Collins, Keenan Jones: Sharing the Priesthood of Christ

THESIS 7

At the Last Supper, when instituting the Eucharist as a sacriﬁcial meal, Jesus committed himself through a cultic, priestly act to his self-sacriﬁcing death. Here we come to the ﬁrst of the three supremely deﬁning moments in the narrative of Christ’s priesthood: the Last Supper, the cruciﬁxion, and the resurrection into glory. This thesis bristles with controversial points—not least over two central issues, the ﬁrst more general and the second more particular. First, what is ‘sacriﬁce’, and is it still viable language for Christians? Many people ﬁnd the idea of the sacriﬁce of a human being and, especially, of a totally innocent human being strange and even morally repulsive, especially when it is presented as ‘placating’ an angry, ‘bloodthirsty’ God. Nico Schreurs makes the claim: ‘sacriﬁces in general and blood sacriﬁces, in particular, disgust most of our contemporaries.’ Years earlier, J. S. Whale pointed out how for many people the very idea of such sacriﬁces is ‘revolting’ and both ‘morally and aesthetically disgusting’.11

11 J. S. Whale, Victor and Victim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 42.

In the Western world and beyond, the language of sacriﬁce seems irreconcilable with contemporary ‘ideals’ of self-realization and self-fulﬁlment, the ‘good life’ promoted by endless advertisements and TV soap operas. Add too that political rhetoric about dying for one’s country which has been employed for two thousand years or more—not least by unscrupulous modern leaders. For the sake of power, wealth, and prestige, they have debased the language of sacriﬁce and self-sacriﬁce and led millions to their death. Perhaps the sharpest criticisms levelled at sacriﬁcial interpretations of the Last Supper and Christ’s death have come from contemporary feminism. Some feminist theologians point out how some traditional presentations of Christ the innocent victim sacriﬁcing himself to atone for the sins of others have been misused to legitimate the sufferings of innumerable women. They have been encouraged to endure all kinds of violent injustice and victimization by imitating the self-sacriﬁcial love and redemptive death of Christ.12

12 See e.g. M. Grey, Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption and Christian Tradition (London: SPCK, 1989); R. R. Ruether, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998).

One can understand why, for various reasons, Ernst Kasemann and others have wanted to abandon the whole notion of sacriﬁce.13

13 E. Kasemann, Jesus Means Freedom, trans. G. Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 114. In his Le Salut par la croix dans la the´ologie contemporaine (1930 85) (Paris: Cerf, 1988), Michel Deneken puts the case for simply banishing ‘sacriﬁce’ from Christian vocabulary.

And yet this would mean also refusing to follow the Letter to the Hebrews and the mainstream Christian tradition in naming Christ as ‘priest’. From Hebrews and Chrysostom, right down to Torrance and beyond, calling Christ ‘priest’ stands or falls with the correlative reality of sacriﬁce. If we give up speaking of sacriﬁcial self-offering, we should also drop the language of his priesthood. Undoubtedly the language of sacriﬁce has at times been massively misused, but the witness of Hebrews and other New Testament authors makes it a normative way of characterizing Christ’s death and resurrection. Below we return to appropriate ways of using sacriﬁcial language.