Traditionally the season of Lent has been associated with the practice of sacrifice, understood as “giving up” or surrendering something for the sake of something better. For example, fasting from some food or drink and using the money saved to help someone who is in greater need.
Lenten Trócaire boxes are a concrete way of doing this. I am reminded of the challenging slogan used by an aid agency that: “We need to live simply so that others might simply live.” Making a sacrifice, of course, is not just for Lent or for religious believers, it is part and parcel of daily life where one value has to make way for another.
Soldiers in war time are expected to be willing to sacrifice their lives for their country; parents, especially women, may have to sacrifice career ambitions for the sake of raising a family. Nor is it always easy, as seen from these examples, to discern when the sacrifice made is always the right one.
The notion of sacrifice has been around since the beginning of human creation as a way in which men and women recognised their dependence on God or gods. This was expressed most often in thanksgiving rituals when farming folk offered up the first fruits of crops or herds to the deity, in recognition that growth and birth derived from the undeserved gift of a gracious higher power.
I use the word “undeserved” in relation to the gift of the deity because this is an important dimension of sacrifice. When we receive a gift from someone, it’s common enough to feel a sense of guilt, or at least unease, precisely because we have not merited or earned it.
A way around this is to accept the gift but to give part back to the giver. Then, thinking of those primitive farmers, one can go ahead and enjoy the fruits of the harvest having “giving back” as well as “giving up” something of value.
Two examples come to mind that brings out what is called the idea of sacrifice as a “double gift.” As a child, I learned early on as my parents told me that, “money doesn’t grow on trees” – it has to be earned! Daddy went to work to put food on the table.
To earn your pocket money, you had to do jobs around the house and go to the shops for the “messages.” So, when visitors came to the house and slipped you a half-crown or (better still) ten-shilling note, one felt uncomfortable ,and the tendency was to refuse the gift by handing it back.
But the visitor would insist: “No take it, I want you to have it.” And then it was okay to receive the gift with gratitude. The handing back made the gift especially welcome and truly appreciated.
Or take the case of the visitor who arrives at the door with an expensive box of chocolates. The natural response of the host is to say: “Oh, you shouldn’t have gone to the bother, that’s too much!” See again that sense of guilt or unease. To get over this social embarrassment, the host opens the box and offers the guest first choice of the delicious contents.
Only then can the host really appreciate and enjoy the rest of the box when the guest is gone. How awful it would be if one took the box and said: “Thanks I’ll keep this for later, though I am not that fond of this brand!”
The suggestion here about the nature of sacrifice is that gratitude for gift demands a surrender of a part of the gift to the donor, whereby the donor returns the greater part to be appreciated fully, assuaging the uneasy, embarrassed feelings originally felt when the gift was bestowed. There is a “giving up” dimension in the process but more important is the “giving back” to the donor.
When we focus on the first, the attention is on the giver’s virtue in “making a sacrifice.” When we focus on the second, the focus is on the giver who insists on wanting one to have it, even though we don’t fully deserve it.
How does this approach to sacrifice apply to our Christian lives, especially during Lent? The primary application, in my opinion, occurs in relation to the meaning of the season as a preparation for the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, the mystery of the death and resurrection of Our Lord, and the wider meaning of the whole life of Jesus as the Incarnation of God’s Son.
To understand this link, I need to make a slight detour back to the development of the Old Testament idea of sacrifice over many centuries. Without going into great historical detail, the people of Israel originally picked up their notion of sacrifice partly from pagan nations, including Egypt and Canaan.
This model of sacrifice, as we saw, centred on material sacrifices of crops and animals, seen as placating or bribing the gods, to ensure good harvests and fertile herds. At times, primitive peoples felt that the gods needed to be fed by the smell of the holocaust drifting up into the heavens, thus ensuring their ongoing favour
But the Israelites rejected such gods in favour of the true God who was not open to bribery and had no need of earthly food. The sacrifices Yahweh desired were spiritual and moral, viz., prayer and good deeds, especially seen in justice toward the widow and orphan.
The prophets would go on to castigate those who relied on ritual to keep on the right side of God, while oppressing their own people. Look back at some of those early Mass readings for Lent to see examples.
Obedience to the law of God became a central form of sacrifice, with the highest honour going to those martyrs who gave up their lives rather than offer sacrifices to idols.
And this brings us full circle to Jesus, the “lamb of God” who takes the place of those old animal sacrifices which were powerless to forgive sin and reconcile the people to their loving, faithful Creator. The sacrifice our saviour made on the cross was the high point in a whole life of obedience to his Father’s will, going back to the beginning of the public ministry where his rejection of the temptations in the desert was in direct contrast to the disobedience of the Jews on their way to the promised land, culminating in their sacrifice offered to the Golden Calf.
Obedience, then, is the gift that Jesus offers back to God in thanksgiving for his life and mission. So, following the steps we traced earlier in talking of the double gift, Jesus gratefully receives the gift of his life and mission from the Father, offers it all back in his life and death and then receives it back in the Resurrection.
It is as if Jesus says to His Father: “I willingly give my life back to you for the sake of your creation.” And the Father answers back: “And I lovingly restore your life by glorifying it and calling you to sit at my right hand.” So, the model of all sacrifice is about grace and gift.
It is in fact, not double gift, but treble; God gives life, we give it back and God gives it again to keep and enjoy. God will not be outdone in his generosity. He gives twice and we give once (and something not ours in the first place!)
And please note again, that we must not reduce “the” sacrifice of Christ to the cross alone. It must be the whole process of the full life, death and resurrection of the Son of God who is also the Son of Man, whose total obedience is a complete self-giving in thanksgiving for God’s love, especially his reconciling, forgiving love for his fallen creation.
This process of giving, returning, and re-giving revealed in the mystery of the cross and resurrection of the Lord is played out again and again in the Mass, which is both Christ’s sacrifice and ours. In the Offertory we offer the gifts of bread and wine back to God, praying that our sacrifice may be acceptable to the Father. And then in the Eucharistic Prayer, those gifts become the body and blood of Our Lord and we receive them back transformed in Holy Communion.
We ourselves, in receiving communion, become in a deeper way what we already are through Baptism, which is the body of Christ in the world. The threefold dynamic of sacrifice lies at the heart of the Eucharist, which itself means thanksgiving.
Finally, I want to quote one of the greatest expressions of the meaning of sacrifice in the Bible. It is from St Paul and his opening words of the 12th chapter of his Letter to the Romans:
“I appeal to you therefore brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good, acceptable, and perfect.”
The apostle is urging us still today to see our bodies, by which he means our whole selves, as a gift from God which we constantly offer back to our maker in all we do in cooperating with grace to achieve that transformation which will then go on to transform our relationships with others, the wider creation and ultimately lead to union with the Trinity which is the greatest gift of all.
Kieran Cronin ofm