Priest (Presbyter)
πρεσβύτερος — presbyteros · prez-VEE-teh-ros
In brief
The priest — in Greek, presbyteros, "elder" — is the pastor of the Orthodox parish: the man who stands at the Holy Table for the Divine Liturgy, baptizes, hears confessions, anoints the sick, crowns marriages, preaches, and blesses. He serves not in his own right but as the delegate of his bishop, and the Church has always been honest about the weight of the office: it is discharged on earth, said St. John Chrysostom, but it ranks among heavenly things.
The elder
Presbyteros means "elder," and the English word "priest" descends from it through Old English. From the apostles' first journeys, elders were ordained "in every church" (Acts 14:23), and the Epistle of James already shows them doing what Orthodox priests still do: "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord" (James 5:14). St. Peter exhorts the elders to shepherd the flock willingly, "neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock" (1 Peter 5:3). The job description has not changed.
A priest is made by ordination at the bishop's hands, and everything he does is an extension of the bishop's ministry: he serves on an antimension signed by his bishop and commemorates him aloud at every Liturgy. (For the theology of the office, see Holy Orders; for the three orders side by side, see the-orders-of-clergy.)
What the priest does
The center of his work is the Divine Liturgy: standing at the Holy Table, offering the great prayer of the anaphora, and giving Holy Communion to the people. Around it turn the other mysteries: he baptizes and chrismates (with chrism he receives, not makes), hears confessions, anoints the sick (holy-unction), crowns marriages, and buries the dead. Two things he cannot do: ordain, and consecrate chrism. Those remain the bishop's.
Around the services spreads the unglamorous rest: preaching, teaching catechumens, blessing homes and travelers and harvests, visiting the sick, and giving his blessing as an ordinary courtesy of Orthodox life (see receiving-a-blessing-from-a-priest). At services you will know him by his vestments: over the cassock and sticharion he wears the epitrachelion — the stole without which he may serve nothing — with cuffs, belt, and the great cape-like phelonion. He is addressed simply as "Father." In most of the Orthodox world he is a married man, and his wife carries her own honored title — presbytera in Greek, matushka in Russian, khouria in Arabic — and her own quiet share of the parish's weight.
The weight of the altar
The Church has never talked about the priesthood casually. St. John Chrysostom, a priest before he was a bishop, wrote the classic meditation on the office in the fourth century — six books composed, he admits, partly to explain why he had once fled ordination — awed by what passes through a priest's hands at the altar; see the quotations below. The prayers of the Liturgy keep the same double vision: before the Great Entrance the priest prays quietly that no one bound to fleshly desires is worthy to approach, and yet he approaches — because, as the same prayer confesses, Christ Himself is both the one who offers and the one who is offered, and the priest is only His servant at the Holy Table.
So the tradition holds two truths together without blinking: the priest is a sinner who goes to confession like everyone else and asks the people's forgiveness aloud in the services — and through this same man's hands God gives His own Body and Blood to His people. Orthodox Christians kiss the hand of the priest not because of the man, but because of what it has held.