On Sacrifice and the Discovery of the Future

Here we are on the other side of the fall, in the world, in history and forced to deal with our vulnerability, frailty, mortality and weaknesses — in short, the human condition.

There are seven recognized master-motifs, recurring thematic threads that permeate the entire plot, to the biblical library.  These have been outlined quite nicely in books such as God’s Big Picture (2003) Vaughn Roberts, According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible (1991) Graeme Goldsworthy and The Temple and the Church’s Mission (2004) Gregory Kimball Beale.

The recurring master-motifs are 1) The Kingdom of God / God’s Sovereign Rule 2) Covenant and God’s binding relationship with humanity 3) Creation -> Fall -> Redemption -> New Creation 4) Presence of God 5) People of God: Election, Holiness and Mission 6) Sacrifice, Substitution and Atonement and 7) Faith, Promise and Eschatological Hope.

By the time we finish our work on the Bible we will delve into all seven of these master-motifs but today we begin with number six, on sacrifice. From the fall to the cross to the marriage supper of the lamb the biblical library is very much a story about the origin, necessity, refinement and perfection of sacrifice.

So let’s discuss what this whole sacrifice thing is.

The biblical sacrificial system begins in Genesis 3 with the fall. After eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve find themselves expelled from paradise and are burdened with the consequences of their disobedience to God and their new found self-consciousness.

The line that opens up the biblical motif of sacrifice is “cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3:17-19).

God tells Adam that as a result of his disobedience and as a consequence of his self-consciousness, he will now have to work. What is work? Work is sacrifice. The present is sacrificed for the future. This story is meant as an explanation for the origins of work and sacrifice written after the fact. Mircea Eliade argues that what we see here is the culmination of over ten thousand years of carefully trying to understand how best to manage the world.

For as long as there have been humans they have been watching each other. They have been watching the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail and the biblical hypothesis is that the successful people make sacrifices. The practice of delayed gratification is presented as key to human thriving. The iterative process of effective sacrifice builds competence and resilience. So what is a sacrifice?

A sacrifice is deferred gratification. Successful sacrifice requires voluntarily giving up something in the present for non-tangible future advantages. How can we understand this? It is a covenant with being and with the future as such.

What is important here to understand at the beginning of the biblical system of sacrifice is that Adam and Eve discovered the future. In discovering the future they discovered the necessity of tragedy, suffering and death. The biblical hypothesis to this realization is that the only way to mitigate it is through sacrifice. It is by sacrificing in the present that we can reduce the anxiety and pain which awaits us in the future. Our sacrifices so validate our existence in such a way that the suffering of reality is kept at bay.

Our modern notion of sacrifice, the idea that by making today less impulsively pleasurable we can stave off the ravages of tomorrow and maybe even prosper somewhat, is grounded in this framework. The modern idea that over a decade in college, medical school and then residency where you essentially throw away your social live in your twenties and early thirties will be a sacrifice which is honored by society as such (the patriarchy, God the father) with earned reputation, financial stability and social standing is simply another way of talking about sacrifice. Sacrifice is the small amount of your weekly check that you have deducted into a retirement account or daily exercise knowing that in the future you may be healthier.  What we see in the biblical corpus is the dramatic precursor to these modern notions of sacrifice.

The idea here, one frequently looked at as primitive in our modern culture, that it is as if there is a powerful figure in the sky that likes it when you give up something you value is anything but primitive. It may be the single greatest idea mankind has ever produced. We can give up something today, something we cherish, and be rewarded in the future. I think it is important to remember just how sophisticated of an idea this is and that, of course, there is a dramatic precursor. As we discussed in an earlier post, action precedes articulated understanding. We act first, then we know. On the road to the above mentioned psychological notion of sacrifice in the modern world it was dramatized in the sacrifice of animals, of ones own will, of one’s children and eventually, with Christ, with oneself rendering the dramatic performative sacrifice fulfilled.

Now that we have the knowledge of the future and the catastrophe of the human condition and we have figured out that it is in sacrificing something we cherish that we can combat the impending horror we are left with another question. What is the best kind of sacrifice. What is it that we can sacrifice for the optimal outcome? We see this with some frequency in the biblical stories. A pattern is laid down and then we see it evolve into its ultimate expression. So while you may not immediately see the connection between slaughtering a bull, taking of gold earrings and the crucifixion they are merely stages towards the culmination of the pattern.

What we are called on to sacrifice is that which we love best. Why? We mentioned in an earlier essay, we sacrifice what we love best because the world reveals itself according to the template of our values. If the world you see is not the world you want you need to examine your values and rid yourself of your presuppositions. Ambition, goals, values — while they illuminate part of the world quite clearly, they do make you blind to the vast amount of being which is irrelevant to your values, your presuppositions, your desires, etc.

If it is the case that you are suffering then it is at least possible that you are suffering because you are so fixed on a particular point that the fixation on that point might be integrally related to why things are going so terribly wrong for you. If the world you experience is not the world you want it to be or is not all it might be it is time to reexamine these values.

Why not just curse fate? Why not blame other people? Why not blame being itself? Why not blame God? Well, the simplest answer to this is that it doesn’t work. Rather than curse God when things do not work out the way we want them to it is time to look at ourselves.

This is not meant as a merely casual way of blaming people for their own problems. Even in the Old Testament we

see that sometimes you just get a bad break. Like Job, you may just be the pawn in a little contest between God and Satan and if so, well, that’s too bad for you.

The biblical idea here is far more sophisticated than telling someone who just found out they have brain cancer that it’s their own fault for being such an asshole. Rather, the hypothesis is something like: if things aren’t working out properly it is the appropriate thing for a human being who is living in a proper manner to take the responsibility on for themselves regardless of any counterargument which could be made against doing so.

This is to say: If things aren’t right for you it is appropriate to ask yourself what it is that you are doing, valuing, fixating on, holding as axiomatic, etc. which might be impeding your progress forward and then sacrifice it. It is not that suffering should be treated as evidence that you are doing something wrong, but if you are honestly interested in mitigating the suffering you should at least ask yourself what it is you could sacrifice in the moment to make things better.

This, in some ways, is a deadwood issue. Like the phoenix, a proper amount of burning off of the deadwood is what is necessary for rebirth and progression forward. Failure to do this is why California finds itself engulfed in flames more frequently than you would expect for a modern and wealthy state. Their bowing to enviornmental alarmists and refusal to do proper forest deadwood burnings means when there is a fire it is a catastrophe. They refuse to sacrifice the part for the whole and in the refusal to sacrifice they are faced with the harshness of the universe with very little to veil them from the horror. It is interesting to note that it is only human’s who truly sacrifice the part for the whole. That just isn’t an animal thing. In the refusal to sacrifice in the moment you negate your own humanity.

Your primary duty, so goes the biblical value system, should be to take responsibility for life not unfolding before you properly and do do something about it and the place to start doing something about it is in fixing your own errors. The idea being that if you were to sacrifice properly, maybe ultimately, you could fix your own errors in such a way that things would become better for you, for your family, for your community and maybe even the world itself as the accretion of good which begins with your fixing your own life will grow exponentially — like a mustard seed.

You have to sacrifice who you are for who you could become. If you don’t sacrifice who you are, the you who you could be can never be made manifest and the you who you could be might be the person who confronts the dragon and earns the treasure, saving the world and being the hero — but you won’t know until you sacrifice who you are first. Unwillingness to sacrifice ensures that your maximal self can never be made manifest in the world just like not fighting the dragon doesn’t save you from the dragon, it merely ensures you will lose and never have the treasure he hoards. The bigger the dragon, the greater the treasure.

So we know there is a future which is filled with catastrophe and we are told that the way we can protect ourselves is through sacrifice. We know that sacrifice is the act of giving up something we cherish in the present for something in the future. If something valuable given up ensures future prosperity and pleases the lord the obvious question is, what is most valuable? Once we establish that the sacrifice must be something we value we can start to understand the scale where the higher the value the sacrifice the higher the reward and we don’t know the upward limit to this. So what is the thing which we can sacrifice which is of the utmost value? How about ourselves? How about our children?

We see this when God tells Abraham to sacrifice Issac or tells Jonah to go to Ninevah, the land of his ancestral enemies, and condemn them for being ungodly.

This is the Christian hypothesis as the sacrificial system is fulfilled in the sacrifice of Christ which is multiple sacrifices all at once. Let’s get back to this in a moment.

Michelangelo’s Pieta it is an object of contemplation in a great cathedral in a great city. What Michelangelo is trying to express in this statue is the sacrifice of the mother. What is the proper role of the mother? To sacrifice her son. Mary is “The Mother.” Whether or not Mary existed is beside the point here. Mary exists as a meta-reality of what it means to be Mother. She is what is valuable across all instances of mother. The sacrifice of the mother is to offer her son to be destroyed by the world because that is what is going to happen.

In the statue you see Mary holding Christ’s broken dead body and handing it to the world and this is what mother’s do when they are acting properly as mothers. A mother knows her son will go into the world, have his

trials, his failures, his heartbreaks, his sicknesses, his trauma and then he will die. That’s going to happen. The mother who is awake is aware of this and says yes to life anyway. The mother says yes to life knowing that perhaps the son will live in a way that will justify all that horror and then try to do all the right things to best facilitate him living in that manner despite knowing the full catastrophe of what is coming. That is why Mary is the mother. That is why she is worthy of having Michelangelo sculpt a masterpiece to honor her.

The mother tells you that the world is hard, that it is painful and that you will suffer and die and then tells you that you can handle it, you are strong enough to handle it and live in such a manner that the suffering will be made worthwhile. In the story of Mary, her sacrifice enables Christ to offer himself to God so completely that his faith and trust in the world is not broken by betrayal, torture or death. This is the model of the honorable man and the model of the honorable mother. It is the woman who is willing to sacrifice her child which lays the groundwork for the son who is willing to sacriiffce himself

It is only through the proper maternal and paternal sacrifice that the son can properly sacrifice and so the Christian answer to the question laid out early in Genesis as to the best sacrifice is the simultaneous sacrifice of mother and father of son and son of self which then revivifies the universe. It is that same revivifying force, the logos, which God spoke into the abyss at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of chaos.

There is no doubt that the world we live in is defined by pain and suffering. The person who wants to alleviate suffering, who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures, who wants to create heaven on earth will sacrifice everything he has to God, life and the truth.

In Genesis 3 we see the realization of the future and the necessity of sacrifice and now we take the long journey from the sacrifices of Cain and Able to the cross to the marriage feast of the lamb and everything in between as we refine the notion of sacrifice step by step.

With this, we open the biblical master-motif of the necessity of sacrifice and, in Genesis 4 we begin to see sacrifice take shape. It is a long road from Cain to Christ and our journey on that road begins in earnest now.