Priests, Potatoes and the People of God

Over the weekend, Daniel and I dropped our latest episode of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians, this time on the theme of priesthood.

We thought that we should balance our episode on the laity from the previous season. At the same time, we sought to look at a twofold reduction that many tend to make. This is the limiting of the office of priesthood to the formal office of ordained priesthood, and also the reduction of the church to the ordained priesthood.

With this in mind, we set the theme of priesthood against the backdrop of Christ’s priesthood, which He then exercises through his body, the Church. In making this claim, we relied heavily on the biblical idea of Israel’s designation as a nation of priests. Even though one tribe - the tribe of Levi - was ordained by God to formally be the priestly tribe, it was still the whole nation that played a priestly function. By the same token, the whole Church is priestly and everyone, by virtue of their baptism, is called to pray a priestly role within the circumstances they find themselves in.

This then raises the question of what the priestly function consists of. It is best summed up by my friend Fr Harrison Ayre of the podcast of happy memory Clerically Speaking, which is the participation of Christ the High Priest’s act of offering the world back to the Father through the Holy Spirit.

This is an action by Christ and his whole Body. Everyone in the Church then, is priestly insofar as they are called to offer their part of their world and their lives back to its creator, and the liturgical priesthood thereby plays a crucial role in acting as the contact point between these many offerings and the decisive offering of Christ Himself who, as I argued in Redeeming Flesh, disperses his body throughout the world, only to take it back into himself again before offering it on the cross.

“Priests, Potatoes & the People of God” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.

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