Summary
Jesus is the perfect Priest, Prophet, and King. Through our baptism, we become sharers in these roles of Jesus and are called to communicate the reality of God to others through our lives.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“My kingdom does not belong to this world,” .
Jn. 18:36
1. In considering the priesthood of Jesus, we should know that a priest is a mediator between God and man. How might seeing Jesus as a mediator between God and man influence your relationship with Jesus?
2. Throughout the Old Testament, there were many kings who failed in their duty of being signs of the Divine. In what ways do you identify with the story of these kings? How can you work on turning to God in moments of failure?
3. In many instances, the prophets of the Old Testament called people to repent of their misdeeds. In what ways might God be calling you to repent or amend your life this Lent?
4. Our baptism changes who we are and makes us sharers in Jesus’ roles of Priest, Prophet, and King. Our lives should be signs of God’s goodness. How might God be calling you to communicate this to others through the way you live?
Text: Jesus: Priest, Prophet and King
Well hello everybody, my name is Scott Powell and welcome back to the Pray More Lenten Retreat. So today I want to talk to you about Jesus’ titles of Priest, Prophet, and King. What that means, where those come from, and how you and I, through a baptism, are actually also called to be Priests, Prophets, and Kings.
Opening Prayer
So before we do that, let’s open up in a prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy spirit, amen.
Jesus, thank you so much for the gift of this day for this retreat. We thank you for all the people who are listening and watching online and we pray that you have blessed their time following you throughout this Lent.
We pray that, uh, you would be in this talk. Please give me words that will inspire and make people curious to delve more into the scriptures and the story of our faith. We pray for the intercession of your mother as we pray, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Luke’s Gospels
Alright. I love the scriptures. That’s like what I do. That’s my thing. I teach the scriptures, I love them so much, and I love the gospels. And I love that the Church in her great wisdom gives us four different accounts of the birth and the life and the mission and the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. And all of these four gospels are giving us really the same story from slightly different points of view, which is awesome.
So I love all the gospels. But Luke’s gospel, I love his opening. I love the way that he, uh, leads us into the story of Jesus. He has the greatest prologue. And they’re, they’re all good. So I, you know, it’s like a father with his kids, like, you can’t pick a favorite. But I really love the way that Luke gets you into the story. And Luke’s prologue is actually where we get so many of the stories of Advent and Christmas, right? The story about the Annunciation and the Visitation, um, Angel Gabriel, the nuit de minute, these beautiful prayers and hymns that we sing in the liturgy.
So there’s all this really cool stuff. It’s also where we get the, a lot of the Hail Mary prayer. But there’s something that Luke does that I want to point out. What, what does this have to do with priests, prophet, and king? It actually has a lot, believe it or not. So the way that Luke begins his gospel, Luke’s opening is almost Shakespearean.
He’s a great storyteller, and the way that Shakespeare often liked to tell stories was that he would, uh, before the main character kind of came up on stage and the narrative began, you’d get the background chorus, the cast of characters who sort of show up to prepare the stage, set the stage for the main character. So before Jesus really enters into His mission and ministry in the Gospel of Luke, we get a whole background chorus of characters. And Luke is very careful about how he does this.
The Lineage of Jesus
So in the Gospel of Luke, the first people we read about, long before we read about Jesus, we actually read about, a couple, Zechariah and Elizabeth. They are the parents of John the Baptist, and what we know about Zechariah and Elizabeth is that Zechariah is a priest. He’s a priest from the division of Abijah, he is, um, you know, priests offer sacrifice, they offer incense. He is an intermediary between God and humanity, so he’s a priest.
It’s pretty cool. Elizabeth, his wife is actually from the lineage. She’s not an ordained priest, but she is from the lineage. Her family is from the line of the high priest of Aaron. So they’re kind of a big deal. So, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Jesus aunt and uncle, parents to John the Baptist, they’re a priestly couple, so we read a little bit about them.
The next people we read about in the Gospel of Luke are Mary and Joseph. They’re pretty important, right? The mom and dad of Jesus, Mary, the blessed mother. And what do we know about Mary and Joseph? We know that they’re actually royal.
So Joseph, the thing that’s both beautiful and kind of tragic about the story of St. Joseph, is that Joseph was the direct heir to the throne of King David. Unfortunately, in the time of Jesus, he was a king in exile, a foreign power called Rome was in charge and occupied their land. There was a puppet king named Herod who kind of controlled the territory, but Joseph was the true rightful heir to the throne of Israel, but he’s a king in exile. So Mary and Joseph, in a very real sense, are a royal couple. They are the royal couple of Israel, kind of cool.
And then after the birth story of Jesus, When he is brought back to Jerusalem after 40 days to be presented in the temple, we meet another couple of people, another man and a woman. This is the first set that’s not married, but we meet a guy named Simeon and a woman named Anna and Simeon and Anna, they’re elderly, they’re old; they’re hanging out at the temple. They’ve spent a good deal of their lives there. And Luke tells us that they are, prophets. They’re prophets. In other words, there are people who are waiting for the revealing of God, what He’s doing in the world. And they’re trying to be a sign of that.
And then the baby Jesus comes with the Holy Family, and it’s Simeon and Anna. Simeon holds baby Jesus in his arms, and he says, Yes, this, this is what the people of Israel have been waiting for. Now I can go die, because my eyes have seen the salvation which God has prepared in the sight of every people, they’re prophets.
So, do you see what Luke has done? You guys, it’s so cool. In setting up the story of Jesus, the Priest, Prophet, and King, he has prepared the way with sets, three couples, of priests, prophets, and kings, to prepare us for Jesus. It’s a really cool way to start a story. It teaches us a little bit about who Jesus is, but it also teaches us who we are.
What is a Priest?
So let’s, let’s take this apart for a second, priests, we got to start there. Priesthood is kind of a funny thing, right? And those of you who are Catholic, like, you probably have a very specific relationship to that word priest, right? Priest is, what, it’s father, right? It’s the guy who has the, you know, wears all black and has the little white collar, right?
He, offers Mass, he says confessions, he hopefully hangs out for donuts after Mass, like, that’s a priest. So many religions throughout the history of the world, most of them, in fact, up until modern times have had some version of priests or priestesses, right? Ancient Judaism had priests, Mesopotamia had priests, Egypt had priests, the Babylonians had priests, the Romans had priests, most of the religions on earth throughout the whole history of humanity have had priests.
Why? What’s a priest? A priest, a priest is very simple. So again, in most of our experience, a priest is the one who sort of leads worship. They’re the one who run the parish. They give homilies, they offer the mass, they offer sacrifice, they hear confessions.
Yeah, all of that is true, but those are really what a priest does. Who a priest is, is much more fundamental. What a priest is, and this is the way it was from the beginning, a priest is meant to be an intermediary, a mediator, between God, between the divine, and humanity, between divine and humanity. So again, most religions throughout history have had individuals that are kind of raised up to be mediators, communicators between the divine, the gods and human beings, right?
We are no exception. Judaism always had ancient Judaism, the Old Testament people. They had priests. Zechariah is really, even though his story is in the Old Testament, he’s an Old Testament priest. His story is in the New Testament, rather.
He’s an Old Testament priest. So where does that all come from? All right, we gotta go back to the beginning for this, because this is actually very cool. In most of our experience, and in most of the experience of humanity, Priesthood is, it’s kind of a limited thing. Maybe we have some priests that are actually listening and watching this retreat.
Praise be to God for you guys. Thank you for what you do and the gift that you are to the Church. But again, priesthood in most of our experience is, kind of a separate, not separate exactly. Um, but it’s distinct, right? It’s these people who are called to this particular role, and that’s really cool, and that’s a gift.
But in the very beginning, it actually wasn’t that way. In the story of the Garden of Eden, remember, as the scriptural story begins, who’s the first character in the story, right? We have the creation of the heavens and the earth and all these things, light and dark, sea and sky, animals, birds, dry land, and then we’re given our first father.
Adam, right? Adam. And if you read the story carefully, I think what the scriptures are trying to convey to us is that our first father, Adam, was actually called to be a priest. His job was to garden, to till and keep the garden, to be a gardener, to tend and care for creation, but also to protect and guard, right?
That’s what priests do. They’re tenders, they cultivate, they’re meant to care for their people, to shepherd, and they’re meant to protect, to be safeguards, right? In the beginning, that’s who Adam was. Well, what is the Garden of Eden? The whole Garden of Eden, again, if you read the story carefully, it is such a beautiful story.
The Garden of Eden, if you read the Bible rightly, it’s not some far off utopian island with palm trees far over there. It was the state of creation. All of creation was meant to be a mirror, an image into the heart of God, the God who loves us. That’s why the story of creation is given to us in terms of seven days.
Seven was the ancient Hebrew idea of the way in which you swore a covenant, the marriage, right? A giving of oneself in totality. When Genesis says that God created the world in seven days, what that means and what it would have meant for an ancient hearer was that God wedded Himself like a bride and a bridegroom.
He gave himself to the whole created world whom He loves; and then He put Adam, the man there to be priest, to be the mediator, to care, to be the one who stands in between of the God who loves us and the creation that He loves. Adam, I mean, that’s, that’s cool, it was a dignified role. Adam was a big deal, you guys. And Adam and Eve, then he’s given a coworker, a partner in this.
And so Adam and Eve, from the beginning, had a priestly identity. But here’s the thing about priests, priests are not God. Let me repeat that. Priests are not God. Never worship your priest, guys. It’s never going to go well for you. You priests, you know what I’m talking about. Never worship your priest, because a priest is not God.
You see problems in other ancient religions. You see problems in the Old Testament, where people make human beings who have a very particular role into something they’re not meant to be. This is the problem of original sin. God says to his first priests, to the signs of his goodness in the world, that here’s who you are.
You have so much dignity. You have so much, , integrity, uh, He calls them his image and likeness, which endows them with this incredible dignity as human beings. But he says, look, you’re not God. And there’s this tree and whatever the tree exactly represents it, you know, there’s an imagery being evoked with the tree.
He says that is off limits to you because this is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in hebrew The word for knowledge is the word “yada” and “yada” doesn’t mean just to know about like. Oh, I read a book on you know Uh on George, Washington. So now I know about George, Washington. That’s not what “yada” means, “Yada” means not just to know about something. It means to have ownership over, it means to Arbitrate something.
So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not the tree of being aware of good and evil. You guys, Adam and Eve know the difference between good and evil. We know that because God says don’t do this. It’s bad. So they know what good and bad is.
Otherwise God’s commands are meaningless. He says to Adam, protect the garden. That implies that there’s something to protect against. I think Adam knows what good and bad is. But he says, God says, this tree is off limits because this is the tree of arbitration. This is the tree where you say, I will decide for myself what is good and evil.
And that is God’s and God’s alone. Your job as priests is to convey that to the world, to be the sign of that, not to be the arbiters and out of fear. Or pride, the manipulation of the evil one, the serpent in the garden. They say, no, no, we want what God is keeping from us. We don’t want to be God’s priests, we want to be God.
That is the original sin. And again, they might have done that out of fear, pride, hubris, all sorts of a mix of emotions, I’m sure. But they do it. The priests try to make themselves like God. You guys, that’s the problem of sin. The problem of sin is not that God created these, you know, little kind of pathetic animals down here on earth, these little creatures, these peasants that are just kind of there to do his will.
And if they mess up, he’s going to be mad at us. That’s not original sin. Original sin is that human beings had the most astounding dignity imaginable. We had responsibility and we broke that trust. We said, no, I don’t just want the responsibility. I want to be the arbitrator. I want to be God. The priests made themselves as more than priests, that was a big deal.
And so because of that, the priesthood of humanity was broken. It was broken. And now the nature of the priesthood began to change. And as the story of salvation history moved on throughout the Old Testament, again, it became more of a mediation that God is sort of over here. Human beings are over here and we need someone in between, but that.
gap felt like it was getting more and more distant, felt like the, uh, the gap was getting wider and wider because that’s what sin does. It makes us feel further and further away from God. As God throughout salvation history begins to establish this people called Israel. He says, Hey Israel, I want you to be a priestly people.
I want you to be a people who communicate my goodness to the world, the goodness of God. I want you to show that and be a sign of it out to the world. And again, if you know the story of Salvation History, you know it’s a story about people continually blowing it and failing to do that. So why does Jesus show up?
Jesus shows up for all sorts of reasons. To put an end to sin, to reconcile us back to God, but ultimately, and in part, to be the perfect high priest. What is a priest? A priest is a mediator between God and humanity. The divine and human beings. Well, what makes a perfect priest? A perfect priest would be God, the divine, who is a human being.
Jesus and His Kingship
So that he knows who we are, he knows what we need, but he also is God, so he knows what God requires, he knows what God asks. He is the perfect intermediary, he is the place in the cosmos where human and divine meet. He is priest. Yes, that’s a big deal. Kingship. Priest, prophet, and king. I’m going to take him a little bit out of order.
Kingship. What’s the kingship? So in the very beginning of the story, again, I said that from the beginning Adam and Eve were called to be priests. That’s true. They were also called to be royal. The first time you read about kings or queens or kingdoms in the Bible is on page one when it says that Adam and Eve were created in the image and likeness of God, you know, in the ancient world, those are royal terms.
The king, kings in ancient empires and kingdoms were meant to be, again, signs of the divine. They were meant to be almost sacramental in that they represented something bigger than us to ourselves. And in Israel, among the people of God, a king, the kings, when God rose David to the throne and all of his descendants, the reason that there was a king in Israel, because God wanted something tangible and visible to remind us Of God’s invisible rule and reign over all of creation.
So we put a visible sign because that’s how much God loves us. He knows we’re human beings and we need things that we can look at and touch and shake hands with, right? So we said, no, these kings are not gods. They’re meant to be the sign. They’re meant to remind you that there is a God who is ultimately king, and these guys are supposed to remind you of that.
And again, the story of the Old Testament is a story of a bunch of guys totally blowing it. If you read the Old Testament, there’s all these kings and most of them completely fall on their face. They become almost a countersign of what God was never supposed to be and never wanted His people to be reminded of.
So what does God have to do? He has to come and He has to take it on. You know, there’s prophecies all throughout the Old Testament that say someday God’s going to come, because of the failure of all of these human instruments, God’s going to come and He’s going to do it Himself. And so God comes, born of Mary, right, into a family from a royal line to take on the kingship, be the king that we could never ultimately be, that our kings of days past could never live up to. He is, in His body, the sacramental sign of God’s goodness, his rule and reign over the earth. So He is priest and He is king.
Jesus a Prophet
He’s also a prophet. What’s a prophet? Prophets, you know, sometimes I think we mistakenly think that a prophet, especially like an Old Testament prophet, is simply someone who tells the future.
Yeah, sometimes that’s the case, sometimes prophecy involves speaking of things that have not yet happened. But in the most proper sense, in the biblical sense, a prophet is someone who simply gives insight into what God is doing, reveals to us, communicates to us what God is up to. And in the Old Testament, a lot of the prophets kind of are grumpy.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom, right? They’re kind of dark clouds because a lot of the job of the prophets throughout the Old Testament was to remind the people that you are so far off base on who God wants you to be. He wants you to be a sign to the world that He loves the world and He wants to unite all people to Himself and you guys are blowing it.
You’re falling into sin, you’re abusing the poor, you’re being corrupt, you’re being counter signs and you’re leading people further away from God. So the prophets show up to remind us of who we are, to remind us of who God is, to communicate His reality to the world.
And so if you’ve tracked with what I’ve tried to say so far, priests, prophets, and kings, in a certain Old Testament sense, there’s a good deal of overlap. They all sort of do different things. They have different vocations in a certain sense. But they’re all meant to do what? To communicate God and who He is to those of us down here, to human beings.
Jesus is that He is the perfect priest, He’s God and human and humanity. He’s the perfect king. He is God’s rule and reign on the earth in a visible, tangible, and now sacramentally edible way. He’s also prophet because in Jesus’s person, in His words, in His deeds, He communicates what God is doing and who God is. He is priest, prophet, and King. So Jesus takes on himself everything that no human being could ever do. The high dignified calling that human beings were meant to fulfill, but could never do on our own. Jesus does them and he takes them upon himself. So he is the priest, prophet, and King.
Our Baptism Welds Us With Jesus
But here’s the good news. Through our baptism, our baptism does what? Our baptism unites us. It welds us with Jesus indelibly. It changes who we are forever. And so because we are blood relatives with Jesus, who is the ultimate priest, prophet, and king, because of that being united, because we are his actual literal family, we now share those roles of priest, prophet, and king.
So that our job is to communicate to the world the goodness of God we carry in our baptisms We carry in our very bodies our identity as Christians We are meant to be little walking sacramental icons of God’s love for the world His goodness and His rule and His reign over all of the earth. The world should look at you in your baptism and be like, Oh my gosh, there is something incredible beyond that person because that person is communicating something to me that I want that maybe I’ve never had before.
So, some of you might be sacramentally ordained priests, and you have a duty to communicate that in a very tangible way. Some of you, probably not, but maybe there’s some kings out there, some royalty, I don’t know if there’s that many nations or kingdoms left in the world. There’s some, and maybe some of you have some royal blood, that’s awesome, that’s very cool.
Maybe some of you know that your responsibility is to communicate, to teach the truth to people in the church, to schools, to parishes. Through journalism, whatever it is, you have a prophetic voice. Some of you are called to very tangible ways of doing this, but every single one of us, again, because of who we are as baptized Christians and our unity in Jesus, we all get to role, we all get to share a role in this.
We all have a responsibility because we are the Adam and Eve’s That Adam and Eve could never have hoped to be. Praise be to God for that.
Closing Prayer
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen. Thanks everybody.
About Dr. Scott Powell
Dr. Scott Powell is a teacher, theologian and author. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor of Theology at the St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Scott and his wife, Annie, founded and direct Camp Wojtyla, a Catholic outdoor adventure program for youth based in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He holds a doctorate in Catholic Studies from Liverpool Hope University in England, and has authored a number of books, articles and book chapters on topics of theology, the Bible, and ecology, as well as Catholic culture and its relationship to the modern world. Scott has also appeared in numerous Catholic productions, including “Symbolon,” “Beloved,” “Reborn,” “YDisciple” and the “Opening the Word” series. He has been featured on EWTN, “Catholic Answers Live” and several other outlets. For nine years he co-hosted the popular podcast “The Word on the Hill with the Lanky Guys,” and currently hosts the podcast, “Sunday School, a Pillar Bible Study”. Scott and his wife live near Boulder, Colorado with their three children: Lily Avila, Samuel Isaac, and Evelyn Luca.