What does it mean to sacrifice?

One Hand Clapping has posted a very thoughtful, very well written piece about sacrifice. It is a little long but it is definately worth a read:


What would you sacrifice your child for?
The Sunday sermon

One evening during the Democratic National Convention, talk show host Bill O'Reilly interviewed far-left-wing film maker Michael Moore, whose latest movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, is two hours of anti-Bush venom. Heavily criticizing the Iraq war, Moore pointedly asked O'Reilly whether he would sacrifice his son to take Fallujah. The question took O'Reilly off guard, but he replied, reasonably enough, no. But, he said, he would sacrifice himself.

Moore and O'Reilly thrashed back and forth about the topic for a little while longer, and that was that.

The question was of more than casual interest to me, since my son had just left for active duty in the Marine Corps, and Ken and Patricia's grandson, Marine Sergeant Nicholas Waller, was then in Iraq.

I remember thinking at the time that Moore's question was pretty stupid, since the obvious answer to the question is what O'Reilly said: No. Remembering my own years of service, I discovered when Stephen went off to boot camp that it is much easier to go yourself than to watch your child go.

This week in the Washington Post, Jeff Bergner, former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, addressed Moore's question. "The question," he wrote, "caught my attention because our youngest son had just returned from discussing post-college options with a Marine recruiter." I tell you, the Marines are everywhere!
Anyway, Bergner said, Moore's question was...

... a rhetorical device and not a substantial question at all. This is true in four aspects.

First, it has the high standard of "sacrifice." No normal parent is prepared to sacrifice his child for any reason or objective, including military objectives. The same could be said of any desirable objective. Would you, for example, sacrifice your child to expand health care to the uninsured? Or even ... to save the life of another of [your] children? It is hard to imagine any objective for which one would sacrifice one's child. ...

Second, the question is addressed to the wrong person. All [members of the armed forces] are adult men and women in their own right. And it is they, not their parents, who choose to serve in the armed forces. ...

Third, the objective of Fallujah's pacification is too narrowly stated. Would anyone [even] enlist for the specific purpose of keeping supply convoys moving into Baghdad? Or to open a road to a dusty town? Or to pacify a town or the occupants of a house? Or to be killed by friendly fire? Many young Americans have lost their lives in just such ways. But these are tasks incidental to the larger purpose of military service: protecting the interests of the United States. ...

Finally, the question ignores the issue of consequences. We all know that the full consequences of our decisions are impossible to predict. So are the consequences of our indecisions. If there are risks and sacrifices entailed by action, there are also risks and sacrifices entailed by inaction.

All of these things are true, but after reflecting on the issue for a little more than two weeks, I am nagged by a thought that Moore was on to something, he just didn't know it. Bergner says correctly that the free will and adult status of service members means that however supportive of their service a parent may be, no parent is sacrificing a child in Fallujah or anywhere else. And while not one of us sitting here today would make a positive decision to sacrifice, or even endanger, one of our children, the question and its answer probes more deeply than what any individual would commit or accept.

During America's four great wars of the twentieth century - world wars one and two, Korea and Vietnam - the United States enforced a draft, which coercively took young men, someone's sons every one, from their homes and sent them into combat, where many died.

As a nation, we have indeed decided on more than one occasion to sacrifice our children. The lives of our children are of ultimate value, yet we have offered them up over and over in war, always, however, for the preservation of ultimate worth, that, as Lincoln put it, government by, of and for the people should not vanish from the earth, or today even more basically, for the preservation of American lives against terrorist attack.

The lives of our children are so precious that it is impossible to imagine offering them up for anything except something of ultimate value, and even for ultimate value we accept only a possibility of sacrifice rather than certainty. Combat does not mean certain death: even at Iwo Jima most Marines survived.

But I have a heretical question: is this inability or unwillingness to sacrifice our children with certainty mean that we are morally deficient? Is there anything we treasure so absolutely that we would with certainty part with even our most beloved ones to preserve it?

That is, I think, the dilemma that confronted Abraham so many centuries ago.

Gen. 22:1-2: Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. 2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”

It's impossible to imagine what must have gone through Abraham's mind when he understood what God was requiring of him, to say nothing of what this command tells us about the mind of God. Religious child sacrifice was done in the eastern Mediterranean lands in Abraham's day and before. There was a place outside Jerusalem called Gehenna, where pagan Canaanites had once burned their children in sacrifice to their god Molech. The Jews were so repulsed by this place and practice that when Jesus wanted to describe what hell was like, he simply called it Gehenna.

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” 8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.

10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

By the time we reach this point of the story, if we have any moral sensibility at all we are ready to curse both Abraham and God alike. The deed God requires of Abraham is more than merely brutal, it is also senseless. There is no reason God offers Abraham for the killing of his son, Isaac. He simply tells him to do it. God promised Abraham no reward. There is no hint that some great danger to Abraham's community will be staved off by Isaac's death. God's orders nothing but a religious execution of innocent Isaac, who is undeserving even of a bare-hand spanking.

For two years, until not long ago, the intifada of the Palestinians against Israelis was going full bore. One of its main weapons was the suicide bomber. Suicide bombing hasn't disappeared from the Middle East - it remains one of the favorite tactics of foreign terrorists fighting the Iraqi government - but the Palestinian twist was that many of the suicide bombers were still children, and most of them blew themselves up not merely with their parents' knowledge but their approval. One such bomber was a teenager named Sayeed Hotari, who strapped a belt of dynamite to his waist. He walked into a crowded Tel Aviv disco and blew himself up. Twenty-one Israelis, most of them teenagers, were killed."I feel no regret for my son's death," his father said. "I hope all Palestinian men will do the same."

I have the same question for Sayeed's father and for Abraham: Why did you not offer yourself to save your son? If Sayeed the elder says that all Palestinian men should do the same, why did he not put his life where his mouth was? If Abraham loved Isaac as God said he did, why did he not try to make a deal with God, even offer himself to save his son? He had bargained God out of destroying the righteous along with the unrighteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, so where were his negotiation skills when it came to saving his son? Perhaps God would have struck him dead for his impertinence, but would not Abraham have thought it was worth it? We would offer ourselves to save our children - think of mothers and fathers throwing themselves over their children in Florida last week when the roof started to rip away. But Abraham does nothing to save Isaac.

11 But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

There was a death on the mountain that day, but it turned out to be the lamb of God, not the son of Abraham. "Without the shedding of blood," says the book of Hebrews, "there is no forgiveness" of sins (9.23). Theologically, there seems to be a grim symmetry to salvation: to gain the perfect and ultimate value of eternal life with God requires the sacrifice of the most valuable thing of all, life itself.

What is it that you most desire in all the world, the one thing that if accomplished you would find fullest contentment possible? What would you sacrifice to make it happen? We actually face this question all the time, for good or ill. I had two friends who craved success in business so much that they knowingly sacrificed their marriages to achieve it. My wife desired my call to ministry to succeed so much that for several years she gave up new clothes, nice things, vacations, leisure time and quite a bit of my companionship in order to make it possible for me to attain my M.Div. degree.

But for what would you take a life, or give it? This question is asked of few of us, thankfully, but is dreaded by police officers and soldiers, for whom the question is not academic. And it was no academic question for God, faced with how to accomplish the salvation of creation.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him" (John 3:16-17).

I knew a man a few years ago who lost his son, eight, to cancer. The man said that at first he knelt by his son's bed and prayed to God to heal his son. As his son worsened, the man said he finally started offering himself in prayer to God, asking God to take the cancer from his son and put it inside himself. I am sure that each mother or father here would pray the same thing.

We tend to think of sin judicially and see it dealt with in a kind of theological court, where we are found not guilty based on the pleading of Christ. But I think it is helpful also to see sin as a deep illness in the human being that we cannot cure ourselves. In the mind of God, healing this illness must be the accomplishment of ultimate value, the capstone of creation and indeed, the perfection of creation. So out of love for his children, God became born of woman and took upon himself all the spiritual deficiencies of the human race. The prophet Isaiah put it this way:

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isa 53:4-6).

The apostle Paul wrote in Second Corinthians,

... God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting human sins against them. ... God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor5:19, 21).

And the book of Hebrews offers this insight:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death ... (Heb 2:14).

The tragedy of the human condition is that our salvation cost God the life of his Son, but the deep mystery of the divine nature is that in Christ's death, God sacrificed himself, for the Son and the Father are the one and the same.

So the questions, what would you sacrifice your child for, and what would you sacrifice yourself for, are questions that ask the same thing of God. And the answer is for you and me and all humanity.