The simultaneous appearance this year of the beginning of Hannukah and the fourth Sunday of Advent invites Christians to reflect on our Jewish roots. St. Paul’s arboreal image in Romans 11 comes to mind: the wild branch of Christianity is grafted to and nourished by the tree of Judaism.
A preponderant element of our Jewish heritage is the sacerdotal system, a gift which is poorly understood and inadequately appreciated by so many of us. The sacerdotal system refers to the priesthood. The word itself comes from the Latin sacerdotalis which derives from the two Latin words sacer and dare meaning, respectively, sacred and to give. A priest, or sacerdos, is an offerer of sacred gifts.
In Old Testament times the Jewish priesthood functioned at the Temple and offered animal sacrifices to God. In the New Testament Jesus is both the High Priest who offers the sacrifice and the lamb (‘Lamb of God’) who is sacrificed for the sins of the world. At the last supper, the Passover feast he celebrated with his apostles the night before he died, Jesus identified the bread and wine as his body and blood which would be visibly sacrificed the next day on the cross on Calvary. It is the self-sacrifice of Jesus that redeems the world. The Eucharist is the ongoing, unbloody sacrifice of Calvary – the ongoing redemption of the world.
So, where does the sacerdotal system fit in and why is it under appreciated?
The Church describes the Eucharist as the ‘source and summit of the Christian life’. As the Catechism states (CCC 1325): The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit”. Priests make this possible.
Two canons in the Canon Law elucidate this:
“The celebration of the Eucharist is the action of Christ himself and the Church; in it Christ the Lord, by the ministry of a priest, offers Himself, substantially present under the forms of bread and wine, to God the Father and gives Himself as spiritual food to the faithful who are associated with His offering” (Canon 899), and “The minister, who in the person of Christ can confect the sacrament of the Eucharist, is solely a validly ordained priest” (Canon 900).
So many of us misunderstand and therefore fail to appreciate the Eucharist. We consider it mere symbolism and are ignorant of its ongoing salvific reality. We fail to accept that the consecrated bread and wine Christ gave to his apostles the night before he died is the same we receive in the Eucharist consecrated by Christ through the ministry of a priest and that this is the ongoing sacrifice by which the world is redeemed. We erroneously make no distinction between ‘priest’ and ‘minister’.
How great our gratitude should be to priests for enabling our participation in this divine mystery.
On behalf of the trustees of the National Catholic Community Foundation, a joyous Christmas and blessed Hannukah to all.