Let me sum up where we have got to so far.
Religion, at the most fundamental level – the level at which Christianity shares the aspiration of all religion – is about worship: more precisely, about giving back to God, as the source of our existence, out of what we have received from Him. The Old Testament bears this out; but it also teaches that there are improper ways of doing this – and, for God’s own people, a proper way to be revealed to them. That good way enables an offering to be made that is commensurate with who God is and what we owe Him – something achievable only through the system of symbolic equivalence established for his people by God Himself.
I have already supported these claims using material from the biblical narrative
However, the last post led up to a a further – and, for Christians, all-important – claim which I have yet to discuss.
According to Christianity and the New Testament, this proper religious sacrifice was ultimately fully offered through the sacrificial life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And this good and proper sacrifice has now become, for God’s people as instituted in Christ, not only Christ’s sacrifice, but ours as well.
What does this mean?
We have, of course, already defined proper sacrifice for the purposes of present discussion. When we describe the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice, we are claiming that Jesus effects just such a proper act of worship – and not only for himself at one moment in history, but for all of his Church ever since: that he renders to the Father an offering that is commensurate with his Father’s greatness, so accomplishing for himself and the people of God what the Mosaic blueprint aspired to, but failed to achieve in practice, because it remained forever largely unrealized
This seems an extraordinary claim. For a start, it is not obvious what it might mean to describe the life and death of someone as a sacrifice – not, at any rate, in the same sense in which we would apply the term to the temple cult, or even Abraham’s offering of his son. Nor is it easy to comprehend how that sacrifice – if sacrifice it was – could be anyone else’s but Jesus’s own.
Nevertheless, it is a claim made both by Christian tradition – as well as by Christ himself in a series of symbolic actions culminating in the Last Supper. For Christ not only performs – so Christians believe – the ultimate proper sacrifice to God. By symbolic actions, such as those he performs at the Last Supper, he also communicates, in word and action, the meaning of what he is doing to his followers, so that one day they may be able to understand his sacrifice for themselves. The most important occasion of this instruction is, of course, the Last Supper itself – the meal in the upper room reported in all four gospels. In three of these, Jesus uses the bread and wine to invest his imminent death and resurrection with a meaning that is sacrificial in precisely the sense we have attributed to the term in our earlier chapters. This involves him claiming agency over the events that are about to overtake him. He is not, so this implies, a mere victim, having his life, as it were, stolen from him; he is himself actively choosing, now in death, as throughout his life, to ‘lay down’ that life as an offering to his Father and in service to his friends and future followers. In making this claim, Jesus is vindicated, say Christians, first and foremost, by the Father who ‘raises’ him, as He had once restored Isaac to his father Abraham.
Of course, none of this makes Jesus’ sacrifice our sacrifice. Yet, that too is explicitly promised by Jesus at that last Passover meal before his betrayal and crucifixion. There he assures his disciples of a future participation in the sacrifice he is about to bring to completion on the cross. He does this in two ways. First, in the command that his supper companions should, after his death, forever repeat the action with the bread and wine through which he has invested his own death with sacrificial significance. Second, in his promise of the transmission to them of his Holy Spirit. The latter, I would suggest, is a necessary condition for their meaningful fulfilment of the command. For, at that moment in the upper room, I doubt if Jesus’ followers understood the significance of Jesus’s words and gestures, let alone felt able to speak and enact them meaningfully for themselves after their master’s death – as the Church was later to do.
For that to be a possibility, another divine intervention was required – one which also vindicated the sacrificial status of Jesus’ action, though in a rather different way. The Resurrection brings in its wake the coming of Jesus’ own spirit – the Holy Spirit – upon the disciples at Pentecost. When the Spirit passes from Jesus to his followers after his death, it simultaneously enlightens their minds, and enables them to repeat Jesus’ words and gestures for themselves, so claiming his sacrifice as their own. There is, in both cases, a strong sense of a hiatus and a transition – of Jesus’s death having had to occur, so that the age of Jesus’ earthly ministry could give way to the age of the Spirit’s ministry in the Church. Now Christ and his sacrifice would be recognized in a new and fuller way and by those many living beyond the reach of his earthly mission.
The seal, then, is finally set on the sacrificial status of Jesus’ action – and, I would argue, the first proper Eucharist celebrated – at the point where Jesus’ disciples are empowered to repeat Jesus’ words and gestures at the Last Supper, but now with the understanding that has come to them through the Holy Spirit. If – as I rather believe – a sacrifice has to be recognized by its performers as a sacrifice in order properly to be one, then Jesus’ self-offering becomes fully a sacrifice at this point. The sacrifice which Jesus’ passion had initiated is thus only fully realized as sacrifice after his death and resurrection by his disciples acting in his Spirit. A rather extraordinary implication of this is that Jesus would appear to have shared with his followers his own sacrificial agency.
So it is that we too, as Jesus’ followers, now offer Jesus’ sacrifice as he has offered ours. Symbolized in bread and wine is the content of our whole lives along with Jesus’s, ‘not held back in rebellious independence as ‘our own’, but consecrated and given back to the Father along with Jesus’ self-offering and the self-offering of his whole Church.’ (Dix, p.247)
How is this Christian form of religious sacrifice similar and/or different from other (pagan) forms of sacrifice?
The common ground is, of course, the aspiration to offer something back to the source our existence. Ethnographic studies have demonstrated that, in other, non-Christian forms of sacrifice, communities aspire to offer back to the perceived source of their existence something of what they have and what they are. And this is also what Christians do through the re-actualization of the sacrifice of Christ in their Eucharists. Think of the well-known episodes in the Gospel accounts, so obviously an anticipation of Last Supper & Eucharist, where Christ miraculously multiplies the loaves and fishes. The miracle does not conjure food out of the air, but transforms what is, at least in the case of bread, the work of human hands, shared and placed at our Lord’s disposal. The sense of the eucharistic sacrifice being at some level a gift on our part is well captured, as one scholar has noted, in the Orthodox practice of using bread baked by local households, brought to the sacristy prior to the rite, then placed on the offering plate with the alms.(12)
When it comes to the thing that differentiates Christian sacrifice from the rites of other communities, we touch upon something hard to deal with comprehensively in an intellectually satisfactory manner without going into issues that I shall treat at length in future chapters. For now, it will suffice to draw attention to two crucial features. The first is that the bread and wine are offered to God, not as ordinary bread and wine, but as bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The second is that the offering is made not by Christian individuals, but always collectively by the whole Church acting in Christ’s name. The two things turn out to be linked because the body of Christ, which the bread and wine make present to us in the Eucharist, is actually the mystical body of the Church itself, the body of which we form a part. In offering Christ, the Church offers itself.
Here, then, is where Christian sacrifice differs from the sacrifice of non-Christian communities. Other communities in their sacrifices ‘offer themselves’. For Christians, such offering of the self is only an appropriate response to God where it is made ‘in Christ’; where Christ is what we offer, and ourselves only as included in him. The selves we offer are, in other words, a pre-emptively transformed and sanctified us – the us that we become as the members of Christ’s body.
A proper sacrifice which is trinitarian …. and atoning
Trinitarian ….
Our discussion in this post has focussed on the Eucharist. I now want to show how this emphasis opens the way to a right understanding of sacrifice, which is, first and foremost, trinitarian. The Trinity is not the obscure theological bolt-on that it is sometimes supposed to be, but indispensable to a correct understanding of Christian – i.e. eucharistic – sacrifice.
Here is why.
We have seen how, through the performance of Eucharist, Christ’s followers were enabled collectively to assume Christ’s sacrificial agency as their own – acting as his ‘body’, the Church. Also, that the indispensable means to this development was the coming of the Holy Spirit – a fresh manifestation of God Himself, now acting, not just in Jesus, but directly in the hearts of his followers.
So, we already have two persons of the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit, each distinguished by a characteristic mode of activity. When, in addition to this, we remember that both the action of Christ and subsequently that of the Holy Spirit in us (as we respond to Christ’s action) are in their turn addressed to God the Father as a reciprocation of His initial gift of life, then the trinitarian shape of this Christian sacrifice begins to emerge. Especially when we also bear in mind that the possibility of this counter-gift (by Christ, and by us) forms an element – indeed, the culminating element – of the initial gift from the Father (life itself) and the condition of its full and proper enjoyment. In other words, part of what it is for God to communicate to us life as a gift is His simultaneously giving us the means to respond to His gift, first through sending Christ, who offers that response on our behalf, and then the Spirit, who allows us to make that response our own.
We see then that the Eucharist allows the community of believers to be inserted into a single arc of sacrificial action implicating Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and spanning creation, Cross and Pentecost. This action begins with the gift, not only of life itself, but of our grateful response to life; proceeds to the ultimate realization of that response in the passion of Christ; concludes with our participation in his response through the Holy Spirit. All this is expressed in the grand narrative of sacrifice that forms the content of those eucharistic prayers that precede the moment in the service where the bread is broken, then shared – when the president at the Eucharist articulates the meaning of the sacrifice that is both Christ’s and ours. Following Robert Daly (Sacrifice Unveiled), we can sum up that narrative more fully, and in more theological terms, as follows.
The self-offering of the Son (the second person of the Trinity) is the ultimate response to the self-emptying (kenotic) generosity of the Father (the first person). All the Father’s earlier gifts to humankind culminate in His offering through the Son of the means by which humans themselves can make, in the power of the Holy Spirit which the Son leaves behind (the third person), an adequate sacrificial response to His own initial generosity. This is, of course, a response they could not have made unassisted in this way. Not only, then, does the Son himself make this adequate sacrificial response to the Father. He also, with the advent of the Holy Spirit that is consequent on his death, enables his disciples to share his adequate sacrificial response. So, the accomplishment of sacrifice involves a mutual giving between the persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Into this sacrificial process humankind is progressively drawn, first in Christ alone, then in the entire Church, which, through the Holy Spirit, returns to the Father what, in the Son, it has already received from Him. Sacrifice, then, is a reciprocal gift of love and self-offering between the persons of the Godhead, which engages humankind through the ecclesial community instituted through the self-offering of Christ.
…. but also atoning
The above paragraph articulates the meaning of Christian sacrifice in terms of self-offering, love, and community. When stated in such terms, sacrifice becomes far more ethically and intellectually comprehensible than in the standard account, based in penal substitution, according to which the Cross serves to fund the Father’s forgiveness of our sins. That said, there is something missing from this account. Or, maybe we should say, inexplicit or under-emphasized.
Fortunately, it is something which the words and gestures of any fully enacted Eucharist cannot but bring forcibly to our attention. The rite culminates in the ‘breaking’ of Jesus’ body. We are reminded, in the most concrete terms, that the particular form of sacrifice that is Christian eucharistic sacrifice involves a self-offering ‘up to death – even death on a cross’. Moreover, the sacrifice that the Jesus of the Gospels promises his closest followers requires them – and us – to follow him by ‘taking up the cross’.
How do we bring together the notion of a loving self-offering generative of social and communal bonds with the pain, humiliation and desolation of the Cross? How can the ultimate expression of the life-affirming notion of sacrifice (as set out in our earlier posts) take the form that it does in the Cross – of the most extreme suffering and death?
Perhaps the case of Abraham, discussed earlier, helps make some sense of this. It certainly shows the gift of worship in an intimidating light. Yet, even Abraham’s lonely spiritual road allows him a degree of independent agency. His burden is at least one that he takes up for himself out of desire to respond to God’s call. But, when it comes to Jesus, it is clear that the sacrificial burden he takes up is that of his fellow human creatures, not his own. His is a paradoxically passive kind of action. A sacrifice that is imposed by conditions beyond his control, yet that he freely assumes – as demonstrated by the scene in Gethsemane where Jesus prays for the cup to pass from his lips, while nevertheless accepting to drink from it.(13)
How do we explain this apparent tension between the positivity of the sacrificial principle as the driver of human purpose and community and the negativity of its paradigmatic manifestation through an action that attains glory only through suffering, humiliation and death?
The explanation lies in the need for the ideal of sacrifice to be realized in the conditions of our sinful humanity. In short, as we said in an earlier chapter, taking up the cause of proper religion was never going to be an easy call in a world where its claims have to be upheld against the rival claims of human idolatries.
Perhaps, we can imagine a place – maybe Eden – where the vocation of religion and sacrifice were perfectly accomplished without suffering. After all, suffering is not, I believe, an intrinsic element of sacrifice, so there is no reason in principle, why, under certain conditions, this would not have been possible. The fact remains that, in the conditions of humanity through much of its history – those of an intolerant assertion of idolatrous religion – the Christian sacrifice of worship has simultaneously been a sacrifice of suffering in which Jesus’ followers have joined their master in atoning for a humanity yet to be won to its cause. What has sometimes been true for Jesus’ followers, and the prophets before them, was, of course, pre-eminently true for the one who first brought a perfected religion into a world to which it was previously unknown, or, known only as a blueprint yet to be realized.
The atoning dimension of true religion is glimpsed even in the Old Testament. There, the normal understanding of suffering is as chastisement imposed by God – generally on a recalcitrant Israel. But there also emerges here and there, in some of the Psalms, Job, or Isaiah, for example, a gathering sense of a suffering that cannot be explained by the sins of the sufferer themselves – of a suffering that can only be explained as atoning for others. From a Christian perspective it is hard not to see in this a spiritual development, and an anticipation, of the kind of suffering agency that culminates in the Cross.
For Christ’s followers, too (even those in the supposedly tolerant West) any genuinely eucharistic dedication of our lives is likely, given a sinful world, to involve us in taking up our cross, as Jesus warned. The demonic influences we encounter are not confined to forces of outright opposition and persecution, but take the subtler and more insidious form of the subjugation and warping of our innermost desires away from proper religion, and towards the goals that constitute the idolatries of our own culture and society. We should therefore be wary of viewing the Eucharist as a dedication of our own life projects and achievements, with the role of Jesus confined to scattering an incense of sanctity over the offerings of our own endeavour. There is a danger here of grossly underestimating the insidious influences upon our own motivations of powers and principalities of this world. The result of such an attitude will almost certainly not be proper sacrifice.
The truth is rather that the eucharistic sacrifice we offer is, in the first instance, Christ’s, and ours only to the extent we have been allowed to share it. Think of the boy in John’s narrative of the feeding of the multitude who offers his loaves and fishes to Jesus. The miracle that is to ensue consists entirely in what Jesus does. The boy’s role, the provision of the loaves and fishes, may have been indispensable, yet could have been fulfilled by someone else. Similarly, our own individual role in the eucharistic offering, symbolized in the materiality of the bread and wine, is simply the offering up of our wills and our obedience. The miracle lies in what God does with those things – their transformation at the altar into something worthy to be offered to his Father and ours: Christ’s body and blood.
(12) Schmemann, p.110
(13) The passive quality of Jesus’ agency as pure obedience – and the distinction between his sacrifice and that of the ‘suffering righteous man’ of the OT – is well expressed by von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, pp.106-7