Priesthood

Christ is the one true Priest, mediating between God and humanity not by standing between two strangers but by being, in His own Person, both God and man. Every Christian shares in that priesthood as a member of His Body — a "royal priesthood" — and the Church's ordained priesthood exists to serve and reveal that shared priestly life, not to supply an access to God the baptized would otherwise lack.

For Inquirers

Here is a question worth sitting with: if Jesus already opened the way to God for everyone, why does the Church still have priests?

The quick answer many people reach for is that priests used to be needed as a kind of go-between, and Jesus made that unnecessary — He is the only mediator we need now, so an ordained clergyman is, at best, a helpful teacher and, at worst, an unneeded extra step between you and God. It is a tidy answer, and it misses something important on both ends.

Start with the "before." Long before Jesus was born, the people of Israel already knew and spoke with God — not with a stand-in, not with a lesser messenger, but, Christians believe, with the same eternal Son who would one day be born in Bethlehem. So whatever changed at Christmas and at the Cross, it was not that a mediator showed up for the first time where none had existed. Something else changed — something bigger.

Now the "after." When the Church says every Christian shares in Christ's priesthood, she does not mean each person gets a private, do-it-yourself connection to God that has nothing to do with anyone else. She means something more like a choir than a chorus of soloists: each voice is real, each voice matters, and yet no one sings the piece by singing it alone in a closet. The priest's role is not to stand in your way or to hoard access you lack. It is to serve and hold together the one song the whole choir sings — Christ's own offering of Himself, which the whole Church, priest and people together, is caught up into every time she gathers. Take away the choir director, and the choir does not become freer; it becomes disordered, everyone singing their own version of the same song at once.

Overview

Christ is confessed as the one true and eternal High Priest, mediating between God and man not from the outside but in His own Person, being Himself both God and man (see Christology).
Israel already knew God through the pre-incarnate Word before the Incarnation — the Angel who spoke to Moses and Abraham was not a lesser stand-in but the same divine Person later born of Mary. The Incarnation did not introduce a mediator where none had existed.
What the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection accomplished was not merely "access" or "forgiveness" in the abstract — both were real under the Old Covenant — but the union of human nature to God in Christ's own Person, opening a permanent and universal participation that the Old Covenant's sacrifices could foreshadow but not complete.
Every baptized Christian shares, as a member of Christ's Body, in a "royal priesthood" (echoing Israel's own calling, Exodus 19.6 and 1 Peter 2.9) — this is corporate, not individual, and cannot be exercised apart from the Church.
The ordained priesthood is not a substitute for this shared priesthood, nor a barrier standing between the believer and Christ. It exists to serve, order, and make visible the one priestly life of the whole Body.

Christ, the one true Priest

Every Christian claim about priesthood has to begin with Christ Himself, because He is the one the letter to the Hebrews calls "a great priest over God's house" (Hebrews 10.21). What makes His priesthood different from every priest who came before is not that He is simply better at the same job; it is that He is not, strictly, a third party standing between two others at all. A human priest under the Old Covenant offered a sacrifice that was not himself, on behalf of people he was not identical to, before a God he could not fully show. Christ offers Himself, is Himself both the one who offers and what is offered, and is Himself, in one Person, both God and the humanity being reconciled. This is why the whole argument about priesthood has to be read through Christology: the uniqueness of Christ's priesthood is not a job description, it is a consequence of who He is.

The Logos was never a stranger to Israel

A very common way of telling the Christian story treats the Old Covenant as a time when Israel needed priests to reach a distant God, and treats Christ as the one who finally opened direct access. But this quietly assumes that before the Incarnation, Israel had no real contact with the divine Person who would become Jesus — and that assumption does not survive contact with the text. When Moses turned aside to the burning bush, "an angel of the Lord appeared to him in flaming fire," and then "the Lord called him out of the bush… I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraam" (Exodus 3.2-6) — the Angel and the LORD who speaks are one and the same. When Abraham raised the knife over Isaac, it was "an angel of the Lord" who "called him out of heaven" and spoke in God's own voice: "now I know that thou fearest God, and for my sake thou hast not spared thy beloved son" (Genesis 22.11-12). This is not a novel reading. St. Justin Martyr, debating a learned Jew in the second century, already argued from these very appearances that Scripture shows "another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them"[^justin] — the pre-incarnate Son, recognized as such since the Church's earliest generations. And the Gospel of John confesses openly what these appearances had shown: "No one has seen God at any time. The only born Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has declared him" (John 1.18) — declared Him, the tense implies, all along, not only from Bethlehem onward.

If this is right, then the Incarnation cannot be described as introducing a mediator where none had existed. Israel already knew and was addressed by the eternal Son. Whatever changed at Christmas, it was not that a stranger finally showed up to make introductions.

What actually changed

If Israel already had real contact with the Word, and the Torah already provided a real mechanism of forgiveness — the Law itself says of the sin-offering, "the priest shall make atonement for them, and the trespass shall be forgiven them" (Leviticus 4.20) — then the difference the Incarnation makes cannot simply be "access" or "forgiveness" treated as things Israel lacked outright. The author of Hebrews is precise about what was still missing: only "the high priest alone, once in the year, not without blood" could enter the Holy of Holies (Hebrews 9.7), because "the way into the Holy Place wasn't yet revealed while the first tabernacle was still standing" (Hebrews 9.8). Something real was reserved and unrevealed — not God's willingness to be known, but the permanent and universal way into His presence, thrown open to everyone rather than mediated year after year through one man and one sacrifice repeated without end.

What replaces that repetition is not a better system of permission-granting; it is a union. Athanasius states the goal of the whole Incarnation in a single sentence: "He was made man that we might be made God"[^athdeif] — human nature itself joined, in Christ's own Person, to the divine nature, and so lifted into a communion no Old Covenant sacrifice could accomplish, because a sacrifice can secure a pardon but only the Incarnation could unite God to man. This is why the letter to Hebrews can call Christ's own flesh the veil we now pass through: believers have "boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Hebrews 10.19-20) — see Tearing of the Veil for the full exegesis. The veil is not simply removed; it is fulfilled by something you can be joined to rather than merely pass through.

The royal priesthood of the Church

This union is corporate before it is individual, and Scripture describes it with the very words God once used of Israel. At Sinai God told Moses to tell the people: "if ye will indeed hear my voice, and keep my covenant… ye shall be to me a royal priesthood and a holy nation" (Exodus 19.5-6). St. Peter takes that exact vocation and hands it to the Church: "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession" (1 Peter 2.9), built up as "living stones… a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices" (1 Peter 2.5). John's Apocalypse says the same of Christ's own work: He "made us to be a Kingdom, priests to his God and Father" (Revelation 1.6), and again, "made us kings and priests to our God" (Revelation 5.10). None of this is a new, free-floating status invented for Christians alone; it is Israel's own ancient calling, now extended and fulfilled in the Church, exercised together as one Body rather than claimed by each believer as a private possession.

Why an ordained priesthood, then?

Granting all of this, a real question remains: if the whole Church shares Christ's priesthood together, why does that shared priesthood need an ordained minister at all, rather than being exercised by the gathered congregation as a whole? St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Magnesians within a generation of the apostles, does not address this question directly — his own concern is guarding the Church's unity against schism and against those who denied Christ's real flesh — but the logic he states for why the Church submits to her bishop reaches the same place by a different road: "As therefore the Lord did nothing without the Father, being united to Him… so neither do anything without the bishop and presbyters."[^ign-mag] The bishop's ministry, on this analogy, is patterned after the Son's own relation to the Father — a relation of perfect union, never of one party lacking something the other must supply. Applied to the question at hand, the bishop's ministry is not a barrier inserted between the believer and Christ but the visible shape the Church's union with Christ takes. Ignatius does make the connection to the Eucharist explicit in his own words: "Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it,"[^ign-smyr] because the Eucharist is the whole Church's one common offering, and a common offering needs one who serves and holds it together rather than many private altars.

Modern Orthodox reflection has pressed the same point from a different angle. Fr. Alexander Schmemann observes that treatises on Christian ministry can go remarkably far "without seeing mentioned, be it only once, the traditional and organic connection between ordination and Eucharist"[^schmemann] — precisely the connection Ignatius already assumed. The ordained priest's ministry serves the whole Body's one Eucharist, one altar, one offering — the very thing that makes the royal priesthood a shared priesthood rather than a crowd of separate individuals, kept one instead of dissolving into as many private "priesthoods" as there are believers.

Where the equivocation happens

Put the pieces together and a common argument turns out to rest on sliding between meanings without noticing it. "Access to God," "forgiveness of sins," and "priesthood" are treated as though they were one single thing that Christ simply switched on. But Israel already had real access to the Word and real forgiveness through the Law; what Christ accomplished was neither of these in the abstract, but the union of human nature to God, and the gathering of a people into a shared, priestly Body rather than a collection of individuals each independently licensed to approach God. Once that is seen clearly, "Christ gave me direct access, so I don't need a priest" turns out to answer a question no one who actually held to an ordained priesthood was asking. The Church has never said the priest exists to provide access Christ withheld. She has said the priest exists to serve, and to keep visibly one, the priesthood Christ has already given to His whole Body.

Sources

[^justin]: St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 56 — "there is… another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them." The pre-Nicene identification of the Old Testament's "Angel of the Lord" with the pre-incarnate Son. [^athdeif]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, §54 — "For He was made man that we might be made God.". [^ign-mag]: St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Magnesians, ch. 7 — "As therefore the Lord did nothing without the Father, being united to Him, neither by Himself nor by the apostles, so neither do anything without the bishop and presbyters.". [^ign-smyr]: St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, ch. 8 — "Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is (administered) either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it.". [^schmemann]: Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, appendix "Sacrament and Symbol" (p. 137) — one "can scrutinize virtually all Catholic and Orthodox treatises of Holy Orders without seeing mentioned, be it only once, the traditional and organic connection between ordination and Eucharist.". Transcribed directly from the page image (see); the book itself is not yet converted into TheBrain.