As I once again viewed Mel Gibson’s powerful “The Passion of the Christ” last evening I was impressed with its various images of the priesthood. Today, Holy Thursday, we celebrate the institution of both the Eucharist and the priesthood of the New Covenant, for it was at the Last Supper that Our Lord bestowed that new priesthood upon His twelve apostles. The thing that struck me was how the very first thing those newly ordained priests did was to flee in fear, deserting their Master, the one and true High Priest, as He was being arrested in the Garden of Olives. Only St. John remained somewhat loyal to his Master and would stand with Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross. Judas distinguished himself as the very first apostate priest by actually betraying Our Lord to his enemies who, ironically, were also members of another priestly class. Peter denied that he even knew his Master and the other nine disappear until well after the Resurrection.

And how is it that the Jewish priests, who should have been first to recognize and welcome their Messiah, not only blindly failed to do so but became his active persecutors, arousing the crowds to demand the brutal execution of their true High Priest and king? Yet the Scriptures had long predicted that it must be this way – while those who knew the Scriptures the best utterly failed to recognize their fulfillment, accomplished by virtue of their own wicked malice. The Jewish Aaronic priesthood was to be the prototype and progenitor of a new and more complete priesthood established by Christ, yet at the crucial moment both old and new priesthoods stumbled and failed badly. One suspects that God had a purpose in all this, namely to show the hopeless condition in which sin places all of mankind, even those called to priestly dignity. Our human frailty, selfishness, and perverse natures needed to be clearly demonstrated so that man could see himself as he truly is, and not as he might vainly imagine himself to be.

God needed to humble even the best representatives of mankind, His priests, because exaltation invariably leads to pride, the very thing that had subjected man to Satan in the first place. Only God could purify man from the malignancy of pride and thus free man from his subservience to that ancient ‘father of pride,’ the devil. Christ’s terrible passion and death serves as an object lesson, especially for modern man whose inflated sense of self-sufficiency draws him ever further away from a humble attitude and childlike dependence on God, not only for his material needs but more importantly for his eternal good. It seems that in every generation this basic lesson needs to be reintroduced.