Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A
Every dimension
of human existence can, and often does, require sacrifices. There are certain
things that we have to give up, that are taken away from us, and so forth. But
according to the great 4th century Doctor of the Church, St
Augustine, no sacrifice could properly be termed a “sacrifice” unless if it is
offered to God. “A true sacrifice is anything that we do with the aim of being united to
God in holy fellowship – anything that is that is directed towards that
supreme good and end in which alone we can be truly blessed. It follows that
even an act of compassion towards men is not a sacrifice, if it is not done for
the sake of God. Although it is performed by man, sacrifice is still a divine
thing, as the Latin word indicates: “sacrum facere”, “holy-doing” or
“holy-making”. Only God can “make holy.”
Today, St Paul
exhorts us in the second reading to offer our bodies as “living sacrifices”.
What could he mean by this? The language is of a sacrificial ritual well known
to the Jews. Under the Old Covenant, God accepted the sacrifices of animals. Notice
that the priests were offering dead sacrifices, not living sacrifices. According
to the ritual, those offerings, or at least parts of them, had to be destroyed.
By destroying them – burning them on the altar, for example, or giving them to
the priests, who had no farms or land of their own – faithful Israelites
acknowledged that those good gifts, and their own lives which depended on those
gifts, belonged first and foremost to God. The sacrifices, then, were a form of
worship. In all cases, ritual sacrifices provided a way for believers to bring
themselves, their work, and their communities into communion with God, to make
them holy.
Instead of offering ritual sacrifices of grain and bulls in order to gain God’s favours, which is what happened in the Old Covenant, Christians are now called to a different mode of worship. In the old mode of worship, good things were destroyed. But this would be different in the New Covenant. The sacrifice which Christians are expected to make would be significantly different from that of the Old Covenant - the human body is not presented to be slain, rather they are to be “living sacrifices”. Thank God for that! The body which is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of Christ is to be presented to God, constantly, day after day. St Paul is commanding his readers to totally give themselves up to God. God asks for total, not partial, devotion—body and soul. We either acknowledge Him as Lord of our entire lives, or we deny him as Lord of any part of it.
For Christians,
the ultimate paradigm of sacrifice is Christ. In fact all those sacrifices of
old were only shadows of the one true sacrifice, Jesus’ self-offering on the
Cross. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary
has an eternal dimension and wide ranging implications: it achieves the
forgiveness of sins, it roots us more deeply in Christ, it glorifies God most
perfectly, and we brought into the love of God by the Holy Spirit. And it was
Christ’s sacrifice that makes us holy, not because of anything we can do or earn,
but simply because God in his mercy has offered us this grace. In the New
Covenant, then, the role of sacrifice has changed. Christ’s sacrifice is now
the source of our entering into a right relationship with God.
We are called
not to earn God’s mercy by our offerings, but to express our gratitude and our
love for God’s mercy – which we have already received through our faith in
Christ’s definitive sacrifice on Calvary – through our new way of life. This
new way of life, this new life in Christ (the life of the Beatitudes, the life
exemplified by the saints) has become our way of deepening our union with God
and worshipping him. It is a new way of life based on the commandment of love
and at the heart of love is sacrifice. Instead of the ritual sacrifices of the
Old Covenant, we are now engaged in the great adventure of making our entire
lives into a living sacrifice, an entire life “made holy” in Christ to give
glory to God and to lead us to the fulfilment of everlasting union with him in
heaven. Growth in discipleship is ultimately growth in the Imitation of Christ:
becoming more Christ-like in our thoughts and actions. And that involves
sacrifice and hard work. Christian existence, if lived in imitation of Christ,
is thereby both a sermon to the world and a sacrifice for the world, since
Christians have their share in Christ’s self-sacrifice for the world. Jesus
invites us to say a definite “Yes” to the scandal of the cross.
This is the
reason why St Peter in today’s gospel takes offense at the cross. He doesn’t
only represent the whole of humanity but many of us Christians who wish to
escape suffering as much and as long as possible. Thomas A Kempis, the
Christian writer of ‘The Imitation of Christ’ commented that: "Many come
following Jesus who love his heavenly kingdom but few come looking forward to
suffering. Many admire His miracles but few follow Him in humiliation to the
cross." How true that is for us too: we admire Jesus, we admire his
teaching, we glory in his love for us, but we are far more reticent to accept
the humiliation of the cross for ourselves. But that is what is demanded of us.
All religions outside of Christianity respond in some way to the problem of
suffering by laying out a plan – how can a man flee suffering? In radical
contrast, Christ became man in order to suffer, to suffer more than any other
person ever has suffered. By inviting St Peter and all of us to deny ourselves
and to take up our crosses to follow him, Jesus spells out the paradox of the
gospel, that salvation does not consist in eliminating your “I”, as the
Buddhist and other esoteric religions would hold, but in sacrificing your “I”
for others, which cannot take place without the cross.
As Christ invites
us to follow him by denying ourselves and taking up our crosses, in making this
unworthy sacrifice of ourselves, we hear not a fearsome challenge to immolate
ourselves as a bloody sacrifice as in the past. Rather, what we would hear from
him would be closer to the words of the great homilist, St Peter Chrysologus,
who tells us that this is what Christ wishes to say to us, “Do not be afraid.
This cross inflicts a mortal injury, not on me, but on death. These nails no
longer pain me, but only deepen your love for me. I do not cry out because of
these wounds, but through them I draw you into my heart. My body was stretched
on the cross as a symbol, not of how much I suffered, but of my all-embracing
love. I count it no less to shed my blood: it is the price I have paid for your
ransom. Come, then, return to me and learn to know me as your father, who
repays good for evil, love for injury, and boundless charity for piercing
wounds.”
By our lives of
sacrifice, we share in the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. In the sacrifice of
the Mass, we perpetuate, make present, and apply the continuing effects of
Jesus' once-for-all sacrifice on the cross. In summary, our lives in Christ are
lives of sacrifice centred on Jesus' sacrifice on Calvary, which continues to
be present through the sacrifice of the Mass. Now, as we come to the foot of
the cross, it’s with a new sense of commitment, a new sense of affirmation that
we come. We want to offer ourselves, each of us, in his and her own
heart, a living sacrifice – soul, body, mind, will to God. This is our
prayer and desire even as we come to the table of the Eucharist this morning/
evening.
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