My first priestly act was to bless.
Immediately after being ordained by my bishop with prayer and the laying on of hands, vested in stole and chasuble by my parents, and receiving a Bible as sign of the authority given me to preach the Word of God and administer his Holy Sacraments, I turned to the assembled congregation and echoed the words Jesus gave to the seventy in Luke 10 - and indeed the words Jesus himself used in Luke 24 - saying: “The peace of the Lord be always with you.”
Then, at the end of the service, at my bishop’s invitation I pronounced the benediction, making the sign of the cross over the congregation: “The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always.”
After the service, I stood behind the altar rail as members of the congregation came up for individual blessings with the laying on of hands. As my bishop, my seminary dean, my sponsoring priest, clergy mentors, my parents, my fiancée, seminary colleagues, friends, and fellow congregants of my sponsoring parish knelt before me one after another, I felt the reality of my new relationship to God’s people - not, of course, a relationship which erased the relationships I had before, but one that was all the same new and different. I was now a priest, authorized to bless by the authority of Christ’s Church. Placing my hands on these beloved heads, one after another, I joined the Aaronic benediction invariably used by my childhood pastors in the Lutheran church with the Trinitarian blessing characteristic of Episcopalians:
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord look upon you with favor and grant you his peace. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you always.
I began my priesthood with blessing.
As I reflected upon my first experience as an ordained priest, the experience of blessing in Christ’s name, I was surprised by how meaningful I found it, given especially the relative paucity of reflection upon it. I found that I cherish deeply not only giving individual blessings but also the benediction at the close of the service - that I feel close to God, a vehicle of his grace, in that moment. And this pushed me to think more deeply about what exactly blessings are, and why we do them.
If, as the popular mnemonic goes, the distinctively priestly functions are ABC - absolving, blessing, and consecrating, we tend to think a lot more about absolving sins and consecrating the Eucharist than about pronouncing blessings. Certainly in the Anglican tradition, the blessing at the close of the Holy Communion service has not been a particular source of strife - and, probably as a result, not a particular source of reflection. Questions of what exactly priests are doing when they pronounce the forgiveness of sins in Christ’s name and pray the prayer of consecration would rage both during the first few hundred years of the Church of England’s life and in the controversy over the Catholic Revival in the nineteenth century, producing volumes of learned scholarship and fierce polemic. But blessing has gotten somewhat short shrift. But I was able to go back and find some rich sources within the Anglican tradition to help me think about what, exactly, I was doing when pronouncing blessings.
In The Country Parson, George Herbert dedicates a whole chapter (Chapter 36) to blessing, in which he mourns that the ministerial blessing is not rightly esteemed among the people. To be sure, he argues that before the Reformation, the priest’s blessing was “over highly valued,” made an object of superstition, but the proper combatting of superstition need not deprive the benediction of all power. Rather, he writes,
blessing differs from prayer, in assurance, because it is not performed by way of request, but of confidence and power, effectually applying God’s favour to the blessed, by the interesting of that dignity wherewith God hath invested the priest, and engaging of God’s own power and institution for a blessing
This view of blessing as effectual, as rightly pronounced in the jussive (with thanks to Dr. Tarik Wareh for the grammar assist) and not just the optative, is retained in the old high church tradition of prayer book commentary which reaches its zenith in Bishop Mant’s 1820 annotated Book of Common Prayer. Mant’s annotations are generally not his own, but rather are drawn from the broader prayer book commentary tradition which began in earnest at the Restoration: he collects citations from a wide variety of divines about the efficacy and importance of the ministerial blessing, as you can see below.
The commentators emphasize the duty of priests to bless the people in the Old Covenant, the command to the seventy to bless in Luke, the regular use of blessings in the Epistles, and the antiquity of the priestly blessing in Christian liturgy. Shepherd in particular sounds very much like Herbert when he writes that “this benediction of the priest is not to be considered merely as a prayer. It is likewise an absolution; an assurance of blessing and of peace: for God himself will bless those, that are duly qualified to receive the sacerdotal blessing; and the benedictions and absolutions, which the ambassadors of Christ ministerially pronounce upon earth, will be ratified in heaven.”
Now, it is a mistake to think of a priestly blessing as a magic spell, as some sort of automatic, autonomous buff or shield or mana operating independently of God’s purposes for the world made known in Christ Jesus, with a power other than that of God’s power to create, preserve, and redeem. The traditional gesture of the sign of the cross made by the priest in giving benedictions seems to reinforce this: the priest’s power to bless is not other than the power of the cross! And yet surely it is a mistake too to make blessing an empty sign, less efficacious even than prayer. Scripture seems not to allow it: consider the blessings pronounced by fathers in Genesis, the blessings which the priests are commanded to give in the Book of Numbers, Jesus’ commands to his disciple to bless even their enemies, the blessing formulas in the epistles. However we wish to construe the efficacy of blessings, and without reducing them to mere magic, they clearly do something.
I found Andrew Davison’s Blessing - one of the handful of recent books written on the topic - quite helpful in thinking this through, even if his Anglo-Catholicism means that I of course dissent from some of his conclusions. He writes about blessing incorporating both “recognition” and “conferral”, both “remembrance” of the goodness of the created order and “invocation” of God’s redemptive work. In pronouncing a blessing, that is, we see things as they are - created and sustained by God. And yet, recognizing that the redemption accomplished once-for-all on the cross is not fully manifest in a world still marred by sin and death we confer God’s grace by linking people, places, and things to God’s redemption in Christ. The blessing both recognizes and gives thanks for what God has already done, and not only asks for but in fact declares God’s redeeming goodwill towards that which is blessed.
And this something that blessings do, this work of recognition and conferral, is near the heart of Christian priesthood, both the ministerial priesthood or presbyterate and the royal priesthood in which all Christians share. It is part of the task of the royal priesthood of all believers to bless the world, both to recognize it as God’s good gift and to call it to its true vocation of blessing and glorifying God - “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord”, as we say in the Benedicite. Indeed, even the Roman Catholic Church suggests that pronouncing blessings is something that all Christians can do. God’s declaration to Abraham - I will bless you and you will be a blessing - surely applies to us as well, children of Abraham by faith. We are blessed by God precisely so that we may be a means by which God exercises his blessing upon the entire world!
And in a particular way, invested with the Church’s authority, the presbyter blesses. And it seems to me that this blessing extends well beyond what we might liturgically call blessings or benedictions - the benediction at the end of the service, the blessing of rings or of water, of homes, and so forth. Indeed, we might well say that blessing is near the beating heart of ordained ministry. In baptizing, in administering the Holy Communion, in absolving sins, in preaching the Gospel, is not the minister blessing? Does not the minister, in all these roles, efficaciously declare God’s goodwill towards us, just as much as in the benediction? To be a presbyter is to be one set apart to be a means of God’s blessing for God’s people, a vehicle for applying the redemption won once-for-all by Christ on the cross to sinners.
It is because of this that I cannot imagine a more appropriate way to begin one’s priestly ministry than by blessing: as a Christian, and as a presbyter, blessing is near the heart of my vocation. And it is my prayer that God will use me, in all that I do - but not least in pronouncing blessings - as a means of, as Herbert puts it, effectually applying God’s favor.
Beautifully put. I’m so glad I happened to come upon your substack while browsing my way around Christian twitter as a non-twitter-user. I had the opportunity to see an ordination mass for the first time recently via Zoom (one benefit of the streamed-church era), and was so struck by the individual blessings at the end. I also happened to JUST have read this last night from B16’s “The Spirit of the Liturgy” which dovetails with your point about the royal priesthood of all believers:
“We make the sign of the Cross on ourselves and thus enter the power of the blessing of Jesus Christ. We make the sign over people to whom we wish a blessing; and we also make it over things that are part of our life and that we want, as it were, to receive anew from the hand of Jesus Christ. Through the Cross, we can become sources of blessing for one another. I shall never forget the devotion and heartfelt care with which my father and mother made the sign of the Cross on the forehead, mouth, and breast of us children when we went away from home, especially when the parting was a long one. This blessing was like an escort that we knew would guide us on our way. It made visible the prayer of our parents, which went with us, and it gave us the assurance that this prayer was supported by the blessing of the Savior. The blessing was also a challenge to us not to go outside the sphere of this blessing. Blessing is a priestly gesture, and so in this sign of the Cross we felt the priesthood of parents, its special dignity and power. I believe that this blessing, which is a perfect expression of the common priesthood of the baptized, should come back in a much stronger way into our daily life and permeate it with the power of the love that comes from the Lord.”
Congratulations on your ordination & may God bless you and bless your congregants through you.