In this episode, Matt and Dan contemplate two of life’s great mysteries: plants and potatoes and, by a winding path that would make perfect sense in a Chinese garden, the joys of priesthood.

The Asians approach priesthood without focusing exclusively on priests. This is partly for the obvious reason that neither of them is one, and partly because fomenting class warfare within the Church seems like a poor use of an afternoon. More importantly, however, it is because Christian priesthood only makes sense when we begin with Christ and his Church.

Matt and Dan explore the persistent temptation to imagine the Church as something done by priests while everybody else watches, occasionally volunteers and brings a plate.

Against this, they recover the biblical vision of the People of God as a priestly people: the continuation and fulfilment of Israel’s vocation as a kingdom of priests, in which every member of Christ’s Body shares, according to their own calling, in his priestly mission.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this leads the Asians not first to Holy Orders but to matrimony. Marriage offers a particularly concrete example of how the baptised exercise their priestly vocation: receiving the ordinary stuff of human life - love, work, children, suffering, meals, money, ageing parents, burnt rice – and learning to offer it to God. Beneath every vocation, then, lies the same deep root: baptism. Like water finding its way through a rice terrace, baptism draws every Christian into the life of Christ and therefore into his priesthood, his self-offering and his mission.

None of this makes the ordained priesthood less important. Quite the opposite. Matt and Dan consider how the ministerial priesthood serves the priesthood of the whole Church, and how both find their meaning in the great movement at the heart of Christian existence: receiving creation as gift and, through Christ, offering it back to the Father. There may also be potatoes.