Ordinations are not done quickly; they take time. So we’ll spend a couple of hours in the cathedral this evening. But we won’t stay here. Because this is a sending out – a sending out of us all as the Church, but especially of the two men we ordain to the priesthood. In the Gospel of Luke, we are told, the Lord “sent them out ahead of him to all the towns and places he himself was to visit”. Sean and Sang come to the cathedral not just be ordained by the bishop but to be sent out by the Lord.
In the Gospel of Mark, we are told that Jesus calls the apostles “to be with him and to be sent out to preach” (3:14). Note the order. First, they are called to be with him, watching him and listening to him. Only then are they sent out to preach to others.
Jesus has been with Sean and Sang throughout their life, even before they could recognise his presence. Since faith took root in their life, they have been with him, and in a special way through the years of their seminary formation. Those years were a more intense experience of being with Jesus, learning to look to him and to listen to him, so that they might grow to be like him. Only if that is true will they be ready to be sent out. If they have not been with the Lord and grown to be like him, they will have nothing to preach but themselves; and that is certainly not enough for the people. If the people get only the preacher, they will feel frustrated and cheated. It’s the Lord himself they seek, not just the one who prepares his way.
Years ago, I was staying with Cardinal Francis George in Chicago who at the time was celebrating ten years as Archbishop. In conversation over dinner he said that some of his clergy were good pastors but bad priests. This puzzled me, so I pushed him on it. He explained that they were good with the people but not so good with God. They were pastoral and popular, but their spiritual life could be one-dimensional, and this could show in the way they celebrated the sacraments and preached.
The Cardinal’s point was that a priest has to be close to both the people and to God, not one or the other but both. He needs a foot firmly planted in both camps, as it were, in order to bring the two together. Only then can he be the kind of mediator the priest is called to be, the kind of mediator we see in Jesus. Jesus never leaves the Father when he comes to us in the Incarnation; and he never leaves us when he returns to the Father in the Ascension. When we come to the Father we find Jesus, and when we come to Jesus we find the Father. So too with you, Sean and Sang: when the people come looking for Jesus may they find you, and when they come looking for you may they find Jesus.
Only then will you truly be good news for the poor, liberty for captives, healing for the broken-hearted which the prophet Isaiah announces. This doesn’t mean a frenetic activism; but it does mean that you must be unusually present to both God and the people, and allow them both to be unusually present to you.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that “in our darkest moments, we don’t need advice. What we truly need is presence, someone to sit with us in the shadows, to acknowledge our suffering without trying to fix it. In those moments, silence and understanding speak louder than words, offering a quiet strength that reminds us we’re not alone. It’s not solutions we seek, but connection”. That’s true of the God who connects with us in our dark moments, not offering advice or solutions, but a presence sitting with us in the shadows, saying silently that we’re not alone. There’s salvation in that. In connecting with that God, we are able as priests to connect with God’s people, especially in their darker moments, offering a quiet strength that doesn’t come from us.
In the Catholic Church we speak of a sacramental priesthood. This doesn’t mean simply that the priest celebrates the sacraments. It does mean that, but it means more. It means that the priest has to become the sacrament. He has to be the sacrament.
In his letter to the Galatians, St Paul says that “God was pleased to reveal his Son in me” (1:16). This is extraordinary language, but Paul means what he says. He means that he becomes the revelation of Jesus. The medium becomes the message, because as Paul says in Philippians he “reproduces the pattern of the Lord’s death” in his apostolic mission (cf 3:10).
In what we have heard from 2 Corinthians, he says that “we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (4:10). Paul came to see, slowly, that in his apostolic mission the pattern of the Lord’s death and resurrection was emerging in a way that made him the revelation. Every attempt to silence or stop Paul only gave greater impetus to his mission. That’s what it meant to “reproduce the pattern of the Lord’s death”. God revealed his Son not just through Paul but in Paul.
The same is to be true of Sean and Sang: they are to be the revelation, so that God reveals his Son not just through them but in them. This is what it will mean for them to be men of God. It’s also what will make them truly men of God’s people, not just good blokes.
If that is true of these two new priests, then they will follow in the footsteps of St Anthony of Padua whose feast we celebrate today and whose name Sang bears in Baptism. St Anthony followed close in the footsteps of St Francis in whom he and so many saw and heard Christ. But when they heard St Anthony too they heard the voice of Christ, which is why his preaching had such power. St Anthony was very much a man of God, radically conformed to Christ, but he knew how to touch the hearts of the people and reach deep into their soul. He could connect and still does.
If Sean and Sang really can follow in the footsteps of the Saint, then their priestly ministry through the years will prove a great gift to the Church and to the world, and thanksgiving will, as St Paul says, “overflow to the glory of God”. Amen.