The Direction of Sacrifice
Paul Walton
29 April 2003
Readings (Easter 2 Year B)
Acts 4.32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1.1—2.2
St John 20.19-31
This is the message we … proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1.5)A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about making sense of the Cross. I said that when I was younger, I was taught this way of making sense of the Cross: we are sinners, who deserve to go to hell; in order to forgive us, God needs a perfect sacrifice. We cannot be our own sacrifice for sin, because we are sinners; so Jesus, the sinless one, is sacrificed for us. How can we say of such a god, that ‘God is light and in God there is no darkness at all’? There is a lot of darkness in the sort of god who requires sacrificial blood to be shed.
Yet this passage which proclaims that there is no darkness in God also speaks of sacrifice:
Jesus Christ … is the atoning sacrifice for our sins … (1 John 2.2)The language of sacrifice is very deeply-ingrained in Christian thought—but the Bible is ambiguous when it comes to sacrifice. Look at the Old Testament—on the one hand, sacrifice is necessary; on the other hand, the prophets insist that it is justice and mercy that are important to God, not sacrifice. We can see the same thing as the New Testament tries to come to grips with Jesus—his death is an ‘atoning sacrifice’, yet his life shows the supreme centrality of justice and mercy.
So, can we have a non-sacrificial Christian faith? I don’t think we can, actually. I don’t believe that we can ‘sacrifice’ the language of sacrifice. But we can ask: who sacrifices, and to whom?
It’s important to be clear about the direction of sacrificial action. The way I learned it years ago was that Jesus, the Son, sacrificed himself to the Father. Here, God required the sacrifice; in other words, God requires violence.
This kind of thinking looks at sacrifice as something we make to God; the direction of the sacrifice is from us to God. What if the whole direction of sacrifice is from God to us? Then we could see that God makes a sacrifice for us. We don’t make a sacrifice to God. It is the Father who makes the sacrifice for us. It is human beings who require a sacrifice, and not God; we are the violent ones. We force the issue. We make God sacrifice ‘what was from the beginning, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands’. We cannot abide the truth about ourselves, and about God, that Christ reveals; so we remove him from our midst. We make a scapegoat of Christ.
God the Father knows suffering through this sacrifice; God shares the suffering of Christ; but God does not require it.
There is no need for us to make a sacrifice to God; God’s self-giving love has made all the sacrifice that could ever be necessary. It is the sacrifice that is intended to end all sacrifices.
What this sacrifice requires of Christians is at least this: to live as a community of people who refuse to legitimate calls for the powerless to ‘sacrifice’ themselves for ‘the greater good’. It requires us to live as a community which puts into practice what the prophets called for: the justice and mercy of God.