Living on the Border of the Holy. L. William Countryman

sons, in 1 Samuel 2:12–17, violated the traditional way of collecting the priest’s portion and treated it simply as a fee, and therefore as purely at their own disposal. Their innovation was greeted by the worshipers with great indignation.

      51. For fuller treatments of the subject of purity and impurity in ancient Israel, see L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) 11–4, and Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest, 17–38.

      52. For restrictions on the priests, see especially Leviticus 21.

      53. “Ritual is a relationship of difference between ‘nows’—the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simultaneity, but not the coexistence, of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Here (in the world) blood is a major source of impurity; there (in ritual space) blood removes impurity. Here (in the world) water is the central agent by which impurity is transmitted; there (in ritual) washing with water carries away impurity. Neither the blood nor the water has changed; what has changed is their location.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 110.

      54. The Catechism of The Book of Common Prayer.

      55. “Remember the church exists to foster and hand on . . . the spiritual life in all its mystery and splendour—the life of more than this-world perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this, not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of men, who do need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and imitation.” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 129.

      56. “Uncreated grace, the loving self-giving of God to all men and women, exists long prior to any sacramental action. . . . But, as with the boy who does not recognize the girl’s love for him, so neither do men and women always recognize the presence of the God who is grace. To realize the possibility of grace, they need to make grace, as he needs to make love, in some symbolic action.” Michael G. Lawler, Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 56.

      57. Biblical Hebrew does not seem to have had the vocabulary to distinguish “holy” and “sacred” in the way I am using the terms here. Instead, the prophets attacked these distortions by asserting that GOD does not care about sacrifices and other religious observances.

      58. E.g., Jeremiah 7:1–15.

      59. E.g., Hosea 6:5–10; Amos 5:18–27.

      3

      The Priesthood of Christ

      According to the Law of Moses, Jesus was not a priest at all in the sacramental sense. He belonged to the tribe of Judah, not Levi, and to the family of David, not Aaron. As such, he had no more access to the inner parts of the Temple or knowledge of its rites or authority to preside over them than any other male lay Israelite. He was not, in other words, one of those to be reckoned particularly close to the sacred. Our reports of Jesus’ life and ministry say that he taught occasionally within the perimeters of the Temple, but only in those areas open to the Jewish lay public. On one occasion, he assumed a kind of revolutionary authority in the Temple by driving out the people who changed money and sold sacrificial animals there.⁶⁰ This act infringed on the prerogatives of the priests and no doubt had much to do with his eventual arrest and crucifixion. But he was no priest of religion—at least not of the sacrificial rites of ancient Israel.

      There was another kind of “priest of religion,” however, in the Israel of Jesus’ time—the rabbi. I put the term “priest” in quotation marks because, although the rabbi was a priest in the sense in which I am using the word, Jews of Jesus’ time would not have called rabbis “priests.” For them, the term “priests” referred strictly to persons authorized to offer sacrifice at temples, whether Jewish or Gentile, and not to the other kinds of religious specialists who fall into this category as I am using it. The rabbinic “priesthood” was focused not on Temple and sacrifice but on the synagogue and on instruction (torah