Being a Priest Today. Rosalind Brown

cries out to you,

      troubled upon his own account, and troubled for your sheep.47

      The prayer continues through several pages as Aelred wrestles with his calling.

      And you, sweet Lord,

      have set a person like this over your family,

      over the sheep of your pasture.

      Me, who take all too little trouble with myself,

      you bid to be concerned on their behalf;

      and me,

      who never pray enough about my own sins,

      you would have pray for them.

      I, who have taught myself so little too,

      have also to teach them.

      Wretch that I am.

      What have I done?

      What have I undertaken?

      What was I thinking of?48

      ‘The divine grace, which always heals what is infirm and supplies what is lacking, appoints [this person], beloved by God’; so says the archbishop in the Byzantine rite before he ordains a bishop, presbyter or deacon. This solemn statement, known fittingly as ‘The Divine Grace’, reminds all concerned that God is the one who is calling this person and that God will supply all that is needed. The people cry out, ‘Lord, have mercy’, and then the archbishop prays over the candidate calling for the ‘great grace of the Spirit’. Following a similar pattern in the Anglican rite we sing:

      Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,

      and lighten with celestial fire;

      Thou the anointing Spirit art,

      Who dost thou sevenfold gifts impart.

      Prayer for the candidates’ future ministry follows and leads into the ordination prayer during which the bishop prays:

      Send down the Holy Spirit upon this your servant

      for the office and work of a priest in your church.

      Ministry by grace through faith provides the shape of the ordination liturgy. We are called to let it shape the ordained life. It is the pattern we see when Jesus fed the 5,000 in Luke 9. ‘You give them something to eat’, he tells the disciples. They are being called to a new event of ministry. ‘We have no more than five loaves and two fish’, they reply. They face and acknowledge their weakness, their inability to meet the people’s needs by their own endeavours and powers. ‘Make them sit down . . .’, Jesus insists. The call goes on, not despite but because of their acknowledgement of their own inadequacy. Their calling is simply to set the scene for Jesus to act, to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. ‘They did so.’ Here is faith at work – the willingness to risk that God will act as we obey the call and do as Jesus tells us. ‘And then taking the five loaves and two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke them and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.’ The faith doing, the risk taking goes on as the disciples dare to believe that Christ is active in a situation and can transform it through the faithful ministry of his followers. ‘And all ate and were filled.’ Like Moses we discover the truth of the promise of God’s presence and power as we do the work of ministry.

      The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, talks about ‘catholic personality, community and cultural identity’ in his various writings on human reconciliation. We will make some explicit use of these ideas later. It is also possible to talk of evangelical personality. An evangelical personality is permeated with the grace of the gospel. It is a personality whose identity is based on and flows from the unimaginably abundant love of God, the ultimate affirmation of worth and value. This is the personality priests are called to model as they live with God and as they act for God by ministering to others in the love of God. It is a love dedicated to the formation of an evangelical community – a community of people open to the ‘extraordinary power’ (2 Corinthians 4:7) of God’s love, a community willing to act in the power of God’s love through their ministry to each other, and a community willing to make known God’s great love for the world to all the peoples of the earth. It is a love that is seeking to create an evangelical cultural identity. Constrained by the love of Christ, evangelical personalities and evangelical communities are committed to the transformation of the culture of their localities and lands by ministering the love of God to the world. In the face of the enormity of the task, we do well to remember that God still sees the suffering of all that he has made, and yearns for the work of his hands to be set free from the tyrannies that hold humanity captive. And God still calls people to announce to Pharaoh that he has come to bring his people to ‘a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Exodus 3:8), a land where the dynamics of grace have caused people to realize that only God is to be worshipped and that the idols of our self-sufficiency have bound us in slavery for too long.

      As well as the experience of the ‘power of love’, John Chrysostom also looked for wisdom in the ways of God in those to be ordained. Wisdom is one of the marks of the evangelical personality of priests. We are to be skilled in speaking of and living by the hidden ways of God made known in Christ. We are to tell of the God who uses bread and wine, water and oil for eternal purposes. We are to preach of the God whose divinity is not denied but defined by the self-surrender to the conditions of humanity. We are to proclaim a God whose power is demonstrated in the helplessness of a crucifixion. We are to celebrate the God who chooses to create and who suffers the self-imposed limitations that come with freely sharing life with others. We are living proof that God has chosen ‘what is weak in the world to shame the strong’ (1 Corinthians 1:27).

      Before we move on to other themes, there is one critical postscript to add. Although we are saved by grace through faith and not by our own goodness or strength, a change does occur in us as we are slowly, faltering step by faltering step, transformed into the likeness of Christ. The same applies in priestly ministry. Although it is always a ministry of faith in the grace of God, God is doing a work in and through us. We are in the worst position to judge the ways that the life and exercise of ministry is changing us into an authentic sign of the priestly people of Christ. But most of us will have known faithful ‘stewards of God’s mysteries’ whose lives have been permeated with the light and beauty of God and can agree with the second verse of George Herbert’s poem ‘The Windows’, the first verse of which began the chapter.

      But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

      Making thy life to shine within

      The holy Preacher’s; then the light and glory

      More rev’rend grows, and more doth win:

      Which else shows wat’rish, bleak and thin.

      Beloved disciples

      In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the beloved; and with you I am well pleased’. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. (Mark 1:8–12)