Setting Aside the Priests

 Exodus 28-29

            There is a certain tension in the establishment of the priestly office: Israel as a whole was to be a kingdom of priests. Why, then, do they need, well, priests? Israel’s priestly calling meant that they would, as a people, mediate God’s grace to the nations. We’ve talked about this before, that the purpose of Israel was to protect God’s promise of a Savior until it came to full fruition in Jesus. Aaron and his sons, on the other hand, were involved in the more mundane work of mediating God’s grace to the people of Israel, especially when their behavior threatened their calling. Aaron and his sons will make sacrifices to keep Israel holy so that Israel may continue in the land until the Messiah comes.

            We learn two things from the ordination of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood. First, we learn something about the Office of the Ministry in the New Testament, that is, the work that pastors do. That work is in many ways modeled on the work of Aaron. Pastors don’t make animal sacrifices, but they are called to mediate God’s forgiveness to His people through Word and Sacrament. If you distill everything a pastor does and ask, “What’s his essential function?” the answer is, “To distribute the forgiveness of sins,” that is, to keep God’s holy people holy.

            Second, we learn something about our lives as Christians. Peter names believers as a kingdom of priests, too. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9), and Paul says that our calling is “to offer” our “bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1). The church exists not to preserve the promise but to proclaim the promise to the nations, to invite them to receive with us what God has given in Jesus. Just as Aaron ‘bore the names of the tribes of Israel’ on the ephod and breastplate (Exodus 28:12, 29), so the church bears the names of the world in the presence of God, praying God’s ultimate blessing for all of them.