In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
First of all, I want to say what an honor it was for me when Michael asked if I would preach today – and I want to thank him, and to thank all of you.
I would like to begin by posing this question: what are priests for? Priests do all sorts of things, as I’ve learned in the few years that I have been one. Priests visit and minister to people at every stage of life, from the delivery room to the deathbed; they share in every joy and every sorrow of human existence. They visit nursing homes and prisons, they give out alms to the needy and food to the hungry, and sometimes they have the sad task of turning away the hungry and needy when the alms and the food run out. Priests pray and teach; they lead people in worshiping God; they counsel sinners. It never occurred to me as I was preparing for ordination, but priests also become intimately acquainted with the tediousness of life. Priests manage and administer and host. They make photocopies and prepare budgets; they cook meals and mix drinks; they sweep floors, arrange furniture, change light bulbs, polish silver – and a million other things that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.
These are all aspects of a normal priest’s existence. But what are priests FOR? After all, one doesn’t have to be a priest to visit the sick, to give out alms and food, to run photocopiers or mix drinks. Our Prayer Book also makes it clear that you don’t HAVE TO be a priest to anoint the sick, preside at a wedding, or hear a confession (though, its true, you must be a priest to absolve the penitent). Under some circumstances a deacon or a layman may even minister communion to the faithful. But there is one thing that only a priest may do, from the earliest days of Christianity to today, and that is the central fact and the central act of Christian life: only a priest may offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood. THAT is what a priest is for. As Jesus said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” Dom Gregory Dix put it very well. He asked:
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
THAT is what a priest is for. That is why his hands are anointed and that is the task to which he is set: as the Lord himself said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” And this action is the wellspring of grace from which flows everything else, every other facet of Christian ministry, for laymen and clergy alike: the acceptable offering of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ to the Father for the remission of sins.
From this fact we may draw an important inference, and it is this: PRIESTHOOD DOES NOT BELONG TO MICHAEL COVER. It does not belong to Will Brown, or to Paul Lambert or to Pope Benedict. Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ, and to him alone, because he alone among human beings offered himself acceptably to the Father – with every ounce of his being, with every breath he took, at every moment of his existence, the life and death of Jesus was perfectly conformed to his loving communion with the Father. And this means that he lived a life and died a death that was perfectly empowered by the Holy Spirit because, as St. Augustine says, “the Holy Spirit IS [that] unutterable communion of the Father and the Son…. [And] In order, therefore, that the communion of [Father and Son] may be signified from a name which is suitable to both, the Holy Spirit is called the gift of both. And this Trinity is one God, alone, good, great, eternal, omnipotent; itself its own unity, deity, greatness, goodness, eternity, omnipotence.” (De Trinitate, Book V, Ch. 11)
And this in turn is why we will invoke the Holy Spirit – when we sing Veni Creator Spiritus, and through the laying on of apostolic hands – because it is only by the Holy Spirit that “the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father” (ibid. Book XV, Ch. 19) may be ineffably demonstrated; and THIS is the job of the priest at every mass: To show forth this eternal, divine, all-powerful love, which bubbles out (cf. Meister Eckhart) from the inner life of the Holy Trinity in an ecstasy of creation and redemption.
Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ alone because Jesus Christ demonstrated this ecstatic, all-conquering love ALONE – for three hours, amid darkness and earthquake, at the place of a skull. In this place, on the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus, in his theanthropic solitude, cut off even from the tightest bonds of the love of his all-holy Mother, Jesus Christ broke the power of selfishness, envy, violence, corruption and rot; and there, from the depths of his woundedness, in water and blood, drove out the ruler of this world and demonstrated himself to be the earth’s Judge and the Lord of heaven. Here, on the nuptial bed of the cross, Jesus opened a new way for us, through his sacred heart, to the communion of mutual delight that is his alone, forever and by right, together with the Father.
It is this power acceptably to offer the body and blood of Jesus, which breaks down the dividing walls of hostility (Eph. 2.14) erected by human pride – it is this power of the cross that is being given to Michael today – the power to celebrate the memory of God’s only Son, to show forth the sacrifice of his death (cf. BCP p. 400) for the sins of the whole world, to proclaim his resurrection from the dead and his ascension in the flesh to the right hand of power. Today Michael is being given the power and the authority, in short, to celebrate the mass, to offer to the Father the substantial and inexhaustible contents of the mystery of our faith, the body and blood of his only Son – crucified, died, risen, glorified and reigning forever – and so perpetually to make known to the people who belong to God the all-conquering power of his love.
Michael, I want to leave you with three things. First, I want to exhort you to let your marriage be Eucharistic. Love your wife, and remember that your union with her, as the apostle says, demonstrates the mystery of our redemption (Eph. 5.25); that she shares your priesthood in a unique way, in virtue of the sacramental union of your flesh; and that there is perhaps no better way for you to demonstrate God’s love for his children than by your love for your wife. Let your marriage, your love for one another, be sustained and empowered by the marriage of divine nature and human nature in the one flesh of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father on the nuptial bed of the cross.
Secondly, I want to exhort you to let your whole priestly life be Eucharistic. Let everything you do – all the sublimities, tediousnesses and absurdities of priestly life and pastoral work – let it all be sustained and empowered by the body and blood of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father for the remission of sins. For the sake of Jesus, hold the people of God in your heart. Share their joys and allow yourself to be afflicted by their sufferings. Hold them all in prayer – the living and the dead. Remember them at God’s altar, breathe their names into the chalice of Christ’s blood. Live the difficult circumstances of God’s people as their brother; sincerely suffer them in your heart. Draw them, in the power of your Master, out of their anonymity and fear. Acquaint yourself with them and call them by name to walk in safety along the paths of life, to be found again when they become lost, to be loved, and to receive salvation as the supreme gift of God’s love. God has promised to his Church not hirelings, but shepherds after his own heart (Jer. 3.15). And his heart has been made known to us in the sacred heart of his only Son Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and our great High Priest. Allow your priestly life to be Eucharistic. (cf. JP2 in Pastores Dabo Vobis)
Thirdly, I want you always to remember that this mystery of God’s love is the TRUTH. It is the Gospel. It is to this truth that the whole economy of the Catholic Church bears witness. The blood of the martyrs cries out from the earth to proclaim this truth. When our Lord stood before Pilate he said, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18.37) Attend to this truth. Listen for his voice in your study, in your life of prayer, in your adoration of our Lord’s sacramental presence. Give your voice, your pen, your hands, always in loving obedience and faithful service of this truth. Let your priestly ministry perpetually deepen into this truth. In this culture of clever incredulity, and in a Church that has in many ways conformed itself to this clever incredulity, suffer no denial of this truth. Allow yourself to be regarded as a fool for the sake of this truth. Live for this truth. Die for this truth.
And remember the words of the apostle, whose ministry you have now come by grace to share, who said: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Cor. 2.2ff)
So to God most holy in his divine majesty of trinity-in-unity, to Jesus Christ our Lord and God, made man and crucified for us, to blessed Mary, ever-virgin, from whose glorious purity he took flesh, and to the entire company of the saints in heaven, be everlasting praise, honor, power, and glory, from every creature on earth, and unto us sinners may there be full remission of all our sins, through the blood of Christ’s cross, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.
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