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Speaker: Dr John Bergsma
This is the first of nine lectures from a conference entitled ‘The Splendor of the Church’, held by the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
Dr Bergsma speaks on the concept of priesthood and on priests as reflecting Christ’s role as the Bridegroom of the Church in John’s Gospel.
He points out analogies between Christ and the High Priest’s role in the Old Testament, and then identifies Apostolic Succession in John’s Gospel, pointing out the echoes of priestly functions in the Old Testament – and says that Jesus intended his Apostles and their successors to carry them on.
For instance, Jesus’ washing of His disciples’ feet, which refers to Exodus 30:19-21, where Mosaic Law provides for a basin of water to be always present in the tabernacle of the courts so that the priests can wash their feet before performing any liturgical act.
Jesus’ words to Peter: ‘If I do not wash your feet you have no part [or portion] of me’ echoes the fact that the members of the priestly tribe of Levi hold no portion – ‘I the Lord am their portion.’
Again, there is ‘The High Priestly Prayer’ in John 17. This falls into three parts:
vv1-5, where Jesus prays for himself
vv6-19, where he prays for the Apostles
vv20-26, he prays for those ‘Who will believe on me through them’ – the rest of the Church.
John 17 refers to God’s name throughout – v6: ‘I have manifested Your Name to the men whom You gave me out of the world’; v11, ‘And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in Your Name, which You have given Me, so that they may be one, as you and I are one.’ The Day of Atonement was the only day on which the High Priest could pronounce God’s name.
Christ’s commission to the Apostles in John 20 (‘Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, and whose sins you retain are retained) recalls Moses’ words to Aaron in Leviticus 10:10: ‘You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean …’, and the role, elsewhere in Leviticus, of the priests in deciding if a person with a skin disease was clean or unclean, physical illness being seen as reflecting moral impurity.
The second part of the lecture discusses the Church as Bride of Christ in John’s Gospel. Mary anoints Jesus with a costly jar of pure nard. Jesus says: ‘It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.’ This ties in with the only reference to nard in the Old Testament: in the Song of Songs, where it is one of the perfumes for Solomon’s bride.
Song of Songs Chapter 3 has a beautiful song about the bride yearning for the bridegroom and looking for him. Mary Magdalen’s search for Christ’s body reflects this in great detail.
Dr Bergsma’s final point is that the priest’s role – in persona ‘Christi’, modelling Christ to the people – is in fact closer to Christ’s role of Bridegroom than that of married men!
