Always be ready to make a defence when you are called to give an account of the faith that is in you. (1 Peter 3.15)
What does Scripture mean here when it speaks of ‘an account’ of the faith ?
A comprehensive theological explanation? Presumably not.
Our Christian leaders generally advise that we focus on what our Christian faith has meant ‘for us’. We should consider the words of the man blind from birth in the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel when called to account by the Pharisees following his healing by Jesus: ‘One thing I know: that, though I was blind, now I see!’ In other words, concentrate on the difference it has made in your life!
Our leaders are surely right about this. Nevertheless, in my own (admittedly very limited) experience, the point in my conversations is quickly reached where I am challenged on the question of what I suppose to have happened all those years ago, and how and why Christians like me want to claim it is relevant to our lives today.
So this here is what I say – and it is a form of presentation I would recommend to everyone else:
All religion – including Christianity – centres on the sacrificial giving through which we relate as humans to the source of our being. Religion ‘binds’ us (the etymological meaning of the Latin ‘religio’) relationally and emotionally to this origin. All relationships are founded in giving (as social anthropologists remind us). Our religious ones are no different. Sacrifice is a giving back out of what we have received to the sacred source from which we received it – a counter-gift binding us to the source of what we are.
That counter-gift may be ‘symbolic’. Think of the ‘grace’ traditionally said by Christians at the start of a meal. It doesn’t involve the transfer of anything material, but it nevertheless expresses the recognition that the meal is not just a something we consume to keep body and soul together; it is also a means by which we experience a grateful union: first and foremost, with the source and sustainer of our being (God in this case), but also with those with whom we are sharing the meal. As we see in this example, the ‘counter-gift’ of sacrifice is not restricted to religious settings. By means of it all the actions of our human lives may become a means of expressing a relationship to our source of being. This gives our lives purpose; simultaneously, it institutes bonds of identity with those who share the same relationship to the same perceived source of being. Sacrifice is therefore the source both of personal fulfilment and communal identity.
From a Christian perspective, there is a form of sacrifice and a form of identity that takes precedence over all the rest. This is the sacrifice to the one true god and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, which binds us into the community of the Church. Where other forms of sacrifice usurp that precedence, they are, for the Christians, ‘idolatrous’.
The biblical narrative makes plain that the inauguration of this proper form of sacrifice was God’s response to human depravity brought about through the fall. On the basis of what we have said, it would seem that sacrifice is at some level a human necessity – because humans cannot live without identity of some kind, and the purpose it brings. On the other hand, fallen humanity, prior to this intervention, would appear to have lost the knowledge of the true source of its being, and, along with that knowledge, the wherewithal to offer its sacrifice worthily. At any rate, the diverse objects of human sacrifice, and the broken and divisive forms of identity instituted by mis-directed religion, litter the course of history.
It is also apparent that the vocation of God’s ‘people’ to be the sole representative of proper religion in a world of idolatry was hardly going to be an easy call. As events were to prove, it was a call that, in the present conditions of humanity, exceeded the capacities of any other than God himself, become human and acting on our behalf.
The one whom Christian believers call the Messiah (or ‘Christ’) makes for the first time, in his own self-offering, a worthy sacrifice to the source of his and our identity. This would have a mere historical interest but for a further, all-important, aspect of Christ’s self-offering – something comprehensible only in the light of the Gospel understanding of Christ’s sacrifice as an act on the part of God himself. In doing what he does, Christ offers his sacrifice on OUR behalf. And the implication of this ‘on our behalf’ is that he simultaneously offers US the possibility of participating in his perfect self-offering. By this, I mean nothing less than that he allows US to share in his sacrificial agency, so establishing, for the first time, the possibility of a universal human identity – a community in his sacrificial offering.
How do we know? Because this is what Christ claimed to be doing, above all, at the Last Supper, when he offered up bread and wine symbolizing his sacrifice, and instructed his followers to carry on doing what he was doing after his death. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost marks symbolically the moment, following the Resurrection, when his followers came to understand what Christ had done, and at last assume his sacrificial agency for themselves. This was the moment when the Church was born. It was also the moment when humanity was restored to the possibility of proper sacrifice and a universal human identity.
The essence of the Christian Gospel-event, then, is an act of sacrificial self-offering that is properly both Christ’s, but also, potentially, ours. In practice, we participate in Christ’s sacrificial offering: perfectly at the level of what we do in church – in the divinely-instituted eucharistic worship that moulds our hearts and desires; rather less perfectly, at an everyday level, in our lives to the extent that these are brought into line with the pattern set by what we do in Church. It is this lived conformity to the eucharistic paradigm is that St Paul refers to as ‘living sacrifice’ and ‘spiritual worship’. And it is this sacrificial worship that constitutes ultimate goal of human life.