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By Father Steven Tsichlis
Ordination! The
word rings in my ears this morning – a frightening word, because to
me it is the final response, the final commitment to the Truth. Standing before Pilate only hours before his crucifixion,
Jesus, who is the only Christian priest (the Letter to the Hebrews), says that the
purpose of his birth, the purpose of his life and ministry, is “to
bear witness to the Truth” (John 18:37). This is the essence of the priesthood and the content of the
priestly vocation: to
bear witness to the Truth.
But Pilate’s next question is one that all of us, in our
cynicism and despair, have asked at one time or another: “What is
Truth” (John 18:38)? And
Jesus’ answer is silence, because he is the one High Priest, the
Truth, and in his presence Pilate is face to face with that which he
refuses to accept.
What was true two thousand years ago in Palestine is no less
true in twentieth century America. In a society such as ours, where truth is determined by
advertising and the mass media, the priest is a marginal person and in
some sense, even a condemned man. He does not fit in and is considered by many to be a fool, a
madman, someone out of touch with the “real” world. For this reason, the priest, if he is to remain faithful to the
priesthood of Jesus Christ, is confrontational: he must not allow anyone – especially himself – to worship
the many idols offered by the fantasies of contemporary humanity:
those of race, nation, class, state.
The priesthood is thus not a “privileged” position. Ordination does not mean that I am somehow “better” than
anyone else. Still less
is priesthood to be conceived in terms of power or domination: the Church is not intended as a power structure to be
arbitrarily ruled by a clerical elite as if it were a business
enterprise. The Church is
the Body of Christ and the priesthood is not something which belongs
to the priest, but to Christ. The
saints of the Church, from John Chrysostom in the fourth century to
John of Kronstadt in the twentieth, are adamant on this point: it is not the bishop or priest who celebrates the Liturgy, but
Christ himself who celebrates his own sacraments. The priest is only the tool, the instrument, the icon whom
Christ uses to call together his ecclesia, the community of
those who hear and respond to the Word of God.
Nor is it the task of the priest to go around nervously trying
to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the
right track. No priest can save anyone, for we are redeemed once and for
all by the Crucified and Risen Lord. The priest is called to help others recognize and affirm this
Good News by making visible in the daily events of our lives the fact
that behind the dirty curtain of our pain and suffering, there is
something great to be seen: the
face of the God in whose image we have been shaped…
The above article originally appeared in the
“Orthodox Observer” and is part of the sermon delivered by Father
Tsichlis on the occasion of his ordination to the priesthood by
Metropolitan Silas, formerly of New Jersey, on July 3, 1983.
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