REsources for Living
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I confess I’ve never been a big fan of the concept of sacrifice. It’s always struck me as kind of punitive, like it’s morally superior to suffer than to enjoy life’s abundance. And the religious tradition of sacrifice, which is deeply engrained in a wide variety of religions around the world, strikes me as even more suspect. Why would God or gods want you to offer up something that surely a god has no use for? Why give up something so precious as a life, or even as trivial as a basket of fruit, for a god whose divine nature surely doesn’t run to eating or drinking? What kind of relationship is it when you are expected to give up something valuable for no reason other than to prove your love and devotion?
The quintessential religious story of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac, from the Hebrew Scriptures. God tells Abraham that he must make a sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac—that he must take a knife and slaughter his own child as a way of proving his love for God. Now, when the time rolls around and Abraham raises the knife, he finds a ram caught in nearby bushes, and that ram becomes an acceptable sacrifice instead of his child. Yay.
Needless to say, this is a deeply disturbing story. Sometimes it is described as depicting human moral progress from sacrificing people to sacrificing animals, which is, you know, good. But isn’t this kind of a horrible way of God asking for proof of love and devotion? Where was Isaac’s choice in the whole thing? Where was Sarah, Isaac’s mother? Shouldn’t they both have gotten some say in whether taking Isaac’s life was an appropriate demonstration of Abraham’s love for God? For that matter, who gets to say whether God’s demand for Isaac’s life was a reasonable ask to begin with? What kind of a dreadful story is this?
Maybe it is a story that is both dreadful and true. The fact of the matter is that life continually demands sacrifices of us, some insignificant and some heartbreaking. Parenting, for starters, always involves sacrifices. Of course, there are the sacrifices that parents make for their children: the sleepless nights, the severe limitations on your freedom, the financial and emotional cost of being responsible for keeping another person safe and growing. Those are hard enough.
But there are also the sacrifices we make of our children. We walk away from a crying child to catch an airplane for a business trip. We shut down the endless barrage of questions and demands to get the ten minutes of quiet that we need to maintain our sanity. We send a child to school when another day to recover from illness might be better, because we simply can’t miss another day of work. We inevitably fail at the daily balancing act between what our kids want and what they need, or the ongoing push and pull between what we know society expects of them and the perfect freedom of expression that they deserve. And if all that
weren’t enough, we live with the knowledge that the choices of our generation deeply and inevitably affect the world that our children will inherit.
And there is just no way to do it right, let alone do it perfectly. The fact of the matter is that the world is continually making utterly outrageous demands. It isn’t nice or fair or right, but it is true. And the concept of sacrifice is one way of making sense of that painful reality. Sacrifice declares that in the face of all the impossible challenges that the world presents to us, we choose. Rather than just stumbling through whatever happens to be on our path, we try to remember what matters most.
Of course, what matters most changes from moment to moment. But the idea of sacrifice is that, at least some of the time, we are able to choose to give ourselves to what we most care about. We can give up what is lesser for the sake of what is greater. Maybe that looks like a choice to give up eating meat for the sake of the health of the planet. Maybe it looks like sitting through the raucous honking of a middle school band concert so that your child can see your loving witness. Maybe it looks like listening with soft eyes while someone berates you for a mistake you didn’t know you made.
Of course, not every loss is a sacrifice. Sometimes we really just get no choice. But the idea of sacrifice reminds us to consider when we do choose: Who or what is lost because of my decision? Who gains? What price will I pay and what will be the cost to others? What do I have the capacity to give so that someone else can thrive?
The choices, of course, are never entirely right and never entirely wrong. But the idea of sacrifice invites us to meet the challenges of the world with the crucial, ongoing question How do I serve love? and with its partner question Is there a larger love that I might serve? Maybe living in the rich and beautiful complexity of those questions is all that anyone, divine or human, has a right to ask.
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