Theology
Posted Saturday, April 05, 2008
"...And share with us in his eternal priesthood."
by John Wm. Houghton
A few weeks ago, I showed one of my classes Jesus Christ Superstar. Like most versions of the show, this one was full of anachronisms, particularly in the costumes. The apostles wore, mostly, jeans and t-shirts, while the Romans were dressed in quasi-Nazi outfits. The Jewish priests were in various kinds of black robes, and Caiaphas had a big square necklace with ornaments dangling off the bottom of it.
At some point in the movie, I suddenly realized the point of that necklace: in some strange way, it represented the breastplate of the High Priest:
You shall set in it four rows of stones. A row of carnelian, chrysolite, and emerald shall be the first row; and the second row a turquoise, a sapphire, and a moonstone; and the third row a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; and the fourth row a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper; they shall be set in gold filigree. There shall be twelve stones with names corresponding to the names of the sons of Israel; they shall be like signets, each engraved with its name, for the twelve tribes. ...So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel in the breastpiece of judgment on his heart when he goes into the holy place, for a continual remembrance before the Lord. (Exodus 28: 17-21, 29, NRSV)
I wouldn’t want to make any bets about whether the costume designer even knew what he or she was dealing with here. It may have just been coincidence. But nonetheless, there in the middle of the video was this one vestige of Aaron’s twelve gems engraved like signets with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.
That strange vestment has countless associations: but the one that comes to mind first for me is a paragraph from The Christian Priest Today (London: SPCK, 1972), which Arthur Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, originally gave as a series of lectures to ordinands.
...Because you are with [God] and near him whose name is love, you will have the people you care for on your heart. In this way adoration turns into “intercession,” the bringing of people and needs and sorrows and joys and causes into the stream of the divine love. Be with God (adoration) with the people on your heart (intercession). It is like Aaron of old who went into the holy of holies wearing a breastplate with jewels representing the tribes of Israel whose priest he was: he went near to God with the people on his heart…”Being with God with the people on your heart” is the meaning of the Divine Office, of the Eucharist and of every part of your prayer and your service of the people. (15)
Two things about this passage strike me as I reread it. One is that definition of intercession as “bringing people and needs and sorrows and joys and causes into the stream of divine love.” The other is the Archbishop’s sweeping incorporation of the whole prayer life of the Church as “being with God with the people on your heart.”
To talk of intercession in terms of entering “the stream of divine love” reaches, it seems to me, right into that center where our prayer is bound up with the inner life of God. Consider the prayer of a squirrel (I was going to say, consider the prayer of an angel, but a squirrel will work for the sake of example). Conscious that he is skiouromorphizing, the squirrel, a woodland Cranmer, humbly addresses the Almighty,
O thou who dost provide both acorns and pine nuts, and movest thy servants the humans to set out field corn in winter: preserve us, we pray, from every peril of ground, branch and wire, and keep us ever under the shadow of thine own most bushy tail.
God, who makes both squirrels and angels so that they may know and adore God to the full extent of their capacity for knowledge and love, delightedly regards this modest wish, and in the sovereign freedom of divinity fulfills it as may be best for the squirrel (Matthew 10:29). In all this the squirrel (or the angel) speaks, naturally enough, as creature to Creator, as a part of this world of dependent being to the self-existent One who is totaliter aliter.
Now compare our eloquent rodent with little Jennie, who, though a child of our time, has nonetheless been Well Brought Up in fulfillment of the promises her sponsors made at her baptism, and, at bedtime, stops texting, removes her iPod Nano, kneels by her bed, and solemnly recites a list of “God blesses,” including on any given day a wide assortment of relatives and friends, living and dead, and a certain number of pets (Jonah 4:11). Surely, this, too, is a focus of God’s delight. Nonetheless, Jennie’s bedside prayer is fundamentally different from the one ascending from the tree branch outside her window. For Jennie does not simply speak to God in the creatureliness she shares with the squirrel and the angel: above and beyond that, she speaks in the human nature which she shares with God the Son incarnate in Christ Jesus. Jennie’s prayer is caught up in the eternal address of the Son to the Father which is itself the Spirit (who prays in and through Jennie, crying out “Abba, Father”); her prayer is part and parcel of the eternal intercession of Christ the High Priest who has entered into the Temple not made with hands, bearing as his breastplate not gems, but our scourged and wounded human flesh. Her prayers, our prayers, are not the prayers of creature to creator, of contingency to self-subsistence. Rather, in the High Priesthood of God Incarnate, they are caught up in the eternal conversation, the dance at the source of being: “the stream of divine love.”
When the Archbishop speaks of “being with God with the people on your heart,” he is stressing in his remarks about pastoral care for these presbtyers-in-training the sacerdotal role they will share with their bishop, like cohenim around the Cohen Gadol, the breastplate-bearing successor of Aaron. But I think His Grace would also have agreed in this case on the sacerdotal role of the laity, simply as members of the Body of Christ. 1 Timothy 2:1, quoted in the beginning of the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church, makes the point: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone” (NRSV). That is, the whole Church, and preeminently the laity who are its first order, has in Christ a priestly role of intercession with respect to the world at large. Christ’s eternal intercession is not for Christians alone, but for the world; and Christians, immersed in that stream of divine love, can do nothing other than give in to its depth and breadth and height which pass both thought and fantasy. This is, indeed, the point of all our worship in whatever form: as adoration draws us more and more into the heart of God, we are more and more caught up into the high priestly self-offering of him whose heart was pierced on the cross.
After Jennie’s godparents said their parts, we all charged her: “Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood” (BCP 308). So she, too, wears Aaron’s breastplate, and carved on its gems like signets of carnelian, chrysolite and emerald are the names of Mommy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa and Bobby and Mrs. Miller and “all those who, in this transitory life, are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity.” Amen.
The Rev. John Houghton, Ph.D., is Chaplain at the Hill School in Pottstown. A Fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation, his academic specialties are the Bible commentaries of St. Bede the Venerable and the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. He is the author of Rough Magicke, a fantasy novel, and of Falconry and Other Poems.