To be a “people”, in the sense of not being or being like goyim, means to be called and assembled by God. To be a priest means to offer sacrifices and intercession.

Saint Peter calls us a priestly people (1 Pet 2:9). It doesn’t make sense to minimize any of this when we are in the presence of our neighbours. It is vitally important. We are priests for the sake of those who are not, as well as for our own sake and the generous gift of God. Priests make intercession for all, especially for those who cannot themselves make intercession.

Of course, this is no reason to be proud of ourselves and our efforts. After all, to present a sacrifice means that you know your place – and it is not high. Why else offer a sacrifice? Why else bow before someone else? Precisely because you need help and are insufficient. No, pride is not on the agenda of a “priestly people”.

That is all the more reason to be conscious of being both a “people” and a “priest”.

Our interactions with our neighbours can bear this character: the character of a priestly people.

• We are set apart, not because we are better, but simply because God asks us to be, in his own plan, for the sake of the world and for our own sake, which we know from experience would be dreadful without the call and the response; we are set apart but, at the same time, when someone is not or appears to not be set apart, it is God alone who knows what he permits, not us.
• We are also sent right back in to be present and, while present, to be conscious of moral and physical evil and to suffer for it, without judgment, offering the sacrifice of prayers, taken up from the earth to heaven by the angels.

I think this can only happen if we are little enough to let God do this work in us. Only when we are seemingly brought to nothing does it begin to become possible to “pray continually”, as Saint Paul puts it. God knows we and the world need it. It is quite amazing that the great priesthood of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, should be made open to – and, in the cases where the call is heard and understood, demanded of – us to exercise in our way, according to how God calls us.