How can God’s blessing, conceived as sharing material abundance, long life, fertility and prosperity, be embodied among economically wounded people, living in poverty and blighted by high levels of unemployment? How can a congregation become an instrument of abundance among economically wounded people? Starting with its own members and extending the view to neighbourhoods and broader society, the starting point of priestly praxis must be to notice wounded people, build relationships of trust, and grapple with them to understand their specific kind of woundedness – and the factors contributing to it. Priestly praxis is ‘being with’ – which means an attentive, listening presence (Wells 2018).

In an attempt to share abundance among economically wounded people, the first trap to avoid is handing out dependency-creating aid. If a congregation does have savings, then giving ongoing aid directly to wounded families and communities that are trapped in poverty often makes them lose their dignity and self-respect, trapping them in dependency.¹⁹ There are no quick fixes to poverty. The overall approach should be asset-based, affirming the cultural and economic resources present in a community that have to be owned, affirmed and developed by the community itself. Government social grants do meet basic needs, and a strong argument has been made for a basic income grant, but in this regard the most important contribution of priestly praxis seems to be in the field of skills development and personal empowerment, engaging in educational processes with unemployed people, such as helping them to get an ID document, enrol for a course, write a curriculum vitae, apply for a job, do voluntary work to gain new skills, or plant a vegetable garden. Such initiatives could provide life-giving (blessing) alternatives to hopelessness that do not create (or perpetuate) dependency among economically wounded people.

Another trap to avoid in attempting to share abundance among economically wounded people is to preach a prosperity gospel that makes unrealistic promises and raises false hopes. The blessing of God does enhance abundant life and a flourishing existence, but the ‘wildly popular Christian message of spiritual, physical, and financial mastery’ with its ‘faith, wealth, health, and victory’ gospel (Davison 2014:30) does not produce the rooted and sustainable wholeness envisaged in God’s blessing work.

One of the key material blessings that are ‘efficaciously conferred’ in the Aaronic benediction is God’s protection (Nm 6:24). The challenge facing priestly mission praxis is to find ways of embodying God’s protective care for wounded people. And the most wounded people needing protection in South Africa are women, children and the elderly.

In South Africa, women are not only systemically wounded but actually killed at an alarming rate, usually by men who know them, and often in their own homes. Domestic violence, as defined in South African law, includes emotional, verbal, psychological, sexual and economic abuse, damage to property, harassment and stalking (Brodie 2020:67), which means that there is no area of life in which women do not need protection from men. Femicide (or female homicide) refers to the killing of women in general and intimate femicide to the killing of women ‘by a current or former husband [or]boyfriend, same-sex partner, or rejected would-be lover’ (Brodie 2020:23). The femicide rate in South Africa, nearly 3000 murders per year, is five to six times higher than the world average (Brodie 2020:167, 190). Kobo (2018:182) expresses the pain contained in these statistics by saying that they ‘expose the depth of fragmentation in a black home; how capitalism creates monsters out of husbands, fathers and arguably, mothers and children. This is the struggle of black humanity’.

The major cause of this truly horrific situation is patriarchy (male supremacy), exacerbated by centuries of land dispossession, economic exploitation and racist abuse, which has produced men (both white and black) who unleash disproportionate violence on women. Ministry to overcome patriarchal violence, ranging from subtle to brutal, among South African men should be a top priority for churches. That is clearly a project that will take generations, but while it continues, there is an urgent need to provide protection for women survivors of violence – shelters, places of safety, interim housing and legal assistance (Brodie 2020:202). Other protective steps that Brodie suggests include street lighting, better training of police officers, tighter gun control and better media reporting on gender-based violence (Brodie 2020:206–208). These measures are government responsibilities, beyond the ambit of individual churches, but, acting together with NGOs, they should engage in effective advocacy with authorities for such protections and try to mobilise the private sector to commit their social responsibility contributions in this area.

A distinctive feature of woman abuse in South Africa is the phenomenon called (with deep irony) ‘blessers’: Middle-aged professional men who, in exchange for sexual favours, ‘bless’ young women with money and gifts. This is a form of sex work, which churches should ideally not address in a moralistic way, provided it is consensual and the young woman is not underage. When encountering young women who are in such relationships, a blessing (not blesser) praxis would strive to help them leave it,²⁰ but in any event, protect them against male predators by advising them against unsafe sex, which would expose them to contracting sexually transmitted infections such as HIV and hepatitis B.

The alarming increase in teenagers who become pregnant, some as young as 12, raises a range of other protection issues, particularly the lack of parental supervision and inadequate sex education in families, churches and schools. A priestly praxis in response to this crisis would have to be interdisciplinary (involving medical, educational, psychological and legal partners) and be directed at multiple audiences (children, parents, teachers, congregations).

As explained in Point 3, the embodiment of God’s shining face (v. 25) among wounded people is expressed in actions of mercy and caring help after violence has occurred, as in the parable of the compassionate Samaritan (Lk 10:25–37). On a personal level, priestly praxis means helping wounded people live with the scars that others have afflicted on them. It means training priestly agents with skills in trauma counselling, not just for one-on-one sessions, but also for families traumatised by experiences of violence. This requires serious reform in the curricula for training ordained ministers, but also the training of a wide range of church members as trauma counsellors, so that priestly blessing will not be a series of liturgical moments but become a sustained and life-enhancing movement across communities.

The conducting of funerals to comfort wounded (grieving) families has always been part of the priestly praxis of churches, which will continue. However, in the interest of building flourishing families, congregations need to initiate a process of reducing funeral expenses. Funerals have become extremely expensive, and some families incur huge debts to give their loved ones a ‘decent’ funeral, often at the expense of other priorities, such as the education of their children.²¹ The dignified simplicity (and much lower cost) of funerals in Jewish and Muslim communities are examples to emulate, but an initiative to reduce funeral costs will have to come from parents. They need to exercise priestly servant leadership by giving clear (and binding) instructions on the format of their funerals to protect their offspring from unnecessary expenses and to focus instead on life-enhancing priorities. Such a move would constitute the final priestly act of a parent to comfort and protect their descendants, not by ‘ruling from the grave’, as the saying goes, but instead by serving from the grave. They would thereby commit themselves to be an ancestor who does not demand sacrifices from descendants, but protects and comforts them – in the funeral and beyond – from a position of eternal rest in the hands of God.

A specific form of priestly praxis required among deeply traumatised families, who are struggling to come to terms with the violent death of a loved one, is the practice of a cleansing ritual. In African cultures, similar to ancient Hebrew culture, a person’s unnatural death defiles the ground and disturbs the cosmic spiritual environment, thereby creating unresolved trauma in the minds of a whole community.²² Such defilement calls for an act of cleansing to restore a sense of cosmic equilibrium in the environment and peace in the wounded minds of the afflicted. Priestly praxis of this kind has been carried out by South African Christian leaders, for example, at places where the bodies of apartheid victims were discovered and at the mine in Stilfontein where a number of informal miners had died underground.²³ Creating liturgical formulas and formulating a theology to underpin this comforting priestly praxis is a priority for the churches that have not yet developed such instruments.

As the exposition of the Aaronic benediction has shown, blessing is not a ‘thing’ that can be handed out; it is a divine gift in which one participates by receiving it together as a community of wounded people. Priestly praxis therefore requires an epicletic (‘beseeching’) and invocatory posture, waiting on God and expecting God’s presence (Davison 2014:20, 91). Intercession is therefore a key dimension of comforting priestly praxis. Praying for change in people’s lives is a protest against the status quo, a faith statement that their present situation is not inevitable or unchangeable, thereby sharing hope with a family and community. Intercession requires humble, epicletic mission praxis: ‘Come Creator Spirit, change this situation according to your divine will, and use us by your Holy Spirit to bring about that change’. To ensure that intercession is an authentic priestly praxis, done in the spirit of Jesus, it should ideally be accompanied by the hands-on compassionate touch that he modelled.

Another instance of priestly compassion needed by wounded people is emergency relief in response to disasters like floods, shack fires or drought. In a country whose government departments responsible for disaster relief are struggling to cope, civil society organisations like churches need to step into the vacuum to care for people in need. Providing tangible comfort to people wounded by a disaster is certainly an aspect of priestly mission, in which many Christians engage spontaneously – opening their church buildings and homes to displaced families and handing out blankets, clothes and food – but since the scale and frequency of such events are likely to increase because of climate change and increasing amounts of unsafe housing in informal settlements, emergency responses need to be professionalised in order to be effective. Christians who are committed to this priestly praxis should motivate Christian business people and their companies to fund the establishment of multidisciplinary ecumenical organisations dedicated to this task, in cooperation with international initiatives.²⁴ Another option is to give active support to a well-organised relief organisation like Gift of the Givers Foundation, which is Muslim-initiated but welcomes support from individuals and businesses of all faith communities.²⁵

In conclusion, the links between God’s shining face, God’s compassion for the suffering, and a journey of pilgrimage that came to light in 3.3, should shape priestly praxis as the persistent-and-patient accompaniment of people towards greater humanity and communal harmony in the midst of all the challenges facing them.

Flowing directly from the foregoing, the ‘bottom line’ of the Aaronic benediction is the divine gift of peace [shalom], which refers to a state of affairs in which there is positive harmony and wholeness; not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of holistic well-being. A pronounced benediction is a moment that gives rise to movement, which leads to a state of affairs. Whereas the public and communal dimensions of peace are emphasised by the prophetic and royal dimensions of mission as liberation, the dimensions of inner peace and personal wholeness are the preserve of priestly praxis.

An encompassing vision of peace-with-justice is the necessary horizon for a recovery of the notion of blessing in Christian understandings of mission, but as mentioned before, the Aaronic benediction is written in the second person singular and therefore has a deeply personal dimension. The recovery of God-given personal dignity through encountering the uplifted face of the living God is desperately needed in wounded communities. The message of Steve Biko (1978:29) – that black humanity had been reduced to an empty shell and that it was necessary to ‘pump back life into’ it and ‘infuse it with pride and dignity’ – is as relevant as ever. That was the gospel of Black Consciousness and African dignity, intended to overcome the ‘inferiority feelings, distrust of themselves and self-hate’ (Adam 1973:155) integral to a ‘colonised mind’. Sometimes it is said that men feel ‘entitled’ to shoot and kill their wives:

Kobo (2018:51–54) points out that black women originally became targets of black male anger not because they threatened male authority but because the ‘angry, resentful, broken man’ produced by apartheid presented ‘a site conducive for patriarchy to flourish’ and those angry men vented their anger on the women around them. In a similar fashion, Baloyi (2020:1) traces the roots of negative phenomena such as mob justice and xenophobia to a woundedness that resulted in black self-hatred and an inferiority complex. Even though this personal dimension does not adequately explain the causes of the patriarchal violence just mentioned, it contains a large element of truth. It challenges churches to develop a priestly (dignifying and peace-instilling) praxis to transform this inner woundedness in black communities – among women and men – in the quest for a ‘true humanity’ and for a society ‘with a human face’ (Biko 1978:47, 87–98). It similarly challenges churches to develop a priestly (peace-making) praxis to transform the inner guilt, shame, denialism and indifference in white communities – among women and men – as part of that same quest.²⁶ This inner peace is a dignifying self-affirmation that is not self-centred but represents the ‘rest’ to which Jesus invites all the wounded and which involves a self-denying commitment to take up the yoke of his liberating mission (Mt 11:28).

The peace of God that is ‘efficaciously conferred’ by the Aaronic benediction does not fall from the sky. It grows gradually, as believers collaborate to develop a receptive openness to the moment of benediction in worship, a creative participation in the movement of peace-making through coordinated priestly praxis, and a grateful entering into the maturity of an inner peace that is both self-affirming and self-denying. The LORD blesses believers into personal and interpersonal dignity to mobilise them into the struggle for justice and to set them on the road of comprehensive peace.

If a Christian congregation is to become a blessing movement in society, visionary priestly leadership needs to perform the blessing moment in worship, so as to facilitate beatific praxes to flow from it in the ‘liturgy after the liturgy’. It is the task of theological education and ministerial formation programmes to ‘produce’ leaders who are imbued with such a visionary priestly spirituality, skilled in compassionate interaction with wounded people, equipped with a robust counter-cultural theology of mission, and moved by the Spirit of God into action.