A transcript of a talk I gave last week, unedited.
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I was reading the local news a couple of weeks ago, and discovered to my alarm that our very own Quayside was invaded by hostile forces! And we’re not talking about contemporary art lovers or stag weekends, but actual soldiers with guns and marines with boats. Fortunately the whole thing was just a military exercise, and apart from worrying a few locals, left no lasting damage to the city. But the exercise was apparently very successful, with the invaders invading, the defenders defending, the medics mediccing and the support staff supporting. In what was designed to be a ‘war simulation zone’, all the players knew their role and acted accordingly.
Contrast their attitudes with those of the four players in this bizarre game of Monopoly. It became apparent very quickly in this game, that the top hat had no ambition beyond going round the board as many times as possible, as quickly as possible. He never stopped to buy anything, but just kept on rolling. Odd as that was, the dog behaved in an even stranger way, rejoicing every time he had to pay tax or a utility bill. Meanwhile the car attempted to keep out of trouble by sitting in jail all game, and the iron spent all his money building hotels on chance and community chest squares. Now to win at Monopoly you have to be a ruthless capitalist, crushing your opponents under your superior material acquisition, but none of these players grasped that – rather the top hat thought he was an athlete, the dog became a convinced communist, the car was a complete coward and the iron was simply a nut case. Unlike the cadets and soldiers in the Quayside exercise, the Monopoly players simply did not understand who they were or what they were meant to be doing.
And those two questions – who are we? and what are meant to be doing? – are vital questions to ask ourselves, both as individual Christians and as the collective body of Christ. If we turn in our bibles to the reading we have just heard, in verse 9 Peter describes the church as ‘a royal priesthood’, a single phrase which gets to heart of what it is to be and to live as Christians. So in the few minutes I have tonight I’d like us to explore the idea of ‘a royal priesthood’ with these two questions – what does it mean to be a royal priesthood? And what does it look like to live as a royal priesthood?
So firstly, what does it mean to be a royal priesthood?
To return briefly to military analogy, the ‘royal’ in the Royal Navy indicates two things – that it is the possession of the Queen, and also that it has been commissioned by the Queen. And the word ‘royal’ operates in the same way in verse 9–we belong to God and we are commissioned by God. But who exactly who belongs to this royal priesthood? Peter makes it clear in verse 10 that it is all those who have received the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. And this is a wonderful thing – for just as the whole world is invited to receive mercy in Christ Jesus, all those who take up that offer become the possession of God and part of this royal priesthood.
So that’s the royal part. What about the priesthood? Priesthood can evoke images of Old Testament Israel, where those descended from Aaron, the Levites, were appointed to offer sacrifices in order to mediate between God and humans. But the book of Hebrews makes it abundantly clear that Jesus has permanently fulfilled the necessity to make atoning sacrifice for human sin, and that faith in Christ is the qualification to access the living God, rather than a visit to an appointed priest. Peter thus can’t be suggesting that the New Testament priesthood is about providing access to God, so what does he have in mind? We get a hint in verse 5 of our reading, where he commands that the royal priesthood offer “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Christ Jesus”. But what exactly does that mean?
Well, to get a true idea of what the royal priesthood should look like, we have to go back to the Old Testament. But not to Israel’s priesthood. That priesthood operated as it did because the rebellion of Humankind meant that mediation through the sacrifice of blood was necessary to maintain relationship between a just God and a rebellious nation. But Israel’s priesthood was neither the first priesthood nor the model of what God intended priesthood to be. Rather, we need to go back to the creation-order itself. We see in the early chapters of Genesis and indeed throughout the Old Testament, God’s purpose for creating Humans as his image-bearers on Earth was that they would bring God’s rule to bear on Earth and gather the praises of the Earth to God. This is the true priesthood and the pattern of priesthood that we are to follow; indeed it was the design of creation that all humans would be priests, but this calling was surrendered by Humans as one of the consequences of rebellion against God. Wonderfully, the priesthood has now been restored to the church of Christ. So these “acceptable spiritual sacrifices” spoken of by Peter are all of the fruits of the church of Christ seeking once again to fulfil this priestly role of bringing the rule of God to bear on Earth and of gathering the Earth’s praise to God.
So what exactly does this mean for us? And how do we go about fulfilling this call? This brings me to my second question: what does it look like to live as a royal priesthood?
If we begin with our attitudes, the Epistles highlight three virtues that should especially mark the followers of Jesus and so should be distinctives of the royal priesthood. These are “faith, hope and love”, a trio exhorted by Paul in 1 Corinthians, Colossians and 1 Thessalonians. So as a priesthood we must have real faith in the goodness, promises and word of the God we are seeking to serve and praise, otherwise our efforts will at best be half-hearted and at worst a vanity parade. We must hope for the return of our king Jesus, as without hope of a perfect and united New Earth and New Heavens, we will neither have the vision to herald the reign of God nor the motivation to persevere in our priesthood. And we must love, for in commanding us to “love the Lord our God with all of our hearts and to love our neighbour as ourselves”, Jesus has established love rather than military might or philosophical brilliance to be the means by which His people should seek to live and make him known. So faith, hope and love are to be our priestly attitudes.
What about our actions? In short, the priestly call encompasses the whole life of the church, but there are four tasks in particular that scripture presents as central to this call. Firstly, is the task proclamation. If a king is going to be obeyed and worshipped, he must send heralds into the realm to proclaim his kingship. So we must boldly, unashamedly and urgently proclaim to the whole world that Christ Jesus is the King. Secondly, there is the task of humble service. Jesus leaves us in no doubt that the Christian life is one of putting others’ interests first and seeking their good ahead of our own. Indeed this is the practical fruit of the virtue of love, and highlights again that the priesthood is not to bring God’s rule on Earth through arrogance and muscle, but through a willing outpouring of our lives in service for the good of others and the glory of God.
Thirdly is the task to pray. Prayer is the supreme means that God has given us to seek to bring his rule upon Earth. We are appointed as intercessors to the king, and God has so ordered things that the welfare of all creation, its people, its cities and its nations, are dependent on our prayers. This is sobering when we consider the slowness and dispassion that is so often the experience of our prayer life. But let me balance this with an encouragement, in that I’m certain that without the faithful praying of this church over the years, that both our life as a church and the well-being of this city would be in a far worse state than they are. And let us take heart for tonight’s meeting, that by seeking the good of the Earth and the glory of God through our prayers, we are truly being God’s royal priesthood.
These three tasks - proclamation, humble service and prayer - come under the “God to Earth” dimension of priesthood, so what about the “Earth to God” dimension? Well this is where the final task comes into play, namely the task of praise. Praise encompasses all aspects of thankfulness and thanksgiving, and in our passage in verse 9 Peter exhorts the church to “declare the praises of him who brought us out of the darkness and into his glorious light”. In light of His glorious redeeming work, there is no limit on the type or amount of praise that should be rendered to God. Yet scripture does proscribe a special union between praise and music. We see this throughout the Old Testament and supremely in the Psalter, but also in the New Testament – through Paul encouraging both the Ephesian and Colossian churches to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and through the inclusion in scripture of early church hymns, such as the ‘Christ the servant’ hymn in Philippians 2. The royal priesthood is thus charged calling every heart to give thanks to the Lord Jesus, singing praise to the Mighty King and leading the whole creation in doing so!
I’d like to conclude by exhorting us not to make the mistake of the Monopoly players, but rather to remember who we are, and what we are called to do. We should rejoice to be part of this amazingly-called royal priesthood and at having the creation-purpose of our humanity restored by the mercy of God. So tonight may we pray with desperate and longing hearts to see God’s Spirit move to transform people’s lives, that he may bring people out of their darkness and that they may bring Him praise. Let us give thanks for the growth he has granted us, but not to be satisfied until every tongue on Tyneside, and indeed throughout all creation, confesses that Jesus Christ is the Lord, to the praise of God the Father.
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