Early in December 1986, I was siting in Charlottesville, Virginia, minding my own business (which is to say that I was on sabbatical leave) when a letter arrived from John Coventry, asking me to address this year’s conference of the Association on the topic of ‘ministry of the word’.

I agreed, and almost at once began to regret having done so. The topic seemed so vast, so comprehensive, so obviously central to every aspect of Christian speech and action, that I did not know where to begin. So I turned to the dictionaries, and got a bit of a shock. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique has only one entry under ‘ministry’, and that is ‘ministre des sacrements’. Ah well, that was back in 1929, in the dark ages before Vatican II. Things would be better in the bright new postconciliar world, a world which had witnessed the proclamation of a dogmatic constitution entitled ‘Dei Verbum’. Well, perhaps, but not much better. Sacramentum Mundi (1969) has no entries under ‘ministry’, and the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, has one, which reads ‘ministry, Protestant’.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. It is, after all, perfectly possible that, gathered under other heads and quite compatible descriptions, our Catholic self-understanding has still been permeated by a sense of all our discipleship, all our prayer and compassion, all our disciplined distinctiveness, being set at the service of the word, the diaconia tou logou. Possible, but I somehow doubt it, because it was not simply the ministry of the word which had largely ceased to figure in our Catholic vocabulary.

Many years of listening-in, and of occasionally contributing, to inter-church discussions of ministry, and of sharing in the shipwreck of endeavours lasting from Lambeth 1920 to the collapse of church unity negotiations in England in 1980 on the rocks of ‘ministry’—all this convinced me that light must come from a different quarter.

It came from fundamental theology in general, and in particular from the theology of revelation and faith. This is an area in which much work was done in the years after Vatican II’s Constitution De divina revelatione and in which I have long had an interest. The gist of the matter, as is well known, is that Christian faith is not ‘propositional’ or having doctrine as its object (‘the teaching of the Church’), but is a personal response to God’s self-gift and disclosure in Christ. In this perspective, ‘beliefs’ are varying expressions, more pictorial or more abstract, of how God is comprehended in the relationship he thus establishes (his act of revealing). From this it follows that all Christian doctrines, i.e. beliefs accepted by and taught in a Christian community, must in the last analysis be about Christ. And one then needs to distinguish ‘faith-statements’ from all more secondary statements of Christian experience and conviction depending on them, which may then be called ‘value-statements’.

How can the Letter to the Hebrews apply priestly, cultic language to Christ while the gospels always present him as a lay man? In them he is shown ignoring the rules of cultic purity, touching lepers and corpses, declaring all food clean and cleansing the Temple. The priests are primarily to blame for his death. I am not concerned here with what the historical Jesus actually thought about purity or the cult, but with a clash of theologies. Is Hebrews a retreat from the lay spirituality of the gospels? Having killed Jesus, do the clerics subvert his gospel? One can only answer that question by looking at the function of the cult in the Jewish tradition and at what Hebrews does with the language of liturgy. Why was the image of a celestial cult, shared with ‘innumerable angels in festal gathering’ (12:22) quite so attractive? Would not an eternal banquet be a more obviously appealing image of heavenly bliss than a never-ending service?

It is an intriguing fact that in the first century many Jewish and Christian groups could imagine nothing more exciting than sharing with the angels in the celestial liturgy. Perhaps the most remarkable parallel to the Letter to the Hebrews is ‘The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’, the Sabbath Shirot, found at Qumran. According to Carol Newsom this cycle of thirteen songs, describing the angelic liturgy, was supposed to give the singers a mystical experience of being transported to heaven to worship with the angels.

Two words sum up the present situation of the Church, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘confusion’. One the one hand, we have hierarchical structures and inevitably, we are steeped in hierarchical language and assumptions. Beside this we have an increasing vocabulary acknowledging and inviting ‘participation’ and ‘equality’, issuing from the senior hierarchy and directed especially to the ‘laity’.

We might be moved, as we read, to examine whether we had been taking our baptismal responsibilities as seriously as we ought. However, should we glance back to Can. 207:

our sense of urgency might dwindle somewhat ... especially when we consider that ‘the others’ form something like 98% of the total. If what we, the ‘laity’, do is not by divine institution and our ministry not sacred, but rather is other, then our sense of participation, our sense of responsibility is diminished. We are diminished. Similar examples abound in all Church documents.

It was late summer or, perhaps better, early autumn. I remember there were flowers growing. In those days the station master grew flowers to brighten up the Junction platform. I have been on the same Junction since; there are no flowers now. There is, however, a great deal of graffiti. But when I set out on my journey to ‘become a priest’ the walls were clean.

It is vital, nevertheless, to point out that the absence of graffiti should not be understood, or interpreted, as an indication that there was nothing to protest against or nobody to hate or love. In fact I think there were vague efforts, even frightened attempts, to inform the world in pencil about life’s hopes and problems. And, of course, the more adventurous had attacked various wooden surfaces with pen-knives. The comparative cleanliness should be attributed more to the absence of aerosol sprays and felt pens than to the lack of desire, in various sectors of the public, to address their fellow citizens about their bitterness or enchantment with life. In fact there was a lot to be bitter about in that late summer or early autumn. We had, more or less, just come to the end of one of our periods of global killing. The time had come to number such periods. The one just finished would be known historically as World War II. And it had come to an end with an event, or an act, which had not totally sunk into our world consciousness—we had dropped an Atomic bomb on Japan. The world would never be the same again.

Introibo ad altare Dei—these words from Psalm 42 can induce a stiffening, even a shudder, among Catholics of traditional formation, and so I at once assure my audience that they begin my paper not, or not directly, because of their place at the beginning of one of the rites of Mass that we knew before the Council, but because of their appearance in the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

This is liturgical parody, but the scene also has more disturbing overtones. The cliffs of Dun Laoghaire are soon likened to the cliff of Elsinore where Hamlet was set at enmity with his mother. Mulligan’s companion, Stephen Dedalus, joins him on the parapet wearing black in mourning for his mother and troubled by the memory of how he hurt her by his refusal to join in the prayers at her deathbed. Mulligan compares him to Hamlet and interprets his nickname, Kinch, as meaning ‘the knife-blade’.