“Don’t need no priest; don’t need no pew.
You are my religion; my religion is you.
I don’t need no other purpose; you give me
a reason.
Ain’t their business what I want to believe
in.
You are my priest; you are my truth.
You are my religion; my religion is you.”
Skillet, ‘My
Religion’, Rise (2013)
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| An altar not altogether dissimilar to the one in the church my parents took me to when I was a teenager. Look, it even has that funny little rail you kneel at to receive communion. |
1) Priest
What this word means is a person who mediates between humans and God.
The priest is the representative of humans in God’s presence and the conduit
whereby that relationship is enabled to exist. This is a role whose necessity
makes perfect sense when one considers that God is entirely, perfectly,
superlatively holy, and humans are distinctly, um, not. To stand before God as
a sinner is representative of a death sentence. So, under his covenant with
Israel, God ordained that there should be a specific group within the nation
who might act as priests, offering sacrifices to God so that the people’s sins
might be covered over and forgiven, thus enabling unholy humans to have a
relationship with a holy God.1
Then along comes the new covenant with
Christ, and because he’s awfully good at multi-roling, he becomes both the
ultimate priest and the ultimate sacrifice offered. Through his blood spilled
on our behalf we are made holy such that we might be able to stand in God’s
presence, and indeed that we might become dwelling-places of the very Spirit of
God – and Christ is the sole mediator of the covenant in his blood, the sole
representative we require in God’s presence, the sole channel through which our
relationship with God is enabled. The letter to the Hebrews is very big on
these kinds of ideas; I’ll give you a quick snapshot, but do go and have a more
thorough peruse:
This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better
covenant. The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented
by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently,
because he continues for ever. Consequently, he is able to save to the
uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make
intercession for them.2
So we should stop using the word to refer
to the guy who stands at
the front in a clerical collar and delivers the sermon. That guy is a preacher
or a teacher or a pastor maybe, but definitely not a priest: the Church only
has one priest, and his name is Jesus the Christ. To call anyone on earth a
priest is to claim that we need an intermediary other than Jesus to enable our
relationship with God, which frankly pours scorn on what Jesus has actually
achieved for us and also grossly exaggerates the importance of whichever
individual is being entitled ‘priest’.
2) Altar
What this word means is a piece of furniture on which sacrifices are
offered. Again looking at God’s covenant with Israel, there was a big square acacia-wood
one with horns on it in the tabernacle and later the Temple.3
So we should stop using the word to refer
to a piece of furniture on
which bread and wine are placed for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. No
sacrifice is taking place when that happens; Jesus’ one sacrifice of himself
was sufficient to deal with absolutely all the sins of God’s people, past,
present, and future. The following from just a few verses after that chunk of
Hebrews I quoted above:
[Jesus] has no need, like those high
priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those
of the people, since he did this once
for all when he offered up himself.
Jesus told his disciples to take bread and
wine in remembrance of him;4 this event is a memorial
of his once-for-all, 100%-sufficient, never-to-be-repeated sacrifice. To have
it take place around an ‘altar’, a venue for sacrifice, rather implies that it’s
an actual sacrifice all by itself. And to suggest that we need to conduct extra
sacrifices of our own, reruns of Jesus’ sacrifice, is to express a horribly
diminished view of what that sacrifice actually achieved. If we need a name for
the piece of furniture on which we put the bread and wine, well, ‘table’ would
seem a perfectly adequate one.
 |
| Ew, common cup. Is there an actual reason why people do communion like that, or is it just to save on washing up? |
3) Worship
What this word means is, in the words of Romans 12:1, the
presentation of our bodies, by the mercies of God, as a living sacrifice, holy
and acceptable to God.5 I hasten to add, in light of what I just
said about altars, that such presentation doesn’t constitute an extra sacrifice
of such a kind as to secure our relationship with God; Paul has spent the past
eleven chapters of his letter explaining in no uncertain terms that none of us can
do anything to secure that relationship, and that such a thing is only possible
through Jesus. A normal sacrifice has to die in order to achieve its purpose,
as Jesus did; we, by contrast, are called to be living sacrifices. That
means giving over every part of our lives in obedience to the God by whose
mercies we have already been made holy.
So we should stop using the word to refer
to music. Singing songs to
praise God and encourage one another may be one component of our obedience to
God – the Bible does tell us to do it, after all6 – but it’s nothing
even remotely close to the whole thing. Likewise, the person who leads the
musical component of a church service isn’t the ‘worship leader’ or ‘worship
pastor’; he’s the music director, or she’s the lead guitarist, or whatever the
most appropriate term may be in the circumstances. And when somebody announces
the musical component of the service by saying that we’re going to spend some
time worshipping God now – well, weren’t we already doing that? Aren’t we
supposed to be doing that all the time? Calling music ‘worship’ places
excessive importance on it as a means by which we glorify God, and pushes other
– arguably more significant, if likely less glamorous – means out of the
picture.
So those are three of the most prominent
grudges I bear against bits of vocabulary that get blithely chucked around in
Christian contexts. If you have any of your own to add, well, there’s such a
thing as a comments box…
Footnotes
1 The priests were to be Aaron and his descendants, first
consecrated for the purpose in Exodus 28: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+28&version=ESVUK.
Of course, only four chapters later Aaron the High Priest was telling everybody
to worship a golden calf. Thank God that under the new covenant our High Priest
is Jesus.
2 That bit’s from Chapter 7, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+7&version=ESVUK,
but there’s lots on the same theme in the rest of the book as well.
3 Compare the start of Exodus 27, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+27&version=ESVUK,
with the start of Exodus 38, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+38&version=ESVUK.
Sterling job, Bezalel.
4 As Luke records: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+22&version=ESVUK.
5 Whole chapter, so you can check I’ve got it right: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK.
6 In Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16, to be precise.
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