A healing and forgiving mission: more than 200 priests gather for Chrism Mass

It would have been electrifying to be in the synagogue in Nazareth that Sabbath day, when Jesus took up the passage from the Prophet Isaiah and applied it to himself.

We can imagine he had been preparing for this moment. Coming, as Jesus had, from the baptism in the Jordan and the temptations in the wilderness, knowing he would be doing what he usually did on the Sabbath in Nazareth, opening the Scriptures, he went to the passage he required for that moment. Jesus was ready to say what needed to be said.

But for those in the synagogue—and, may I add, those outside, listening in—Jesus’ choice of Isaiah and his association of those words with himself, would have been transfixing to hear. Perhaps they had anticipated something was coming. After all, while he was away in the wilderness, word would have come to Nazareth of what happened at the Jordan. Perhaps there was an expectation among them that Jesus would offer an explanation.

But did they imagine he would reveal that he was the promised Messiah, the Christ? ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.’ Electrifying, indeed.

We know there was an immediate reaction to the lordship of God that Jesus claimed for himself. Those inside rejected him as the Christ. As Luke tells it, ‘Everyone inside the synagogue was enraged.’ They took Jesus outside, to do away with him. But they had not anticipated that those already outside—the ritually unclean, women, public sinners—might think otherwise, having seen themselves among the poor, the captive, the blind and downtrodden, and thrilled to learn that God’s anointed had come to heal them. Once among these outsiders, now invited into God’s kingdom, Jesus ‘passed through the midst of them and walked away’.

All who are of the royal priesthood of Christ are clothed in garments of praise and gladness, for they have taken on the anointing in the Spirit that gave Christ his healing and forgiving mission.

On that day in Nazareth, Jesus had invited the excluded, the wounded, the forgotten and outcast, as well as those already inside and assured, both the younger and the elder sons in the prodigal parable, into God’s royal priesthood —‘a line of kings, priests to serve God’, as the Book of the Apocalypse put it. Jesus would do this as ‘the First-born of the dead, the Ruler of the kings of the earth’, and all because ‘he loves us and washes away our sins’.

The nature of Christ’s invitation to participate in God’s royal priesthood is found in his own anointing as the Faithful Witness to God’s rule of love and healing. His was an anointing in blood, on the cross. He was crushed, and poured out, for us. To borrow from Isaiah’s image, Jesus lived and acted as a priest, a mediating witness; his ministry was to ‘bind up hearts that are broken’, to be God’s healer.

This is made visible for us in the blessing of the oils today: they are ointments for curing and for consecrating, for restoring and for commissioning. They point to the work of binding up wounds, and anointing ministers. They are signs that point to the servant who witnesses to Christ’s sacrificial love. All who are of the royal priesthood of Christ are clothed in garments of praise and gladness, for they have taken on the anointing in the Spirit that gave Christ his healing and forgiving mission.

As the collect of today’s Mass says, ‘God, grant that, being made sharers in [Christ’s] consecration, we may bear witness to your redemption in the world.’ Let it be so.