be as gods,’ knowing all things, and we succumb to that temptation all the time.” Verna Dozier with Celia A. Hahn, The Authority of the Laity (Washington: Alban Institute, 1982) 8.
40. The point of religion is always what it points toward, never itself. “We seldom recall that being religious means that our whole life is so ordered that every moment we are aware that we are not the final explanation for ourselves. It means that the ethics that control our work are the ethics of a servant, because we are not our own masters. It means that our relationships to our fellow human beings are under the lordship of our Creator. . . . We do not have to stop and think about being religious because that is the way our lives are lived.” Dozier, The Authority of the Laity, 7.
41. I would argue that the map is inevitably incomplete and imperfect because of the uncontrollable quality of the HOLY. Hence I would echo, though for different reasons, Jonathan Z. Smith’s statement: “We need to reflect on and play with the necessary incongruity of our maps before we set out on a voyage of discovery to chart the worlds of other men. For the dictum of Alfred Korzybski is inescapable: ‘Map is not territory’—but maps are all we possess.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978) 309.
42. “Ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual (the primary sense of sacrificium). . . . The sacra are sacred solely because they are used in a sacred place; there is no inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one.” Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 105–6.
43. Religion is not confined to the purposes I have suggested here, though I believe it originates from them. It may also become a way of organizing all reality, including political and ideological as well as spiritual concerns. Speaking of the complex “maps” of Jerusalem and Israel found in the later chapters of Ezekiel, Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “Ezekiel, by employing complex and rigorous systems of power and status with their attendant idioms of sacred/profane and pure/impure, established structures of relationships that were capable of being both replicated and rectified within the temple complex. Being systemic, they could also be replicated without.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 73.
44. “. . . the institution, since it represents the element of stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give, direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty, freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such freshness of discovery. ...” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 121.
45. The oldest evidence for religious rites is usually said to be the burial practices of our Neanderthal cousins (E. O. James, From Cave to Cathedral: Temples and Shrines of Prehistoric, Classical, and Early Christian Times [London: Thames and Hudson, 1965] 38–39). It is possible, however, that some sort of mortuary rites go back beyond Neanderthal times; see Paul G. Bahn, “Treasure of the Sierra Atapuerca,” Archaeology 49/1 (January/February 1996): 45–48.
46. The exact nature of institutional priesthood varies greatly from religion to religion, but the common features are involvement in rites and a special relation to the community’s tradition. The community remains priestly in its own right. Joseph Kitagawa has pointed out that the notion of a priestly people is very widespread in the major religions and that it is the religious communities that “ultimately play the priestly role of mediating between concrete human experience and the sacral reality, no matter how it is called” (“Priesthood in the History of Religions,” in To Be a Priest: Perspectives on Vocation and Ordination, ed. Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, III [New York: Seabury Press, 1976] 52).
47. Royden Keith Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism. The Hale Lectures. New York: Scribner, 1951.
48. For a good survey and interpretation of the Jerusalem sacrificial system, see Richard D. Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest: Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) 55–82.
49. Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest, 59–62, 83–85.
50. Eli’s sons, in 1 Samuel 2:12–17, violated the traditional way of collecting the priest’s portion and treated it simply as a fee, and therefore as purely at their own disposal. Their innovation was greeted by the worshipers with great indignation.
51. For fuller treatments of the subject of purity and impurity in ancient Israel, see L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) 11–4, and Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest, 17–38.
52. For restrictions on the priests, see especially Leviticus 21.
53. “Ritual is a relationship of difference between ‘nows’—the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simultaneity, but not the coexistence, of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Here (in the world) blood is a major source of impurity; there (in ritual space) blood removes impurity. Here (in the world) water is the central agent by which impurity is transmitted; there (in ritual) washing with water carries away impurity. Neither the blood nor the water has changed; what has changed is their location.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 110.
54. The Catechism of The Book of Common Prayer.
55. “Remember the church exists to foster and hand on . . . the spiritual life in all its mystery and splendour—the life of more than this-world perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this, not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of men, who do need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and imitation.” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 129.
56. “Uncreated grace, the loving self-giving of God to all men and women, exists long prior to any sacramental action. . . . But, as with the boy who does not recognize the girl’s love for him, so neither do men and women always recognize the presence of the God who is grace. To realize the possibility of grace, they need to make grace, as he needs to make love, in some symbolic action.” Michael G. Lawler, Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 56.
57. Biblical Hebrew does not seem to have had the vocabulary to distinguish “holy” and “sacred” in the way I am using the terms here. Instead, the prophets attacked these distortions by asserting that GOD does not care about sacrifices and other religious observances.
58. E.g., Jeremiah 7:1–15.
59. E.g., Hosea 6:5–10; Amos 5:18–27.
3
The Priesthood of Christ
According to the Law of Moses, Jesus was not a priest at all in the sacramental sense. He belonged to the tribe of Judah, not Levi, and to the family of David, not Aaron. As such, he had no more access to the inner parts of the Temple or knowledge of its rites or authority to preside over them than any other male lay Israelite. He was not, in other words, one of those to be reckoned particularly close to the sacred. Our reports of Jesus’ life and ministry say that he taught occasionally within the perimeters of the Temple, but only in those areas open to the Jewish lay public. On one occasion, he assumed a kind of revolutionary authority in the Temple by driving out the people who changed money and sold sacrificial animals there.60
