Priests and Pontiffs
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Every Christian should be a minister!
Every Christian should be a priest!
Every Christian should be a pontiff!
The fact that some Christians sneer and others snicker at such statements does not disprove them in the least. It only demonstrates ignorance of the real nature of Christianity by a lot of those who profess it.
Most Christians do not want to be thought of as ministers or priests. Ministers are stuffy individuals who look with jaundiced eye upon what average folk like to do and who make the company ill at ease when they walk in. Priests are "holy Joes" who wear clerical dog-collars and pace up and down in front of the "sanctuary" dressed in long robes.
What has happened, of course, is that those who ought to be ministers and priests have abdicated their function and have created an office and developed men to fill it and now they do not want to be personally identified with the function. They prefer to pay others to do the work and lend just enough support to them to salve their own consciences and keep the functionaries off their necks. And they secretly resent the caricatures of their own creation.
Any relation between such a custom and the genuine militant sword-wielding army of the Captain of salvation is purely incidental. The two should not be spoken of in the same breath. Perhaps they ought not to be mentioned in the same article. Forgive me then, and I'll get on with the task of explaining the bit about the universal pontificate of the believers. And don't be frightened off from reading further by that big word.
The word "pontiff" simply means "a bridge-builder." It might be argued with some degree of consistency that it just means a bridge. No other term more fittingly portrays the relation of Jesus to God and ourselves. There was a big chasm between us. It had been created by a universal tremor of disobedience and then widened and deepened by erosion of the stream of iniquity.
There was no way to cross it from our side. But it never became wider or deeper than God's love, and to prove it he launched grace into orbit and spanned the grand canyon of sin. But grace was not something to be shot across like a breeches buoy from shore to sinking ship. He was in grace, so that it was not a system, a sequence of events, or a series of things.
Grace was God coming! It was God coming in the form of a Son. Over and over again he said, "I have come!"
He came from the other side. We had been without God but now He became "God with us." In order to do this the living Word which was with God and was God had to become flesh and dwell among us. He had to come into the world and the only way he could come was as Word become ffesh. This is the
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And this is where we come in. The Word had to enter the world at a point in history. There was a "before he came" and an "after he came," and "before" and "after" are historical terms. Thus it was with us also and since he had to return we are here with his commission and demand to go into all of the world.
Our trouble is that we think of "all the world" from a geographical sense. We conceive of it as a matter of time and space. It is a question of distance covered and miles traveled. But he came to the whole world and yet he never got beyond a hundred miles from the stable in which he was born. Of course, all the world must sometimes be thought of as the surface of our spinning sphere, but it must not be limited to that.
To go into all the world for him meant to empty himself of any thought of equality with God. It meant to take on the form of a slave, to be made like a man. It meant willing acceptance of humiliation and obedience unto death, even the death of the cross. It was not covering every mile of every road to contact every man, but it was accepting the burden and the concern and the human sensitivity of every sinful being on earth, wherever that being was.
If we are to fulfill our mission we must start as he did. The word of God must become flesh--our flesh. He did not merely quote passages or read scriptures, although sometimes he did both, but he translated the word into life. The word became virile, vital and vigorous. It lived and moved and had being.
And we must leave our heavens and our structures and go into the world. In our day the world is fragmented. It is split asunder and hostile against itself. Thus, there are now many worlds and between each one of them and God is a great gulf fixed. When the word becomes our flesh we move into these worlds and we become bridge-builders (pontiffs) so those who inhabit these worlds can cross over to God.
We are miniature Christs. He was "the Anointed One" but we are "the anointed ones." That is what Christ means. It is also what "Christian" means. When he was baptized he was anointed and acknowledged as God's Son, when we are baptized we are anointed and acknowledged as God's sons. And our mission is identified with his from that time on.
As "little Christs" we can never become the bridge from earth to heaven. We can only be the approaches to that bridge. There is no supreme pontiff upon earth. This is not the language of the anointed but of the antichrist. Supreme pontiffs become the heads of organizations which stand athwart the way to the goal. They do not build bridges to the glory of God, they erect buildings to the honor of saints.
We must not dramatize our role, for we are not acting a part, but being a partner with him. We must be in the world as he was in the world. There is nothing glamorous or sensational about a bridge although it may lead to all sorts of dazzling possibilities. Its function is to be there to provide men with a way out of where they are and a way in to where they long to go.
Some of us will go into the educational world as teachers, others into the world of physical suffering as doctors and nurses. Still others will go into the distorted mental world as psychologists and psychiatrists, or into the ghetto world as sharers and counsellors. But wherever we go we must be "little Christs" and while we feed the poor, heal the sick, console the distressed and comfort the mourners, we must lead men to God. We must never forget the purposes of our anointing.
To be born again is simply to become incarnate, to allow the word of God to become flesh--our flesh-- suffering, shrinking, sensitive, tempted flesh. When this happens we will know what he
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This is the work of all of us. We cannot relegate it. We cannot delegate it. If you fail, some world--your world-- will be left stranded, hopeless and helpless. It will be a world of untouched lives and lonely hearts. Wherever your lot is cast by temperament, choice, qualification, or natural bent, there is your destiny, there is your world. And you are sent into that world as minister, priest and pontiff.
A good Roman Catholic friend with whom I shared this concept objected strenuously. "You would have every man his own pontiff," he said. I replied to him as I now say to you, "I am not interested in every man becoming his own pontiff, but I am desperately concerned that every believer become a pontiff of God." One greater than any of us has said, "It is enough that the servant become as his lord."