Dedication to the Lord

A reocrding of today's reading and reflection can be accessed here.

Today’s gospels from the feria and the memorial were the subject of recent reflections on the blog. For today’s thought, therefore, I turn to the first reading from the memorial of St Willibrord, bishop and missionary, a first millennium Yorkshireman who helped evangelise continental Europe. The reading is from the Book of Deuteronomy (10: 8-9).

What is the meaning of this text and what are its implications? On the surface, it is a prescription about the Levite priesthood on which the Jewish religion depended under the terms of the Old Covenant. They were the ones designated from among the Jewish people to do service in the temple and ceremonialize in liturgical form the first three commandments of the Decalogue. Note the order of their duties: to carry the ark of the covenant, to stand before the Lord, to minster to Him, and to bless in His name. In other words, in the constitution of their priesthood, it was the theological and not the sociological or the pastoral which came first. Primordially, they were there for the service of God; then, and only then, they were set to serve the people by blessing them in God’s name and sharing with them God’s blessings. There is something profoundly important about this conception of priesthood which, so often in our day, is thought about in terms of functionality, of the job, perhaps, for some, of the equal or unequal opportunities. In the Book of Deuteronomy, the service of God comes first. But more than that, it is the service of God that then shapes the lives of those who are appointed to the ministry.

For what does the extract tell us next, other than that the Lord himself is the inheritance of the Levite? The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; Thou maintainest my lot, says the Psalmist. Here we see in the Mosaic Law and in the Psalms a foreshadowing of the priesthood of Christ who is to come, for in fact the Levite priests could still marry, and still exercised the privileges and duties of fatherhood. Whereas Christ as the high priest of the New Covenant was, as St Paul alludes to in the letter to the Hebrews, ordained for men in the things that appertain to God. He was wholly for God, and indeed His availability to the people was not at odds with His being wholly for God but was a fruit of it. From His consecration to the Father came his divine readiness to being the great bridge builder. For in His dealings with the lost sheep, He had no other mission than to bring them back to the Father and make them too share in His goodness, His God-centeredness.

This is why even if the ministerial priesthood is reserved to a particular slice of humanity, the priesthood of the faithful belongs to all those who have been baptised in the death and resurrection of Christ, and who, therefore, have taken a share in His God-centeredness. We are all marked with His character, even if we are not all empowered to distribute His gifts as the ministerial priests are. We are all part of that Body then which, in union with its Head, approaches the throne of the Blessed Trinity in the mysterious worship accomplished in His sacrifice.

In COLW, this has everything to do with how we understand our vocation, for that vocation is not firstly about what we are asked to do, but rather about how we as individuals are meant to reflect something of the utter beauty and holiness of God through His particular call to us, to reflect something of how His inexhaustible holiness was realised in the person of Jesus. Thus, whether we are simply baptised Christians or whether we are privileged enough to have been called to the sacred ministry, we are all meant in some way to bear the ark of the covenant, to stand in the presence of the Lord, to bless His name, and to bless others in His name insofar as we can, mystically priests, prophets and kings, as St Peter says. It is this sense of union with this overwhelming fountain of divine life that St Therese of Lisieux expressed in declaring her vocation to be love. To echo St Catherine of Sienna, how we would set the world on fire if only we had plumbed the depths of this mystery and begged the Lord to bring it to realisation in our own lives.

We probably all often wish we could have His mercy and His largesse. But perhaps we should also pray for His total dedication to the Father, for then we might know better how to live our consecration to the Lord, and how to share together this calling to reflect His glory in our lives. To do so, however, we only have to say with Mary our yes and thank you, regardless of what our vocation is.