to assert that the whole of Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Nor did the priests of religion monopolize all access to GOD, for it was accepted that GOD would also speak with kings and prophets and had a special relationship with the poor. Their priesthood had a critically important role, however, in that it served as the religious model for interpreting the more fundamental priesthood of the whole people.
As we have already observed, our understanding of the fundamental priesthood will always be closely connected with our understanding of the HIDDEN. Both the one and the other belong to that category of things to which it is hard to give definitive expression. We can know them only tangentially and in fragments, never face-on or whole. Our language has no direct, ordinary vocabulary for these two concepts. To give enough specificity to them that we can at least begin to deal with them, we make concrete models in the form of religion and its priesthood. Thus, for example, the Temple created an image of the borderlands. Its sacredness was an image of GOD’S holiness, its purity an icon of the distinction between the HIDDEN and the everyday world. Its rites and traditions offered a concrete model of how one might approach GOD, through offering something valuable and shaping one’s life with reference to the sanctuary. The Temple’s priests were an image of the fundamental priesthood by which we sustain one another in the border country.
Such models of things ungraspable and inexhaustible are called “sacraments.” One classic definition of sacraments is that they are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”54 They put us in touch with that grace in a tangible way. They may even be said to convey grace, for behind them stands the boundless generosity of GOD.55 Yet they hold no monopoly on grace, which is an uncontrolled and uncontrollable gift of the HIDDEN REALITY itself. Rather, they point toward grace; they map it for us; they remind us of its pervasive (and therefore ungraspable) presence by creating images of it in concrete rites, objects, and persons.56
Sacraments do not exhaust grace, as if one had no access to grace except through these sacramental rites or objects or persons. Grace always remains free of human control. GOD is always free to address us by any means whatever. If an Israelite made a pilgrimage to the Temple and there made use of the sacramental priests to guide him or her through the appropriate rites, and to carry the blood and choice portions of the sacrifice to the altar, that did not mean that that person had no other avenue of access to the HOLY or that GOD could not deal with that person directly. The lay Israelite, though not a priest of religion, continued to be a true priest and to participate in the priesthood of the whole people. Such a person might be surprised by an encounter with the HIDDEN ONE at any moment. For the priesthood of the people of Israel was and is the fundamental priesthood bestowed on all humanity—in the particular form shaped and conditioned by Israel’s particular encounter with the HOLY. If the fundamental priesthood of the people of Israel were to disappear, the sacramental priesthood would lose its significance, having nothing to signify.
What the sacramental priesthood of the Temple did for the Israelite was to set forth in visible and tangible form the shape of every Israelite’s priesthood. The one Temple, with its rites and priesthood, figured GOD’S oneness. The purity rules of the torah figuredGOD’S graciousness in choosing Israel and in instructing the people in clean behavior and so separating them from the nations. The worshiper’s purification and the cautious and obedient ascent of Mount Zion alluded to Israel’s acceptance of the covenant at Mount Sinai. The sacrifice shadowed forth the danger and cost of our approach to GOD—and also its bountifulness, for most sacrifices culminated in a sacred banquet.
The purpose was not to replace the ordinary Israelite’s priesthood—that fundamental priesthood which he or she exercised in the way uniquely possible within the called people of Israel—but rather to illuminate it, to help the worshiper remember and interpret the truths that informed it, to guide each person living and ministering in the border country that is the very presence of the HOLY. The sacramental priesthood was a secondary priesthood, derived from the priesthood of the whole people (which, after all, went back, in the biblical story, to a time when there was no distinct priestly caste in Israel) and representing that priesthood to itself. The grace to which this sacrament points and which, in appropriate ways, it nourishes in the worshiper is the fundamental priesthood itself. Without such sacraments, there is a real danger that the people would lose sight of their shared priesthood amid the everyday preoccupations of life. What is everywhere is hard to see anywhere. The sacrament refocuses attention on the almost unnoticed pervasiveness of grace.
Of course, the religion of ancient Israel did not always work this way. There is nothing human, including most certainly the works of religion, that cannot be turned to evil purpose. Our hankering to compete, to make much of ourselves, to protect our sense of self-importance, to place TRUTH, if possible, in our debt, is always looking for an opportunity of self-aggrandizement. The sacramental priest finds such an opportunity by reversing the relationship between sacrament and grace, so that the sacrament appears to be primary and the HIDDEN HOLY merely a backdrop to it. In this way, the Temple came to be seen not simply as sacred (in the sense in which I have been using the word) but as HOLY in its own right, not just as the sacrament of GOD’S presence, but as its guarantee.57 In the same way, the priesthood of the Temple came to be not just the sacrament of the priesthood of all Israel, but a superior religious caste.
There are protests against this state of affairs throughout the history of Israel. Prophets objected to an excessively high opinion of the Temple and its sacrifices. They found that some Israelites had so literalized the metaphor of GOD’S presence there that they imagined the city could not possibly fall to an invading army.58 Others had such confidence in religion that what they did in the profane sphere seemed to them irrelevant; they assumed that, as long as they maintained the prescribed religious rites, they were free, under GOD’S protection, to grind down the poor.59 They mistook sacrament for the ultimate REALITY behind it.
In the language of scripture, this error is called “idolatry” The first of the Ten Commandments is to have no gods but GOD; the second is to make no idols. We are apt to think of idols as being equivalent to “foreign gods” and to treat the second commandment as little more than a reiteration of the first. But one can make idols of the real GOD, too. And the most dangerous idols are those made from the best materials. Whatever can serve as a true icon of GOD can serve as an idol, too. Whatever can serve as a true sacrament of GOD’S grace can also serve as a convincing idol to be worshiped as if it were the grace itself. Thus the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood went, at times, from being sacraments to being idols and drew down on themselves prophetic condemnation.
All this leaves us in something of a quandary. There is no religion without sacraments. And there is no sacrament that cannot be perverted to the uses of idolatry. This statement applies to modern Christianity as much as to ancient Israel. The fundamental priesthood is the central thing; but, because it is so universal and inevitable in human life, it forgets itself if it is not represented in concrete and accessible fashion. Yet when it does create concrete sacraments of itself, it is apt to forget that they are images and to take them at face value. We may even so far forget ourselves as to suppose that the fundamental priesthood is derived from the sacramental one, that only the sacramental priests enjoy real intimacy with the HIDDEN, that the priests of religion are the real priests, and that the rest can only be humble worshipers.
The ministry of Jesus resolved this problem in a striking way. Jesus did not, of course, manage to resolve it once for all; in every age, people must struggle through its difficulties once again. He did, however, resolve the problem in principle by reasserting the dignity of the fundamental priesthood in his own person and by setting a decisive question mark against the excessive claims of religion and its sacramental priesthoods.
39. “We resist living with the doubt, incompleteness, confusion, and ambiguity that are inescapable parts of the life we are called to live. Living by faith means living in unsureness. . . . We cannot bear having to take a risk that this is the way to go. We cannot bear our inability to know absolutely. So we hurry
