. . . Christ as Priest exercises
perfectly His mediatorial office. In the name of mankind He worships God to the
full measure in which God deserves to be worshipped. As a man and in the name
of all mankind, Christ acknowledges that He, a man, is nothing, apart from God.
As the new Head of the human race, the Second Adam, He gives mankind back to
God. This recognition of God’s supreme dominion, and the total yielding up of
one’s self to the Supreme Being consequent upon that recognition, are at the
very core of religion. It constitutes, in fact, what is called the virtue of
religion. For religion means a binding back to God, a return of the creature to
God, where he belongs. Religion, then, is nothing less than right order. With
good reason St. Thomas argues that it is a form of the virtue of justice.
Christ, fulfilling perfectly the obligation woven into the very nature of man
stands out above all men as The Religious, The Just Man.
As Priest, Christ faces God in the
name of man; as Priest He also faces man in the name of God. He exercises His
priestly office by giving man the gifts of God and even the gift of God
Himself. Truly Christ is the one Mediator, the center, the point of meeting
between God and men, because He is God and man. He is the Pontiff, that
is, the Bridge between God and men. Through Him God comes to man. God will come
through no other way. Through Him man goes to God. There is no other way for
man to reach God or to worship Him.
The priestly or sacerdotal
character of Christ, therefore, shows clearly how completely dedicated is His
life. A life that is initially dedicated to the Father; a life that is totally
dedicated to mankind.
Sacredness thoroughly pervades the
office of the priest. The term “sacerdotal” frequently used as the equivalent
of “priestly” indicates plainly the sacredness of the work of the priest.
The priesthood authorizes a man to handle sacred or holy things. God is
essentially holy. No other being is holy or sacred except by reason of some
relationship to the All Holy. Whatever belongs to God is holy. It can belong to
God either because it is God’s gift to man, or because, through God’s
sanctification and generous acceptance of it, it becomes man’s gift to God for
the sake of adoring and pleasing Him. The sacred office of the priest, then, is
bi-polarized, bringing down God’s blessings to man, and carrying up to God what
man owes to Him. (Albert Schlitzer, Redemptive
Incarnation: Sources and Their Theological Development in the Study of Christ [3d
ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 262-63)
Martin Luther desired to give all
glory to Christ, but thought this required that he deny any good in man. As a
matter of fact, however, his conception of the manner in which Christ’s
redemption is applied to individuals belittles Christ’s redemptive action and
robs Him of His true glory. Christ did not come to destroy life, but to give
it, to increase it. His glory does not need the reduction of man’s action to
nothingness, but rather in the transforming and validating of it through giving
him internally a share of His own life and merits. One does not truly glorify
the action of the Creator by denying all true being and causality in creatures;
rather the glory of the Creator consists in communicating a share in His being
and in His causality. Similarly, one does not truly glorify the all-sufficiency
of the Redeemer’s satisfaction and merits by refuting to recognize genuine
expiation and merit in the redeemed. Rather, the glory of Christ requires the
recognition that Christ through His work for us enabled us to share in His
work. The meaning of those who are justified in Christ in no way adds to the
value of the merits of Christ, no more than the being and action of the
finite creature add to the being and action of the infinite Creator. Just as
the Creator’s action is in the creature so that he may act, so the merits of
Christ are in the Christian to enable him to merit and make amends for his sins
before God. Since this is the ultimate purpose of Christ’s redeeming action for
us, we can safely say that Christ’s merits are incomplete without our merits.
This seems to be implied in the saying of St. Paul, “He was reconciled you in
His body of flesh through His death, to present you holy and undefiled and
irreproachable before Him . . . I rejoice now in the sufferings I bear for your
sake; and what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ I will up in my flesh
for His body, which is the Church . . . “
This true meriting on the part of
the Christian and through the merits of Christ is understandable only on the
basis of the intimate union between Christ and the redeemed. Christ spoke of
this intimate union under the figure of the vine and the branches: the vine
communicates its own vitality to the branches. St. Paul inspired b the Spirit
of Christ speaks of this same intimate union between Christ and Christians
under the figure of a human body: Christ is the Head, we are the body, His
members. The life which is in the “Head” expresses itself through the body: “In
him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead . . . and In him . . . you have
received of that fullness. In him, too, you have been circumcised with a
circumcision not wrought by hand, but through the putting off of the body of
the flesh, a circumcision which is of Christ . . . And you, when you were
dead by reason of your sins, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, be
brought to life along him, forgiving all your sins . . . Indeed he has
taken it completely away, nailing it to the cross . . .(He who is) united to
the head, from whom the whole body, supplied and built up by joints and
ligaments, attains a growth that is of God.” (Albert Schlitzer, Redemptive
Incarnation: Sources and Their Theological Development in the Study of Christ [3d
ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 307-9)