It has been a weekend of ordinations and First Masses. Our diocese has three new priests, praise God. The first Mass of a newly ordained priest is always a joyful occasion, but especially in an age like our own, which has a phobia of commitment and sees a lifetime choice first in terms of what one gives up, rather than as an exercise of freedom which comes only when I have discovered how and to whom I must give my heart irrevocably.
Just as everyone loves to see a bride and groom on their wedding day, so there is a joy in a first Mass which is bound up with something intimate and personal. This is, after all, the first Mass of Father X, whom we have seen grow in our family, our parish, our seminary, and something much more than the merely personal.
Vocation – to marriage or priesthood – has to be incarnated. Just as Stradivarius is just the name of an old violin until someone suitable comes forward to play it, so we can talk in reverential, abstract terms about vocation, but this comes alive when approached in the right way. Today in the life of a new priest we have an exemplum of what vocation looks and sounds like, and so we are led from the consideration of the personal to something greater: to the nature of priesthood itself. What we celebrate in truth is not the glory of the one who is called, as the glory of what he is called to.
For vocation is not what I do for God, but what God does in and for me. It is, if you will, the difference between playing your Stradivarius beautifully for God and becoming the violin on which God can make music.
Today we celebrate not the virtuosity the new priest has acquired through long training, but his “yes” to God’s choice of him as an instrument on which God can play beautiful music. We are celebrating, if you will, the music of priesthood. If I say this new priest is God’s gift, I do not mean he is God’s gift to the priesthood, but that his priesthood is God’s gift to the Church and us and that gift is the person of Jesus among us. The gift is that through the new priest’s words Jesus will preach and teach, through his frail hands he will bless and heal, through his body he will offer himself once more in sacrifice. “When you see the priest, think of Jesus Christ,” says St John Vianney. “The priesthood is the love of of the heart of Jesus. What is a priest? A man who holds the place of God – a man who is invested with all the powers of God.”
Clericalism does not stem from a distorted view of the dignity of priesthood but from a distorted sense of one’s own importance in exercising its power and a distorted sense of who that power is for. With you, says St Augustine to his community in Hippo, I am a Christian; for you I am a priest.
The real message of the Martha and Mary Gospel which was proclaimed at the Mass is not some simplistic opposition between activity and contemplation, but the opposing of a relevant temptation, namely, that of seeking to serve Jesus by the exercise of my own activity and plans. This functionality actually misses the point because it cannot see beyond its own busy agenda to draw strength from the presence of Jesus, who is in fact the host of the desired encounter, not the guest.
Mary has chosen the better part not just in a moral sense, but in a literal way. She has chosen the more life-giving portion of what is on offer. Martha’s busyness is a way of being in control, a Mrs Doyle-like intervention based on her own perception of what will make Jesus’s coming to their house successful. Even a diocesan priest must always chose this better part, which is that intimacy with Christ from which all strength will come and all activity prosper.
When the priest dares to sit at the feet of Jesus and give himself up to what He wants, he has his people with him, he presents them at Jesus’s feet. It is the presence and person of Christ, not clerical activity, which is the life of the priest, his identity. Like Mary, the priest best ministers to God by becoming his guest.
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