He’s
Not a Priest
October
9, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The primary
assertion of the New Testament book of Hebrews about Jesus is that he was both
a priest and the sacrifice he offered as a priest. In that book we read:
Since then we have a great high priest who
has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our
confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with
our weakness, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are,
yet without sin. Hebrews 4:14-15.
We also read that God designated Jesus “a high priest according
to the order of Melchizedek.” Hebrews 5:10. Don’t worry too much about what “according
to the order of Melchizedek” means. It doesn’t matter for our purposes here. Hebrews
also says:
For it was fitting that we should have such
a high priest, holy and blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners and
exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to
offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, then for those of other
people; this he did once for all when he offered himself. Hebrews 7:26-27.
Although some
scholars see intimations of Jesus as a priest in other parts of the New
Testament, only Hebrews expressly names Jesus as a priest. Jesus as a pure high
priest who both offered the ultimate sacrifice for sin and was himself that
sacrifice is Hebrews’ central image for Jesus Christ. The unknown author of
Hebrews used the sacrificial system of worship at the temple in Jerusalem led
and performed by priests to express his conception of who Jesus was and what he
meant. My contention here is that Jesus wasn’t and isn’t a priest at all. We
start consideration of that contention by looking at what a priest actually is.
There are two
distinguishing and necessary characteristics of a priest that I want to look at
here. They differentiate one ordained as a priest from those of us ordained in
traditions that don’t have priests. One is that a priest stands between the
people and God as a mediator between them. The other is that a priest is one
who performs sacrifices to gods or to God. If this second characteristic in
particular does not apply to a person, that person is not a priest. In the
understanding of most Protestant Christians neither of those distinguishing
characteristic applies to Jesus. I’ll start with Jesus as a mediator between
the people and God.
The understanding
of Jesus as a mediator between the people and God fails on at least two counts.
The first is the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. That doctrine advances
the paradoxical truth that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully
divine at the same time with neither of those two natures in any way diminishing
the other. In orthodox Christian teaching Jesus is not a mediator between the
people and God, he is himself fully God as well as fully human. It makes no
sense to say that a person mediates anything to himself or herself. Jesus was
not a mediator among us, he was Emmanuel, God with us. See Matthew 1:23. The
Prologue to the Gospel of John, the New Testament’s strongest and clearest
expression of the concept of Incarnation does not call Jesus a mediator. It
calls him God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God….and the Word became flesh and lived among us….” John 1:1,
14a. The only way to make Jesus a mediator between God and the people is to
deny that he was and is God. As a mere human with a special relationship to God
Jesus could be a mediator. As God he cannot. If he is not a mediator between
the people and God he is not a priest.
Much of Christianity teaches that we don’t
need a mediator between ourselves and God. There’s an element of Mark’s story
of Jesus’ Passion that makes that point clearly once we understand what it’s
talking about. In Mark’s Passion story we read: “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and
breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to
bottom.” Mark 15:37-38. The curtain in question in this symbolic statement is
the curtain in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem that separated the people from a
space called “the Holy of Holies.” That space was the innermost part of the
temple, and many Jewish people understood it to be the place where God was most
immediately and powerfully present on earth. Only the high priest was allowed
to go behind the curtain, and he did so only once a year.
Mark’s statement
that at the moment of Jesus’ death that curtain was torn in two from top to
bottom is a metaphoric or symbolic way of saying that everything that separates
us from God, or that we think separates us from God, is no longer present. Whatever
we thought it was that separated us from God, that thing is now gone. It is
rendered ineffective. It neither does nor can separate us from God any longer,
assuming for the moment that it ever did. If now nothing separates us from God,
then we don’t need a mediator between us and God. If there is no need for a
mediator between us and God, and there isn’t, there is no need for a priest.
God would not make Jesus something of which we have no need. Jesus is not a
priest.
The second distinguishing
characteristic of a priest is that a priest is one who is authorized to and
does perform sacrifices to the priest’s gods or God. Hebrews presents Jesus as
both the priest who offers a once for all sacrifice and the sacrifice itself.
The notion that Jesus is a priest may be unique to Hebrews, but the Christian
tradition as a whole has long proclaimed Jesus’ death as a sacrifice that had
to be made before God could or would forgive human sin. This soteriology, that
is, this understanding of how Jesus is Savior, coalesced after the early
twelfth century CE into what is known as “the classical theory of atonement.”
Scholars also call it the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement. As
formulated by Anselm of Canterbury in the early twelfth century, this theory
holds that human sin is such an affront to God that God could not simply
forgive it. A price had to be paid, and human sin was such an affront to God
that no human being could pay it. Only God Godself could pay it. That’s why,
this theology says, God became human in Jesus of Nazareth. It says Jesus as God
the Son Incarnate suffered, died, and thereby secured salvation for us humans.
The classical
theory of atonement has so taken over western Christianity that most people
both in the churches and outside of them believe that it is what Christianity
is. Recall for example Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ that
came out in 2004. Conservative Christian churches played it up big. They
thought it a brilliant presentation of the Christian faith. Many of them
displayed banners promoting the film using the film’s primary marketing slogan:
“Dying was His reason for living.” That slogan is a pretty good expression of
the classical theory of atonement pared down to its bare essentials.
I and many other
Christians today reject the classical theory of atonement absolutely. I’ll give
just some of the reasons why we do. For a more complete discussion of the flaws
of the classical theory of atonement see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical
Theory of Atonement,” in my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, available at
amazon.com.
First, that
theory overlooks Jesus’ ethical and social teachings. Indeed it makes all of
Jesus’ teachings irrelevant for his significance. The Gospels of the New
Testament do of course contain accounts of Jesus’ suffering and death. Yet
those accounts occupy relatively little space in those Gospels. Most of the
texts of those Gospels deal with stories of Jesus’ life not his death. In the
Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus proclaims what he called the kingdom of
God.[1]
We learn from Jesus sayings about the kingdom of God how human life on earth
should be ordered. We learn that God is nonviolent and cares most of all about
the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized among us. In those Gospels we
find a call to remake human life on the model of the kingdom of God. The classical
theory of atonement ignores this aspect of the Christ event. That in itself is
reason enough to reject it.
The second reason
for rejecting the classical theory of atonement that I’ll discuss here is even
more important. That theory makes God out to be a monster. It says God won’t
forgive human sin unless a totally innocent God-man suffers unjustly and
horribly somehow to placate God’s violent wrath against us because of our sin.
Moreover, that God-man had to be God’s own Son. Feminist theologians have
called the classical theory of atonement cosmic child abuse, and indeed that is
what it presents to us. The God of the classical theory of atonement is not a
God of love. A God of love would never subject anyone, let alone God’s own Son,
to the horrific, brutal injustice that befell Jesus of Nazareth. The God I know
and love would never do such a horrendous thing. The God I know and love is not
the God of the classical theory of atonement. Jesus was not a sacrifice. He
suffered a terrible fate, but that fate was neither God’s doing nor
sacrificial. If Jesus’ death was not sacrificial—and it wasn’t—then he can’t
have been a priest who offered himself as a sacrifice as Hebrews says he did.
Because a priest is one who offers sacrifice,[2]
if there is no sacrifice there is no priest. If Jesus was not a sacrifice—and he
wasn’t—then he wasn’t a priest either.[3]
The book of Hebrews
has some good things in it. There, for example, we find the famous definition
of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen.” Hebrews 11:1. Hebrews’ vision of Jesus Christ as both a priest and a
sacrifice, however, is not one of those good things. It’s primary flaw is that
it sees Jesus as something he was not, something he actually rejected. When
Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers and drove the sacrificial
animals for sale there out of the temple he wasn’t cleansing the temple with
its priests and animal sacrifice. He was symbolically overthrowing it. Jesus
knew God didn’t want sacrifice. Jesus knew that each of us has direct access to
God in prayer and that we need no mediator between God and us,. So yes, Hebrews
is in the New Testament; and yes, it has some good things in it. But no, Jesus
wasn’t a priest and it is a serious misunderstanding of him to assert that he
was.
[1] In
Matthew he often calls it “the kingdom of heaven,” but he meant the same thing
as he meant by kingdom of God.
[2] The
Roman Catholic and certain other Christian traditions call their ordained
clergy priests. That title is appropriate in any tradition that understands the
sacrament of the Eucharist as a sacrifice as the Roman Catholic Church does. It
is not appropriate in any Christian tradition which, like my own
Congregationalist tradition in the United Church of Christ, does not understand
the Eucharist to be a repetition of the supposed sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I
am an ordained Christian minister, but I am not a priest.
[3]
For a discussion of an understanding of Jesus’ death as salvific but not
sacrificial see Chapter 9 of my book Liberating Christianity cited
above. That chapter is titled “The Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration of
God’s Solidarity.”
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