31 st Sunday in Ordinary Time – B

The scriptures of the New Testament give us two very different portraits of Jesus today – the gospel gives us a portrait of Jesus the rabbi, and the letter to the Hebrews gives us a portrait of Jesus the priest.

As a rabbi, Jesus was both a scholar and a teacher of the law, and his dialogue with the scribe in today's gospel shows his ability to hold his own in the type of intellectual sparring that is typical of those whose lives are lived in the world of scholarship and academia.

The portrait of Jesus the priest is one that is very different, however.

The priesthood of Jesus was not one in which he received sacrifices offered by the people –such as livestock, grain, or incense – which he would offer on their behalf.

The priesthood of Jesus was one in which he offered his very self – his body, his life, his love – as a sacrifice on our behalf, and not in a way that needed to be repeated because the sacrifice was imperfect, but rather in a way that accomplished our salvation once and for all.

This priesthood is one we are all called to share in a variety of ways.

We all share in the fruit of the sacrifice offered by Jesus the priest in the sacraments – beginning with our Baptism, and then in every one of the other sacraments, we share in the life-giving grace of Jesus' saving sacrifice in which he was both the priest and the victim.

Once we become literally “other Christs,” anointed ones, in the sacrament of Baptism, we share in the priesthood of Jesus in a number of other ways.

In our prayer, both our personal prayer and the prayer we offer with the Church, especially in our celebration of the Eucharist, we offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, a sacrifice of petition and intercession, to our Father in heaven.

On our service to others, wherever that service is offered, we offer a sacrifice of our time and energy, our talent and our attention, on behalf of others, just as Jesus offered his entire life for the sake of our salvation.

Perhaps most importantly, when we make a decision to die to ourselves and to live for God and for others, then we are united most closely with the person of Jesus Christ who is our priest.

With the people of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, we respect and revere teachers who are learned as wise, as we see in the portrait of Jesus the rabbi in today's gospel.

But only in Christianity do we acclaim the Son of God to be our Savior because he is our priest.

In a world in which people sometimes seem to have an insatiable desire to distinguish themselves from others in a way that casts them in a favorable light, perhaps what the image of Jesus the priest calls us to is a life of distinguishing ourselves from others by our selflessness, our generosity, our willingness to be free of concern for ourselves so that we might live totally for God and for our neighbor.

This is how Jesus distinguished himself among his contemporaries.

This is how the saints distinguished themselves among their contemporaries.

May the image of Jesus the priest inspire us today to have no greater aspiration than to live in such a way as be to be known among our contemporaries as people who live totally for God and for the good of others.

 

Thomas P. Ferguson
November 5, 2006