Wednesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 313

It is even more obvious if another priest is raised up after the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become so, not by a law expressed in a commandment concerning physical descent

but by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed.

Hollywood sort-of gets it. The priest, half-naked, painted with blood, dancing amok, is possessed by divine power and mediates both blessings and curses upon those around him. That’s a far cry from the pastor who sits with the parish council, tells stories to second-graders, goes bowling with the KCs, inspects the church hall with a contractor, and tries to keep his congregation awake on Sunday morning. Since the Protestant Reformation Catholics have been reluctant to speak of their priest as mediator of God’s mercies. Christians in general welcome Jesus as mediator; why should there be another? Some Catholics might thrill to Mary as mediatrix;; but they only recognize the priest as mediator when they have to go to confession. The problem, however, given that prejudice: many Christians might never discover their mission and responsibility as priests-mediators.

Melchizedek, as the Letter to the Hebrews recognizes, is a shadowy figure appearing vaguely at the very edge of our collective memory, almost prehistoric. A friend of the Patriarch Abraham, he was the king and priest of Salem, the city which would become Jerusalem. He appears in Genesis without ancestry or progeny, to bless Abraham upon his recent victory. His birth is not recorded; his death is not remembered; he seems to abide in Jerusalem eternally, as a deathless spiritual presence.

That priestly spirit rested on the Levite priests for a thousand years, residing in Solomon’s Temple. But the Temple’s curtain was mysteriously torn in two when Jesus was crucified. That rent cloth signified the end of the Levite priesthood. When the Romans razed the Temple in 70 AD, the Jewish priesthood disappeared altogether. Only the rabbis survived to tell the story.

The Letter to the Hebrews, recognizing the catastrophe in Jerusalem, declares that the priestly spirit of Melchizedek has now settled upon Jesus. He alone mediates God's mercies.

I wonder if that didn’t come as a surprise to some first century Jewish Christian scholars. They would have known Jesus as the “Son of David,’ not “son of Levi.” Some might recognize a Levite connection in Jesus’ enate ancestry; Mary’s cousin Elizabeth was married to the priest Zechariah. But that would not carry much weight in Jewish thought. The Letter to the Hebrews runs an end around the problem of Jesus’ royal lineage, declaring that the Spirit of Melchizedek has descended upon Jesus without any genealogical connection. It simply resided for a millennia in Jerusalem and the Temple until That Day when the Lord was crucified.

So there is the story of Jesus as priest. The matter of “Chaplain Ken Bartsch as priest” is another story, one which Hebrews does not address. The Church did not honor its leaders as priests in that first century. But at the moment I am more interested in the 21st century Church and its membership as the priestly presence in the world.

Because we are baptized into his death and resurrection, we are the mediators of God’s mercy to a troubled world. We are the face of God in the world; we are his sacred presence, especially as we do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with our God. Our prayers are the prayer of Jesus for his people, who are like sheep without a shepherd. The Lord inspires our neighborliness, courtesy, civic participation (including military service) and innate sense of justice. Our fidelity as husbands, wives, parents and children provide a confused, distracted and frightened world with clear models of what God requires of his own image and likeness. Likewise, when the disappointed grumble, "Where is God when I need him?" they are asking, "Where is the Church?" 

But the priesthood of the Church did not begin with Melchizedek or Abraham. It begins in the Word who was with God and is God eternally. It remains forever, as the scriptures insist: "You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek!"