presence of the HOLY. The sacramental priesthood was a secondary priesthood, derived from the priesthood of the whole people (which, after all, went back, in the biblical story, to a time when there was no distinct priestly caste in Israel) and representing that priesthood to itself. The grace to which this sacrament points and which, in appropriate ways, it nourishes in the worshiper is the fundamental priesthood itself. Without such sacraments, there is a real danger that the people would lose sight of their shared priesthood amid the everyday preoccupations of life. What is everywhere is hard to see anywhere. The sacrament refocuses attention on the almost unnoticed pervasiveness of grace.
Of course, the religion of ancient Israel did not always work this way. There is nothing human, including most certainly the works of religion, that cannot be turned to evil purpose. Our hankering to compete, to make much of ourselves, to protect our sense of self-importance, to place TRUTH, if possible, in our debt, is always looking for an opportunity of self-aggrandizement. The sacramental priest finds such an opportunity by reversing the relationship between sacrament and grace, so that the sacrament appears to be primary and the HIDDEN HOLY merely a backdrop to it. In this way, the Temple came to be seen not simply as sacred (in the sense in which I have been using the word) but as HOLY in its own right, not just as the sacrament of GOD’S presence, but as its guarantee.57 In the same way, the priesthood of the Temple came to be not just the sacrament of the priesthood of all Israel, but a superior religious caste.
There are protests against this state of affairs throughout the history of Israel. Prophets objected to an excessively high opinion of the Temple and its sacrifices. They found that some Israelites had so literalized the metaphor of GOD’S presence there that they imagined the city could not possibly fall to an invading army.58 Others had such confidence in religion that what they did in the profane sphere seemed to them irrelevant; they assumed that, as long as they maintained the prescribed religious rites, they were free, under GOD’S protection, to grind down the poor.59 They mistook sacrament for the ultimate REALITY behind it.
In the language of scripture, this error is called “idolatry” The first of the Ten Commandments is to have no gods but GOD; the second is to make no idols. We are apt to think of idols as being equivalent to “foreign gods” and to treat the second commandment as little more than a reiteration of the first. But one can make idols of the real GOD, too. And the most dangerous idols are those made from the best materials. Whatever can serve as a true icon of GOD can serve as an idol, too. Whatever can serve as a true sacrament of GOD’S grace can also serve as a convincing idol to be worshiped as if it were the grace itself. Thus the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood went, at times, from being sacraments to being idols and drew down on themselves prophetic condemnation.
All this leaves us in something of a quandary. There is no religion without sacraments. And there is no sacrament that cannot be perverted to the uses of idolatry. This statement applies to modern Christianity as much as to ancient Israel. The fundamental priesthood is the central thing; but, because it is so universal and inevitable in human life, it forgets itself if it is not represented in concrete and accessible fashion. Yet when it does create concrete sacraments of itself, it is apt to forget that they are images and to take them at face value. We may even so far forget ourselves as to suppose that the fundamental priesthood is derived from the sacramental one, that only the sacramental priests enjoy real intimacy with the HIDDEN, that the priests of religion are the real priests, and that the rest can only be humble worshipers.
The ministry of Jesus resolved this problem in a striking way. Jesus did not, of course, manage to resolve it once for all; in every age, people must struggle through its difficulties once again. He did, however, resolve the problem in principle by reasserting the dignity of the fundamental priesthood in his own person and by setting a decisive question mark against the excessive claims of religion and its sacramental priesthoods.
39. “We resist living with the doubt, incompleteness, confusion, and ambiguity that are inescapable parts of the life we are called to live. Living by faith means living in unsureness. . . . We cannot bear having to take a risk that this is the way to go. We cannot bear our inability to know absolutely. So we hurry up and create some certainties that will relieve us of the anxiety. The temptation in the Garden of Eden is that ‘you will be as gods,’ knowing all things, and we succumb to that temptation all the time.” Verna Dozier with Celia A. Hahn, The Authority of the Laity (Washington: Alban Institute, 1982) 8.
40. The point of religion is always what it points toward, never itself. “We seldom recall that being religious means that our whole life is so ordered that every moment we are aware that we are not the final explanation for ourselves. It means that the ethics that control our work are the ethics of a servant, because we are not our own masters. It means that our relationships to our fellow human beings are under the lordship of our Creator. . . . We do not have to stop and think about being religious because that is the way our lives are lived.” Dozier, The Authority of the Laity, 7.
41. I would argue that the map is inevitably incomplete and imperfect because of the uncontrollable quality of the HOLY. Hence I would echo, though for different reasons, Jonathan Z. Smith’s statement: “We need to reflect on and play with the necessary incongruity of our maps before we set out on a voyage of discovery to chart the worlds of other men. For the dictum of Alfred Korzybski is inescapable: ‘Map is not territory’—but maps are all we possess.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978) 309.
42. “Ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual (the primary sense of sacrificium). . . . The sacra are sacred solely because they are used in a sacred place; there is no inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one.” Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 105–6.
43. Religion is not confined to the purposes I have suggested here, though I believe it originates from them. It may also become a way of organizing all reality, including political and ideological as well as spiritual concerns. Speaking of the complex “maps” of Jerusalem and Israel found in the later chapters of Ezekiel, Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “Ezekiel, by employing complex and rigorous systems of power and status with their attendant idioms of sacred/profane and pure/impure, established structures of relationships that were capable of being both replicated and rectified within the temple complex. Being systemic, they could also be replicated without.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 73.
44. “. . . the institution, since it represents the element of stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give, direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty, freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such freshness of discovery. ...” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 121.
45. The oldest evidence for religious rites is usually said to be the burial practices of our Neanderthal cousins (E. O. James, From Cave to Cathedral: Temples and Shrines of Prehistoric, Classical, and Early Christian Times [London: Thames and Hudson, 1965] 38–39). It is possible, however, that some sort of mortuary rites go back beyond Neanderthal times; see Paul G. Bahn, “Treasure of the Sierra Atapuerca,” Archaeology 49/1 (January/February 1996): 45–48.
46. The exact nature of institutional priesthood varies greatly from religion to religion, but the common features are involvement in rites and a special relation to the community’s tradition. The community remains priestly in its own right. Joseph Kitagawa has pointed out that the notion of a priestly people is very widespread in the major religions and that it is the religious communities that “ultimately play the priestly role of mediating between concrete human experience and the sacral reality, no matter how it is called” (“Priesthood in the History of Religions,” in To Be a Priest: Perspectives on Vocation and Ordination, ed. Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, III [New York: Seabury Press, 1976] 52).
47. Royden Keith Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism. The Hale Lectures. New York: Scribner, 1951.
48. For a good survey and