What is a priest?
Someone in special need of being rescued. That’s it, Fathers. More poetically, someone in special need of angels. That may sound melodramatic or overstated, but is it? When we fill in Expenditure Requests for parish projects, we’re asked: is this nice to have, desirable or essential? In our priestly lives, is God’s grace “nice to have”, is it no more than “desirable”, or is it “essential”? A no-brainer, I think. If it weren’t essential, what earthly or heavenly use would we be to anyone? Yes, a priest is someone in special need of being rescued.
And this is a blessing. It means he is blessed to share the human condition and can become human himself. He’s blessed to share the Church’s condition of entire dependence on the Holy Spirit and can become in the best sense a man of the Church. In the 1st reading, a mysterious prophet is anointed for a mission. Clearly, those to whom he is sent need rescuing: they’re poor, broken-hearted, imprisoned in some sense, sitting among ashes, faint in spirit – an historical description perhaps of the Jews returned to Jerusalem from exile and not experiencing the bright and shiny future they’d thought awaited them. And when, as in the Gospel, the Lord takes up the same role, it’s to a people similarly situated, surely. And who is David, given us in the Psalm, the David of the historical books and of the Psalms, if not someone rescued again and again?
Widening the perspective, what is the whole plan of redemption if not a rescue operation? How can we be part of that unless rescued ourselves? And what of Him who conducts the operation, God-made-man himself? Is it heresy to say that he shared this neediness and needed rescuing himself? It seems to be an insight of at least the Letter to the Hebrews. “He had to experience death”, it says, “for all mankind”. He needed “to be made perfect through suffering…for the one who sanctifies and the ones who are sanctified are of the same stock”. Thus Ch. 2. In the same vein, Ch. 5: he “offered up prayer and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death.” He was “heard”. “He learned obedience”. He was “made perfect”. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was not a decorative prayer. And so, in its lesser turn, our need for rescue somehow connects with something greater. Any self-sufficiency, any superman complex, puts us far from the Paschal mystery.
And what is it we need to be rescued from? Well, each of us will have his own litany. And if we were bold enough to ask others, we’d be given another! Is it sometimes from shortage of faith, from our spiritual poverty, our pastoral ham-fistedness, from our angers or weariness, sometimes from actual sins or our own obsessions, our own isolationism and narcissism, even from our own virtues and pastoral plans and messianic delusions. Nor should we forget those other evil forces St Paul enumerates, the spiritual hosts in the heavenly places. Nor the adverse pressures of our times and culture. What a spring of prayer all this can open! The cry for daily bread and forgiveness, to be delivered from temptation and evil. “O God, come to my aid…Lord, have mercy…Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner… Jesus mercy, Mary help…Jesus, I trust you…Veni, Sancte Spiritus!” How often the Psalms put the needed words in our mouths!
And are we rescued? Surely, we’d answer yes. The Lord is the shepherd of shepherds too. “My hand shall always be with him.” There’s something that keeps us mysteriously buoyant. There’s a song of gratitude composing itself inside us as the years go on. Perhaps we can tweak our definition: “a priest is someone who is rescued”.
And how? How does the Lord evidence his unflagging support for us losers? What means does he use? Any he chooses, myriad means, exquisitely honed to our needs, from the simplest to the sublimest. A cup of coffee, a good night’s rest, some closeness to nature, a moment of music, a visit made or received, a word of encouragement. “My brother is my salvation” is a great Desert Father saying. How the brothers and sisters we’re anointed to serve, save, grace and rescue us! On another tack, last year Pope Francis recommended reading, reading the classics, old and new, the great novels and poems of our cultures. This too can help.
“I do not call you servants anymore; I call you friends.”
Brothers, I’m only trying to evoke what St Paul experienced in excelsis: “we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:7-12). What is a priest? Someone in special need of being rescued and constantly being so. God help us if we’re anything else. This, however disconcerting, is more than okay. It’s real. It’s beautiful. It’s even an echo of Jesus, not to mention the saints. It’s the Paschal Mystery rescuing us for itself. What is a priest? To use another Desert Father saying, “one beggar telling other beggars where bread is to be found”.
“Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart” (2 Cor 4:1). Our weakness is our strength.
And for what are we rescued? For what were Christ’s hands laid on me? For what is the Holy Spirit constantly renewed “deep within us”? “Do this in memory of me”. I’ve been touched this year reading the testimonies of catechumens in the Diocese headed for the Sacraments of Initiation at Easter. How often they mention the Mass, seen online, even seen in a kind of vision, attended from a tentative distance…
I share this particular account: “What started as an effort to hide myself from the gaze of evil turned into something entirely transformative that I was not expecting. At Mass, I felt the reality of the love and light I had been seeking. It was not [where I had previously sought it], but in the Eucharist. When the Host was held high, I knew that there was something in the room that changed even before I learned of the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. My attention was fixed just as before, but instead of death and terror, I felt life that seemed more real than the substantial world around me. Complete goodness that shone so brightly it burned away the darkness clinging to me. Every hatred I held, every sinful action, my judgmental thoughts: all began to melt away week by week as I attended [Mass].”
What a privilege to be rescued to share in this!
St Mary’s Inverness, 10 April 2025
