Burning to Share in the Priesthood of the King of Righteousness, Second Wednesday (I), January 23, 2019

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

• Today we make a shift in our biennial four-week study of the beautiful Letter to the Hebrews. Until now, it’s introduced us to Christ’s priesthood as God the Father’s ultimate word, who through compassionate obedience in suffering and death, seeks to lead us through our suffering and death to perfection, if only we respond with eagerness and allow his living and effective word to profit us as it ought. Today we begin to look more deeply at Jesus’ high priesthood and its characteristics, a priesthood in which he offers himself as the Victim and seeks to transform us to make of our lives a loving sacrifice for God and others. The Letter to the Hebrews does so by focusing on the figure of Melchizedek, but before we get to him, it is important for us first to focus on the context of the priesthood in God’s plans in general. The priesthood, both in the Old Testament and in the New,  has a specific purpose: to offer sacrifices to God specifically for the forgiveness of sins. God had given his people the gift of the Law, the gift of the Covenant, the gift of the Commandments to help them to keep the Covenant, but just like we see with Adam and Eve in the beginning, people abused their freedom by failing to live their end of the Covenant. They chose against God, against the Law he gave to form them to love Him and to love others. Hence the priesthood was established out of God’s mercy to make sacrifices of expiation for the forgiveness of the sins against love of God and others, against the Law. But the Old Covenant Aaronic priesthood wasn’t sufficient to do this. Holocausts of various types of animals and other forms of sacrifice were not sufficient. Jesus came as the Eternal High Priest to make an expiatory sacrifice as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. He did this through his own suffering and death. He did this by offering himself.
• That brings us to Melchizedek. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us — a sentence of striking importance! —  that he was “made to resemble the Son of God.” When we say of Jesus, as we did at the end of the first reading and during today’s Responsorial Psalm, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek,” we need to understand that, yes, Jesus is a priest like Melchizedek and not like the Aaronic Cohens, but that Melchizedek was made to be a particular type of priest in anticipation of Jesus. And so what are the qualities of Melchizedek’s priesthood that were made to resemble the priesthood of the Son of God? The first is in his name, which means “King of Righteousness.” Righteousness means being right with God and with others. The second is “King of Salem,” which means “King of Peace.” When we are right with God and others, peace comes as a fruit; when we’re not right with God and others, there will be no real, lasting peace. The third is that he is a “priest of God Most High,” who finds his lineage in God, since he is “without father, mother, ancestry.” This is in contrast to the Jewish priesthood which is based on blood descent from Aaron. Fourth, he was superior to Abraham, shown in the fact that Abraham tithed to him and he blessed Abraham. Christ would say later, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). Fifth, he was “without beginning of days or end of life,” meaning that his priesthood, resembling that of Christ, was eternal. Based on all of these criteria, the Letter to the Hebrews says, referring to Jesus, that he is “another priest… raised up after the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become so, not by a law expressed in a commandment concerning physical descent but by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed. For it is testified: “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” Jesus’ priesthood is one of righteousness, peace, God, superior to Abraham and eternal. We could also one other detail that is not in today’s passage: that Melchizedek offered a sacrifice of bread and wine, not animals, which is a clear allusion to Christ’s making his own definitive sacrifice under the appearance of bread and wine during the Last Supper and taking us from sign to signified the following afternoon on Calvary.
• We see Jesus the High Priest carrying out his priesthood of righteousness in the Gospel. He returned to the Synagogue as a controversial figure because he had healed the paralyzed man’s sins (a divine action that was considered blasphemous by those unwilling to consider that he might be divine), ate with tax collectors and sinners, allowed his apostles to pluck heads of grain on the sabbath and more. In the synagogue, there was a man with a crushed hand who probably couldn’t work and support himself and his family. Jesus called him forward and asked what would on the surface seem to be a silly question, but one that was key to understanding the righteousness with God and others that Jesus had come to reestablish. “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil,” Jesus asked, “to save life rather than to destroy it?” Jesus was asking if it was possible to love someone in deeds on the Lord’s day. He was querying whether it was possible to save or redeem. Jesus’ opponents didn’t respond because they knew how ridiculous their response would seem, but after Jesus was gone, the Pharisees went out on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day, and began to conspire with the Herodians (with whom they would ordinarily not interact at all because of the Herodians’ licentiousness and relations with the Romans) about how to put Jesus to death. They apparently thought nothing was wrong in using the sabbath to “do evil” and to “destroy” life, but they homicidally objected to Jesus’ trying to do good and save life. Even though the Pharisees were distinguished by their trying to live the Law in all its minutiae, many of them had ceased to be “righteous,” because they were no longer living the Law as a Covenant of Love. They were so obsessed about smaller details that they failed to live the main point of it. Rather than forming them to be God-like, they thought that it required murdering Jesus. It’s key for us to grasp what was happening behind the scenes. If the devil can’t get us to reject God’s law, he’s going to try to get us to misunderstand it and live according to a distorted notion of it. That’s what had happened with so many of the Pharisees, Scribes and others. That’s what happened with Governor Cuomo and the legislature yesterday in Albany. Jesus had come to reestablish God’s people in righteousness and in the peace that flows from it. But not everyone would accept this priestly work and they would become participants in his priestly sacrifice not through their cooperation but through their conspiratorial plotting.
• Someone who shared in the King of Righteousness’ salvific concern to bring everyone — including the outcasts — into right relationship with God is the fellow New Yorker whom the Church celebrates today, St. Marianna Cope. She was born in Germany but when she was one emigrated to Utica, NY, with her parents, who would have in the states nine younger children. She felt the strong yearnings of a vocation to religious life, but left school after eighth grade to work in a factory to support the family, which was reeling because her father was suffering dementia. After her father was called home by God and the younger siblings were old enough to be cared for by their mother, she was able to enter religious life, as a late vocation to the Sisters of St. Francis at age 24. She made up for the education she had missed, went to college and eventually became both a teacher and a principal. Her talent as an administrator became known and she helped to build two hospitals in the Syracuse area, serving as both a nurse and as an administrator. She was often criticized for her personal abandon in caring for “outcast” patients, like alcoholics, that no other hospitals would take. In 1883, when she was 45 and Provincial Mother/Superior General, she received a letter from St. Damien of Molokai asking for help managing hospitals and schools in Hawaii, and to help out with leprosy patients. Fifty other Congregations had gotten a similar letter and had said no. But the letter touched her heart. And she herself wanted to be the first to go. “I am hungry for the work,” she said, “and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen ones, whose privilege it will be to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders…. I am not afraid of any disease, hence, it would be my greatest delight even to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’” She would prove to be a good daughter of St. Francis whose own care for a leper led to his conversion. She and six other sisters went to Honolulu, receiving those diagnosed with leprosy. Four years after her arrival, when Fr. Damien was approaching death on the island of Molokai, she responded to the plea for help, saying she “cheerfully” would accept the responsibility of the continuation of his work, which she did for 35 years until she died in 1918. There she showed that every person, including the greatest outcasts, had immeasurable dignity. With St. Damien, she prepared for the most extravagant funerals, to teach through the way people were buried how great the gift of life is and how much greater the gift of eternal life is. Her witness of loving charity and service to everyone, including those whose dignity was often forgotten or despised, is a model for all work in fostering a culture of life. We prayed to God at the beginning of Mass that through the “intercession of the Virgin Saint Marianne Cope, we may burn with love for you and for those who suffer.”
• And so we renew that prayer. Christ comes today to meet us in this chapel to incorporate us into his priesthood more deeply, the common priesthood we received on the day of our baptism. Today we looks with us not with “anger” or “grief” at our hardness of heart — like he looked at those in the synagogue — but with love and consolation for our desire to love him and others ardently and offer ourselves in love to do go to them and to help Jesus unite them with his priesthood. As we prepare now to receive the fulfillment of Melchizedek’s sacrifice, we ask Jesus to fill us with the love that will make us one!