies and becomes veiled in myth, its threat contained in regulated cults of sacrifice. Christ, by his offering of himself on the cross, blows open the whole disguise of myth and shows what has really been going on all the time.

In spite of that, human beings tend to revert to type. Our original flaw needs a lifetime of grace and more to be healed. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the Church can tend to forget the unique nature of Christ’s priesthood, and seek to re-establish cults of sacrifice in its place.

This has been going on from the beginning. After the Last Supper, St Peter clearly understands that he has just been ordained as some sort of priest, because the first thing he does is to try and kill someone. He has perhaps missed the clue, that Jesus, in ordaining the Apostles, had handed them bread and wine: the priestly sign of Melchizedek, not of Levi.

It doesn’t take much thought to identify ways in which the Church today can slip into imagining itself as a priesthood which offers blood that is not its own. In the appalling crimes of clerical abuse. In the ways in which the broken Clergy Discipline Measure still blights the lives of so many. In the seemingly endless recognition of, but failure to deal with, misogyny, institutional racism, and homophobia.

As priests, this gives us I think a particular call to be continually discerning the nature of our priesthood. Which is, of course, the priesthood of Christ, shared with his Body which is the whole Christ, and given particular expression in the ordination of its ministers.

This priesthood is radically different. The bread and wine given to us to carry are the signs of a subversive peace-making that, because they come from the Lord, will continually probe and expose our complicity with the structures of sacred violence. And, as this is the priesthood of Christ, it is both prophetic and costly for those who exercise it. But, because it is the priesthood of Christ, it is the means of the redemption of the world, and of the Church, from all the violence that, in spite of its persistence, is not of God.