THE spirit of sacrifice is indispensable in our life. It’s what keeps us from losing our proper way and direction in life. Without it, we can’t help but to get spoiled and to get lost.
Sacrifice checks and corrects our tendency to go off-the-track in our life. Our problem since Adam and Eve is that we tend to misuse and abuse the wonderful endowments we have—our intelligence and will, our power to know and to be free and all the other things that we have and enjoy.
These powers that precisely make us the image and likeness of God, as our faith teaches us, and that enable us to become God’s children with his grace, need to get engaged with God and not just with anything we happen to like.
The problem with these powers is that they can be so intoxicating that we tend to easily lose sight of their proper purpose and their proper usage. Our first parents, still in their state of original justice, could not resist the intoxication. Imagine us!
These powers need to be offered to God, and through them our entire selves. That’s how we have been designed at our creation. We need to know how to offer back to God what he has given us. Unless we don’t believe in God, that’s just how the cookie crumbles here.
This is the simple language of love. God, who is love, made us in love and for love. He expects us to repay his love for us with our love for him.
This offering and loving God now assumes the character of sacrifice, because it has to contend with the consequences of sin. It now involves an element of pain and self-denial, where originally it came as pure delight.
That’s why, since the fall of our first parents, God has been tutoring us, all throughout the history of mankind, to learn the language of sacrifice.
From Abel and Cain, to Noah, down to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to the prophets and other holy men and women, this divine pedagogy in sacrifice has been done step by step.
First, they—we—were asked to offer some burnt offerings out of the fruits of the earth and of their labor. Thus, plants and animals were burned as offerings.
Then some laws were given for us to be able to give God not only things but also an integral part of us, if not our mind and heart. These divine commandments are a way to form our minds and hearts to receive a greater gift.
Then came the perfect sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. This makes our loving and self-giving most pleasing to God, since it is done for us and with us by Christ himself, the Son of God who became man.
On this point, the Letter to the Hebrews has these relevant words attributed to Christ, addressed to his Father, to describe how his sacrifice supersedes the previous forms of sacrifice:
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, Lo, I have come to do your will, O God.” (10,8-9)
And this economy of sacrifice continues to work up to now. Christ’s sacrifice invites, not exempts, all of us to participate, as can be gleaned in the words of St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians:
“We always bear about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies.” (4,10)
There’s no doubt that in the Christian understanding of the meaning of our life, the spirit of sacrifice plays a central role. Sacrifice is not only an ingredient, much less a seasoning in our life. It has to be the very essence of our life.
This spirit of sacrifice meets all the requirements of love, for which we have been created. We have to learn how to develop that spirit in our day-to-day affairs.
In fact, nothing should be done without this spirit of sacrifice permeating it. We have to check if indeed our every deed is primarily motivated by this spirit of sacrifice.
Otherwise, we can go through life on the wrong footing, badly if not fatally handicapped. This spirit of sacrifice keeps us always in the frontiers of love, avoiding complacency and lukewarmness that has been described as the tomb of love.
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