Waiting on the Lord: Reflections for a Priestly Life

In a restless, fast paced world of quick fixes, there is huge value in the way priesthood is ‘weighed and pondered’.

In his new book Waiting on the Lord, Simon Cuff addresses key aspects of priestly life and the ways in which it prophetically stands in contrast to the priorities of contemporary culture.

Read on for an exclusive extract...

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Imposters and Unlikely Priests

This is pretty weighty stuff. I’d bet that almost all of us in ministry have a pretty healthy dose of imposter syndrome. If I told you, that I know what you did, what you secretly want to do, what you fear you might have done, or that there was an administrative mistake and - speaking to my self in all of these - and in fact it was a different Simon who was selected for ordination and you should never have been admitted to college, let alone begun a curacy - I think many of us could relate. I spent most of both my pre-ordination retreats expecting an official in a dark suit to emerge from somewhere in the retreat centre and to escort me quietly away from the premises.

If we feel like we are here as an impostor, that someone - possibly even God - has made a terrible mistake, we can find encouragement in the priesthood of Christ. If we feel we’re the unlikeliest person to be called to serve in God’s church as priest, if we feel we’re totally unqualified or not the person we would chose for this particular calling, I can absolutely assure you that however unlikely you think it might be that you are called to this vocation, Christ’s priesthood is even more unlikely according to the conventions of his day.

We sometimes miss this. Part of the argument of the New Testament authors is that it should be obvious that Jesus is the Messiah from the prophecies of the Old Testament. We get a mistaken impression if we take this at face value. Even as our New Testament authors are making the case that Jesus is the one to whom prophecy points, they are the very same time demonstrating the sheer unlikeliness of Jesus being the one who would redeem God’s people. He’s born out of wedlock in a backwater, executed with common criminals. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

If Jesus is an unlikely Messiah, he’s an even more unlikely priest. Indeed, strictly speaking according to the conventions of Jesus’s day it’s impossible for him to be a priest at all. He’s not from the right family. He’s not from the tribe of Levi, and so immediately disqualified from serving as priest. Again, we often miss this. It’s a bit of a truism that Christ is priest, and indeed the priest. Yet we miss that the author of the letter the Hebrews is having to explain how it is he can be priest at all.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews presents Christ as our great High Priest. However, he can’t present Christ as a priest in any sense according to the Jewish conventions of his day. Yet so many of the author’s arguments for who Jesus is and what Jesus has done depend on him being not just high priest, but a superior High Priest. The arguments for this are based on Jesus doing once and for all and in a superior way, what the temple High Priest has to do again and again each year for the atonement of sins. To do this, the author argues Jesus’s priesthood is of a different and superior order. He compares Jesus’ priesthood to Melchizedek, who isn’t of the tribe of Levi, and is the first priest mentioned in the Bible. The argument of Hebrews for us as Christians is so successful we can miss why it is the author needs to go to so much effort to make this call. Jesus’ priesthood is unlikely, unexpected, impossible. He’s from the right family, he’s not the right sort of person, he can’t possibly serve as priest.

It’s the reason why the letter to the Hebrews has to make an argument for the priesthood of Christ at all, which helps us as our foundation in ministry, rather than the conclusions which make Christ an obvious and superior priest. For those of us who don’t feel we’re obvious candidates for this calling, and certainly don’t feel we’re superior, it’s this unlikeliness and unexpectedness which helps us step into the particular calling God has placed on our lives. It also helps us in our exercise of this calling. Alert to the sheer unlikeliness, unexpectedness, impossibly of Christ’s own priesthood, we’re liberated to exercise our own priesthood seeking out those who are unexpected, unlikely, impossible disciples. It prevents us from only encouraging those who are the right sort of person, or from the right sort of family, or who look and think and speak like us.

Waiting on the Lord is available now.