A Kingdom of Priests

When the Hebrews, recently enslaved but now free, were gathered at Sinai to begin their formation as a free people, God spoke the words that defined them over against their four centuries of slavery in the highly hierarchical kingdom of Egypt. One of the defining phrases was “kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6 RSV). “Priest” was a privileged and highly influential position in the culture from which they had just been rescued, a far cry from anything they could ever have imagined for themselves. And now they were all priests! It would take them a long time to assimilate what that meant. Many of them never did get it. Many of us still don’t get it. 

Twelve hundred years or so later, the phrase was picked up by Peter as he wrote to his congregation of beleaguered first-century Christians in the process of helping them understand and live out their baptismal identity in Jesus: “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). John of Patmos, who gets the last scriptural word in these matters, also used the term “priest,” this basic term of self-understanding out of the Hebrew tradition, to identify the Christians in his congregations: “priests serving his [Jesus’] God and Father” (Rev. 1:6) and “priests serving [Jesus’] God” (Rev. 5:10). 

One of the severely crippling misunderstandings of the Reformation assertion of “the priesthood of all believers” is to assume (or worse, insist) that each of us can function as our own priest — “I don’t need a priest, thank you, I can do quite well on my own, me and Jesus.” 

But that is certainly not what Martin Luther intended when he included the priesthood of all believers as a fundamental tenet for reforming the church. He meant that we are all priests, not for ourselves, but for one another: “I need you for my priest, and while we are at it, I’m available to you as your priest.” The priesthood of all believers is not an arrogant individualism that, at least in matters dealing with God, doesn’t need anyone. It is a confession of mutuality, a willingness to guide one another in following in the way of Jesus, to assist and encourage, to speak and act in Jesus’ name, and to be guided by another to speak and act in Jesus’ name. In the community of the baptized, there is no one, absolutely no one, who is not involved in this priestly leading and being led, for even “a little child shall lead them” (Isa. 11:6).