The Meaning of Sacrifice in Human Experience

April 10, 1983
Lakeland

Homer tells that in the course of the Trojan War, Agamemnon killed a stag sacred to Diana. Because of this sacrilege, the Greek armies were stricken with a pestilence. In order to appease Diana, Agamemnon reluctantly consented to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, on the altar. As the father held the ritual knife poised to slit her throat, Iphigenia was rescued by Diana who carried the girl away in a cloud.

Another legend, from another ancient culture, portrays a like theme. Both ancient stories are striking clues to the meaning of sacrifice in human experience.

Abraham, like Odysseus, an epic wanderer, hears the voice of God (Gen. 22), "take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah and there offer him as an offering on one of the hills which I shall designate."

When Abraham and Isaac climb the sacred hill, Abraham prepares Isaac as a living burnt-offering sacrifice. Before he can light the kindling, God calls to Abraham, "Do not lay hands on the boy. Do nothing of the sort to him; for I know that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

Then Abraham sees a ram caught by the thorns in a thicket. The animal is sacrificed instead of the boy.

These ancient epic legends illuminate the meaning of sacrifice in human experience.

First, they illustrate what much other data confirm, that sacrifice was a practice among primitive people in all places.

In pre-historic times the sacrifice was human. To us, it seems ghastly that a father should cut his daughter's throat in an altar ritual; or that Abraham prepared to roast his young son as a testimony of faith; or that in ancient Mexico, not only the Aztec priest, but many times the victim himself glorified in the experience, when the obsidian knife was plunged into the chest and the priest tore out the still throbbing heart and held it up to the rays of the sun. But people did sacrifice human life.

But as more humane values slowly sifted through the sieves of religious and social change, animals were substituted for humans. Most of the Old Testament sacrifices are from the period of animal victims. The legend describing God's intervention to save Isaac and the substitution of the trapped ram probably represents, symbolically, the cultural transition from, human to animal sacrifice in the ancient lands of the Bible.

Thus it was to be expected that when Jesus came to be regarded as a sacrifice, there would be association with animal sacrifices. When lambs, goats and bulls were customarily slaughtered for altar roasting, how natural that people with associational habits and cultic memories should say, "Behold the lamb of God.'' The lamb bone at the passover meal was itself a primitive symbol into which meanings of a more enlightened level had been infused.

When animal sacrifice, too, had been largely abandoned as a religious practice, people still retained the old ideas in symbols of blood, grain, and words of the sacrifice of the lamb of God.

The meaning of sacrifice in human experience involves the motives underlying religious expression. Sacrifice has its origins in our emotions. Like all states of feeling, there are both healthy and unhealthy, inspired and degraded emotions which find various outlets in beliefs about sacrifice.

The gods received sacrificial gifts from people. Sometimes people brought the overflowing of their abundance to the altar with thanks for the favors of deity provided through the fertile earth and the nurturing sun.

Fear motivated gifts to God, too. Guilt-ridden by the remembrance of offenses committed, men and women feared the wrath of God. Naively attributing to God the less worthy of their own emotions, they brought gifts, hoping that the bribery would appease the anger of the divine being. So Agamemnon hoped to placate Diana with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, for the profane act of killing the sacred stag.

Such bribes are not just primitive acts. There are many moderns who offer sacrifices, hoping to appease the wrath or secure the favor of God, "Oh, God, do this for me and I'll never take another drink." It is said of Martin Luther that this sort of experience directed him toward the life of the clergy. Caught in a violent thunder-storm, the frightened young Martin Luther prayed to St. Anne to mediate with God. "Snare me and I will become a monk." We know that Martin Luther did become a monk. There is much uncertainty, however, that this is how God recruits candidates for the Augustinian order.

The idea of substitution is another meaning for sacrifice. The animal or person being sacrificed substitutes for the person who was really guilty of offenses deserving punishment. This was the scapegoat driven into the wilderness after sinners wiped their crimes on its hide. This was the "lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world."

As I noted last Sunday, because of my interpretation of life and death, I cannot participate in the Christian mythology of Easter other than in a strained and unconvincing figurative manner.

Many a skeptic of dogma has arrived at a position of doubt because many so-called "religious" persons proclaim that God conspires to accept the death of Jesus, who was blameless, in place of those who are guilty and deserve punishment.

This would be a repulsive moral code for a human transaction. To execute the innocent, mistakenly, is tragic enough. To kill the innocent in full knowledge that this is a substitute for the guilty who are known, is ethically monstrous. It does not help basic justice to explain that God demanded the life of a sinless person, Jesus, as a ransom for the many who were incapable of atoning for their sins. This meaning of sacrifice is a parody of religious and ethical responsibility.

Sacrifice is sacramental, too. The primitive peoples believed that sacrifice made the profane sacred, as the smoke ascended from the burnt-offering. The ritual of sacrifice has been believed to establish a connection between the person and God. The ceremonial acts, incensing, the lifting of the chalice and the wafer on the tongue miraculously bring one into the presence of God. So millions believe. Their testimony is that the experience is ineffable, unexplainable. One cannot judge such witness. I can respect such piety, but it is not for me.

We know too that many persons have sacrificed their lives because of an excessively morbid viewpoint, rather than for good reasons. A parent can make his/her life too much a sacrifice. Sometimes the parent who considers him/herself completely self-sacrificing in devotion, caution, and direction of sons and daughters is really trying to live the life of that son or daughter – to experience in the child that which has been denied or never achieved by the parent.

The hermits, who existed in abhorrent filth in caves, or Simon Stylites existing for years on top of a pole, announced their lives as sacrifices to God. To me, it is more likely that the motive was a repressed morass of guilt feelings – probably compulsive.

If sacrifice in human experience were nothing more than re-enacted primitive rituals or the impulses of the emotionally unhealthy, then sacrifice would be a notion to be rooted out and discarded. But apart from all the aberrations and distortions, sacrifice is one or the essential underlying girders of decent living.

Human experience in all periods testifies that there is never an easy road to the resolution of conflict or the fulfillment of ideals. Progress is costly.

A Christmas hymn stanza is assumed to be prophetic of Jesus' fate:

"Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb."

Almost always there is a bitter perfume accompanying the hope and acts representing a bitter life and stronger hope. There is a certain universal truth about Christian symbolism. For every crown to be worn, there is a cross to be carried. No one who has ever labored in a worth-while enterprise can ever seriously question this basic experience.

This week marked the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. MLK said many times, "Unmerited suffering is redemptive." This is a basic truth of human experience. When one suffers undeservedly, that unmerited sacrifice may set in motion a chain of events that redeems an evil time or turns about human circumstance from an ill-favored to a better-favored course of events.

Passover is celebrated, usually somewhat co-incident with Easter. In our Wednesday evening group we have been talking about Passover, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt when the ancient Hebrews began their legendary, long, perilous, arduous march to
freedom. According to the legends, this began with unmerited suffering. The old scripture has it that Moses was reared by Pharaoh's daughter amid luxury and advantages of the royal household. Then (verses 11 ff) "one day when Moses had observed his people,” [he] saw their burdens and witnessed an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. So stirred and angered by the undeserved suffering of the Hebrew laborer, Moses killed the Egyptian overseer. This set in motion the chain of events which one day led to the successful Exodus. "Unmerited suffering is redemptive."

This, to me, is the human meaning or Jesus' life. He did not deserve the torture, humiliation, and slow death on the cross. When he decided to go to Jerusalem and demonstrate in that city, he must have surmised that cruel and unusual punishment might be the consequence. [CJW note: MLK – tragic prophecy] But out of that tragedy of unmerited punishment grew the spirit and courage of the regathered disciples for whom the execution had forged bonds stronger than death and convictions stronger than the other faiths with which they were to contend. "Unmerited suffering is redemptive."

Think of your own life experience. Do you not treasure the memory of a father, mother, friend, who was not compelled to suffer for you, but who did; and because of that sacrifice you are a better person? Anyone is poor indeed who has no poignant memories of those who have sacrificed so that he/she might live and grow. We are all here because of the sacrifice of others. You know it; I know it. We are here because or the sacrifice of other human beings.

A long time ago I read in an old National Geographic about John Oman, a man of the sea who was at home in his small craft that traveled back and forth from the Orkney Islands to the mainland of Scotland. He said every line on a good boat had been discovered by the sacrifice of a good man.

That is a parable for the whole voyage of human experience. We sail always into an unknown future. If the vessel continues seaworthy, we are well-advised to remember and appreciate that every advantage we obtain has been paid for by some member of the human company. "Unmerited suffering is redemptive" and that is the meaning of sacrifice in human experience.