If you’ve been around organized religion for any period of time, you probably have heard the terms “clergy” and “laity.” Both of those words describe groups of people. If you’re talking about individuals, you would use “clergyman/clergywoman” or “lay people,” but otherwise, the terms are very similar.
The mention of the laymen in Exodus 29:33 is the first ever use of this phrase in the Bible, and it’s somewhat jarring if you’re not expecting it. Most of us assume that the clergy/laity distinction was created by Catholicism (or maybe that’s just me). To see it in a Hebrew context almost feels out of place.
It’s a division that makes sense, though. According to just about any definition, a member of the clergy (both Christian and Jewish) is a religious leader of any sort. For Jews, that can look like Rabbis or “Chazzans,” whereas for Catholics, it means priests or Bishops.
Lay people, by contrast, are everyday joes that hold no formal position in religion. The Clergy serves us—the everyday practitioners—who attend worship services without participating.
As a minister, I guess my job would fall into the clergy class, but I’ve always been uncomfortable with that term (even if I do sometimes use the clergy parking spaces at hospitals). It creates a barrier between myself and others that I would rather tear down. I’m no better or holier than anyone else I attend with.
“Holier” seems to be the key difference here in Exodus 29:33. The layman should not eat the consecrated food because they weren’t “holy,” unlike Aaron and his sons (Alternatively, that phrase may refer to the food itself that’s holy, but the point is the same regardless.).
What made Aaron or the food holy? They were consecrated. They went through a purification process that created a separate class of people. Any regular person was unable to do the same job because they would literally be struck dead. It wasn’t their place, and God let them know their place.
No such separation exists today. As Christians, we are part of a “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) that allows us to draw near to God (Hebrews 10:19-25) in ways unlike any layman in the Old Testament.
Furthermore, I would argue that the Old Testament started tearing down the bricks of this division even inside the Old Law. When Moses is told that the nation of Israel would be a “kingdom of priests” to them, God lays down the framework that devotion and worship shouldn’t just be relegated to the Tabernacle. Even at that stage, everyone was to position their hearts toward God.
I’ll sometimes have people tell me that they don’t feel “close” to God, whether because of sin or a fledgling prayer life or something similar. I’m always quick to remind them that I have similar feelings, as I suspect the priests in the Old Testament felt. Being a member of the “clergy” doesn’t make me immune from those thoughts.
But the truth is that we’re all unholy compared to God. The most righteous among us are still not even in the same ballpark as Jehovah, despite what titles we may give ourselves. We’re all trying to reach out to Him in the way He’s prescribed through the Bible. Thanks be to Him that He made such a path possible.
