READINGS

1. Meditation on Sacrifice

HOMILY

The word sacrifice keeps on popping up in our Eucharistic praying.

And some of you have let me know that you find those words difficult.

And I want to say, for very good reason.

Let me discuss with you a little bit about what is meant, and what is not meant by the word 'sacrifice'.

So let us see if I can allow you to find yourselves into a more comfortable way of praying eucharistically.

There's a perfectly simple sense of the word 'sacrifice' which is not what is being meant here.

And that is the way in which, for instance, I, a priest, offer a sacrifice to some divinity who presumably needs it for whatever reason.

Or that someone demands of me a sacrifice for someone else, like some of the people, were saying: well, all these old folk we were alright allowed them to die for the sake of the economy.

That's a sacrificial model of priesthood.

That is it specifically and exactly not what is being asked for here.

If that's what you think you're doing when you say the word sacrifice, then please don't say these prayers.

That's the wrong thing to be doing.

I'm going to use the example which my mentor, my guru, René Girard, always used when explaining the double meaning, perhaps - two possible sets of meanings behind the word 'sacrifice'.

He always used the story of king Solomon's judgment of the two prostitutes.

You remember the story:

two prostitutes, both of them had daughters at the same time, they both lived together.

During the night, the daughters of one of them died so the mum quickly swapped babies with the other one; and the other woman, when she woke up, found her baby dead, but it wasn't her baby.

So they took the matter to the king for judgement.

And the king said: bring me a sword, I will now cut it in half the babies that you can each have half.

Whereupon one of the two women said: that's splendid, quite right, then we're both in the same position.

And the other one said: no, I would let the other woman have the baby, I would prefer that the baby lives than that I win.

Of these two, you could use the word 'sacrifice' perfectly easily: one woman was prepared to sacrifice the baby to be equal with the other woman, and one woman was prepared to sacrifice her right to the baby to allow the child to live.

We used the word 'sacrifice' for both.

But they're obviously completely incommensurable in meaning, they're not the same thing at all.

One is involving killing something, the other involves letting go of something, giving something away for the sake of life.

Now, it's only conceivably in the second meaning that we can possibly refer to Jesus's going up to death as a sacrifice.

I should say that it was language with which he was familiar and he was perfectly happy to use.

So we shouldn't be too shy about it.

He was happy to use it precisely because he was bringing it to its fulfillment and actually exploding it from within, because rather than this being the account of us sacrificing someone to God or - in some particularly terrible notions - God demanding that we sacrifice someone to God as though God needed bloodlust satisfying, something like.

That it's exactly the reverse: God gave himself up to us, and we are the angry divinity in the picture.

And God is giving himself up into our midst, into the midst of our silent and sinful humans precisely so that we can be utterly amazed by the generosity, by the power, by the forgiveness in that act.

And so we realize we never need to perform any kind of sacrificial logic ever again.

That's self-giving up into the midst of us to enable us to live free from the world of sacrifice.

That's what's called the one true sacrifice.

And please notice that means that all other sacrifices are not true sacrifices, they're fakes, they're nine-dollar bills, if you like.

They're either not the real thing at all or they're a cover-up, but the self-giving of God up to us, sinful humans, so that we may be amazed, forgiven, loved, reached at our most violent, and enabled to understand how much we are being let off.

That's the sense, if you like, of the word sacrifice - the same sense as the good mother in the Wisdom of Solomon.

The good mother was opening up the possibility for the baby to live.

Well, Jesus is opening up the possibility for us to live.

Now, one might say: well, that's just what Jesus was doing, what about what we're doing?

Well, our way of sharing in what Jesus was doing is by giving thanks, that's what the Eucharist is.

We started to give thanks and we find ourselves able to share inside that self-giving.

Someone who is giving himself to us and enabling us to turn into givers of ourselves away to others, which is why I used the word 'sacrifice' very happily when I pray.

I'm thinking not of anything that I'm doing; I am thinking of what is being done for me and with what joy I am going to be turned into someone capable of doing that for others.

A final consideration: good people can't share in Jesus's sacrifice.

Only bad people can.

That's one of the really weird things about all this.

If you are a good person, you're probably shocked by the word 'sacrifice'.

If you're a bad person, you understand how sacrificial you usually are: how full of grift and cheating, treason, injustice, gossip, all awful things which are the day-to-day of our lives.

In other words, you understand that you are a fully-fledged sacrificer in your day-to-day life.

And then, into your midst comes someone who uses that language, that mechanism which we know only too well; turns it on its head, lets you free from all our involvement in all that stuff, and says: now let me take you somewhere else and make you a player of a different game.

That's why I think it's so important we remember that to be able to pray on the inside of our Lord's sacrifice is something which only sinners can do.