Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life

Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life

Copyright ©2022 Jeremy Davis

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Published by: Ancient Faith Publishing

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ISBN: 978-1-955890-16-8

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Illustration front cover image by Zdenek Sasek / Alamy Stock Vector.

Illustration back cover image by Morphart / Shutterstock.com.

Copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Davis

Copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Davis

Preface

Why have you picked up this book? As I look forward to its release, I ponder this question, which has a few layers.

First, why would anyone today pick up a book about sacrifice? Even to me, it seems like an eccentric choice of subject, not a discussion topic of the here and now. Although we all assume we know what sacrifice is and mention it surprisingly often, we don’t really want to ponder, preach, or pursue it. It feels like the anthem of a bygone era. In the middle of the last century, our forebears put everything on the line in order to save their nations from economic depression and war. Today, in the wake of protracted and senseless wars and in the bosom of a prolonged prosperity, sacrifice strikes many of us as a frightening and perplexing predicament to be avoided. Yet we can’t seem to shake the habit; the word keeps rolling off our tongues, and its depictions keep popping up in literature, art, and entertainment. Sacrifice haunts us now, pulling our attention even as we push back in apprehension and perplexity.

Obviously, you do have a reason for picking up this book. Is it that, as a Christian, you are haunted by sacrifice in a special way? In its origins, core beliefs, and practices, Christianity is a religion of sacrifice. Our Faith’s roots are wrapped around a great number of Old Testament sacrifices, such as King Solomon’s sacrifice of 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep at the dedication of the temple (3 Kin. 8:62, 63 [1 Kin. 8:63, 64]). For us today, that’s an unimaginable and (honestly) horrific

amount of blood shed to honor God. And this wasn’t just a one-off; animals were regularly killed in God’s presence at the temple, and gallons of their blood was thrown against the side of His altar.

In the New Testament, Christ saved us by sacrificing Himself on the Cross. The blood that poured from His wounds was the means of our atonement, justification, redemption, reconciliation, purification, boldness before God, sanctification, cleansing and liberation from sin, and victory over Satan (Rom. 3:25; 5:9; Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:20; Heb. 9:14; 10:19; 13:12; 1 John 1:7; Rev. 1:5; 12:11). We are sprinkled with His blood (1 Pet. 1:2), and we drink His blood in Holy Communion.

That’s a lot of blood, and it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Why did God command that His worship be accomplished through bloodshed in the Old Testament? Why was it necessary for His own Son to die cruelly in order to save us? It’s often difficult to find answers to these questions, and the answers some preachers and theologians provide are not very satisfying. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8), why does He find all this bloodshed so necessary?

As if this biblical blood weren’t perplexing enough, God’s sacrificial demands did not end with Christ. In the New Testament, we are called upon to sacrifice our bodies through obedience, our possessions through charity, and our time and words through worship (Rom. 12:1; Heb. 13:15, 16). We may even have to sacrifice our own blood through martyrdom (see Phil. 2:17). How can we comprehend this unending and universal call to sacrifice, let alone motivate ourselves to fulfill it? And how can we explain to nonbelievers what we ourselves do not understand or practice?

You’ll find surprising answers in this book. You’ll learn that sacrifice had a very different significance for ancient people than it does for us today. You’ll hear how it drifted away from this ancient significance into a fundamentally different meaning in our modern world. You’ll

discover how Old Testament sacrifices were gifts from the heart, only tangentially related to killing and death. You’ll see in Christ’s Cross the ultimate gift that ushers us into communion with God. And you’ll find inspiration to offer your own gifts alongside Christ’s, inviting God into your life.

While modern historians and anthropologists will provide helpful insights at the outset of our journey, our main guides will be the Bible and the Church Fathers. We will give special attention to the Fathers of the first five centuries, who wrote when the ancient practice of sacrifice was within living memory and whose writings therefore reflect its significance to those ancient practitioners. Although they rarely define sacrifice or elaborate on its general significance, the way they speak about sacrifices gives us a window into their ancient perspective.

For this subject, our foremost source is St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 370–444), who wrote extensively about the Old Testament sacrifices and their fulfillment in the Cross of Christ and the sacrifices Christians are called to make. His writings provide by far the most teaching on sacrifice by any Church Father. Two of his earliest major works— On Worship in Spirit and Truth and the Glaphyra, on the Pentateuch—are entirely concerned with explaining the sacrifices and other practices of the Mosaic Covenant and interpreting them as prophetic images (or types) of Christ and Christian life. Cyril’s commentaries on the Gospels of Luke and John return to this subject time and again, not to mention his commentaries on Isaiah and the epistles of Paul. I cannot think of another Church Father who wrote so much about sacrifice. Cyril provides an invaluable, comprehensive treatment of the subject that, in harmony with what we find in the other Fathers, preserves for us an authentically ancient and Christian perspective.

Another important source for our study will be the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (first century). His pre-Christian

explanations of Old Testament sacrifices are as extensive as Cyril’s, and they provide valuable evidence for the ancient Jewish understanding of the meaning of sacrifice.

In the end, these voices from the past show us that sacrifice is not about bloodshed but about bonding, not about loss but about love, not about suffering but about self-giving. It is a way of drawing near to God and entering into communion with Him—a welcoming gift, inviting Him into our lives.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Greek are mine (including biblical and patristic texts). Translations of the Old Testament are from the Septuagint text, and all Old Testament chapter and verse citations are according to the Septuagint numbering (as used in the Orthodox Study Bible); where there is a different numbering in the Hebrew text (that is, the Masoretic text, used as the basis of some other versions of the Bible), this follows in parentheses or brackets. Where I know of a published translation of a patristic text, I have included a supplementary citation in the format, “Compare trans. in . . .” or “Compare ’s trans. . . . ,” so that you can check the context and see another translator’s rendering of the passage.

I am grateful for the freedom to pursue this research while serving at St. Elijah Antiochian Orthodox Church (Oklahoma City) and Holy Ascension Antiochian Orthodox Church (Norman, Oklahoma). I want to thank my fellow clergy for their support along the way: His Grace, Bishop BASIL (Essey), Father Constantine Nasr, Father John Salem, and Deacon Ezra Ham. I also want to thank all those who attended my parish classes on sacrifice for their questions and suggestions, which helped to guide my research. I am especially grateful to all those who read through early drafts of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback that helped me refine the book:

Harriett Anderson, Shawn Ashley, Julie Barnes, Candace Bowling, Dr. David Bukenhofer, Susan Byers, Ashley Charette, Jeannine Crouch, Victoria Funk, Tom Hoyt, Jane Krawtzow, Steffany Lei, Katy Powers, Donna Tollison, Sara Gae and Greg Waters, Lee Webb, and others. Many thanks also to my editor, Katherine Hyde, and all the team at Ancient Faith.

Finally, glory to God for all things!

Abbreviations

Collections of Patristic Texts

ANF = Ante-Nicene Fathers. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Revised by A. Cleveland Coxe. American Edition. 10 vols. 1885–97. Reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.

NPNF1 = Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series. Edited by Philip Schaff. American Edition. 14 vols. 1886–89. Reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.

NPNF 2 = Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. American Edition. 14 vols. 1890–1900. Reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.

PG = Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca . Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–86.

Copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Davis

Our Cloud Was Their Silver Lining

We use the word sacrifice often, but without much thought, like Vizzini’s exclamations of “Inconceivable!” in the movie The Princess Bride . We seem to be sacrificing all the time: our lives, freedom, friendships, happiness, wealth, family, work, dreams, pursuits, and so forth. Yet at the outset of this book, Inigo Montoya’s observation is apropos: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Before we consider what sacrifice really means, let’s reflect a bit on what we think it means. How do we commonly use this word today, and what connotations does it bear? Today the word is used in three semantic domains: ritual, secular, and theological. In each of these domains, it carries different connotations and evokes different feelings. As all these modern associations accumulate, sacrifice takes shape as a cloud of gloom that threatens to darken our worldview.

Ritual sacrifice is a religious practice, often involving the killing of an animal in service of a supernatural being. For most people today, this is an exotic and incomprehensible phenomenon associated with distant history and remote cultures. For Jews and Christians, the idea

of ritual sacrifice might feel more familiar from its presence in the Bible, but its actual practice remains strange. While it might intrigue us with its aura of the bizarre and barbaric, it’s hard to imagine it happening in our own neighborhoods. Consider how neighbors reacted when practitioners of the Cuban Orisha religion wanted to sacrifice animals in the United States! Local governments and animal-rights groups have carried out a decades-long effort to prevent them, in spite of the Constitution’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion.1

This discomfort is compounded by the fact that behind the animal’s shed blood and ended life lurks a terror that captures our imagination: human sacrifice. This fear is reflected back to us in television and movies, where human sacrifice is portrayed much more often than animal sacrifice. It constitutes the beating heart (forgive the pun) of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the climax of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in which Emperor Palpatine urges Rey to “make the sacrifice” by striking him down. In actuality, human sacrifice has been a rare practice, embraced by only a few historic cultures (e.g., the Aztecs) and otherwise limited to abhorrent anomalies. Nevertheless, it looms over our imagination and haunts our use of the word sacrifice in all kinds of contexts.

In the end, we equate ritual sacrifice with ritual killing—an act of violence cloaked in religion. Understandably, then, we respond to it viscerally, with shock, fear, and outrage. We might be intrigued by cinematic or literary portrayals, but we are horrified by the real thing.

Unlike exotic ritual sacrifice, secular metaphors of sacrifice are commonplace. In nonreligious contexts, sacrifice describes a loss, often for the sake of gaining something else. Secular sacrifices can be voluntary

1 Schmidt, “Blood Sacrifice,” 205–8.

or involuntary, and their significance spans a continuum from noble renunciations to meaningless losses to pernicious bargains.

We sometimes use sacrifice to describe a noble renunciation— giving up life, relationships, property, or pursuits for the benefit of others. We honor soldiers sacrificing their lives for our freedom or parents sacrificing their careers for their children’s care. When we want others to appreciate us, we tout our own self-denial as a sacrifice, imbuing it with a sheen of virtue. We may even aspire to make truly great sacrifices ourselves, as a vague and remote possibility. Truth be told, however, most of us are reluctant to allow such sacrifices to drift down from our lofty ideals into our real lives. Even when we can bring ourselves to make noble sacrifices, it is often from a sense of duty and with a twinge of regret. The most heroic soldiers would rather not make the ultimate sacrifice if they could avoid it.

Today, in fact, we may question the very idea of noble sacrifice. After the heyday of noble secular sacrifice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 2 the mounting experience of senseless suffering throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has given us a more jaded perspective. As a result, the word sacrifice is increasingly used to describe a pernicious bargain that harms oneself or others. This ironic sense of sacrifice is expressed in statements like these: “He sacrificed his family for the sake of his career,” or “The country’s leaders sacrificed soldiers’ lives on the altar of their pride.” A May 26, 2020, headline on CNN.com read, “The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals.” We condemn such sacrifices as the fruit of misplaced values naively or cynically pursued. Yet we also have a sense that even well-intentioned sacrifices can be revealed as harmful in hindsight, when unforeseen outcomes tarnish their nobility.

2 See Zachhuber, “Modern Discourse on Sacrifice,” 19–24, 27.

And thus a growing cynicism invites the question: Is sacrifice ever worthwhile?3

Between noble and pernicious sacrifices lies a no-man’s-land of meaningless ones. These are pointless losses—specifically, violence endured with no greater good to justify it, not even an illusory good. By designating such losses as sacrifices, we honor or valorize them, yet without identifying any honorable or valorous purpose in them. Thus, we now use certain ancient sacrificial terms to ennoble innocent sufferers of violence.

A pervasive example is the word victim . Its root, victima , is Latin for “an animal offered in sacrifice”; it was a specifically sacrificial term. It is only “since the eighteenth century, [that] the usage of victima for any kind of ‘victim’ became popular in European languages: instances of unjust and cruel human suffering were thus inscribed into a sacrificial logic.”4 Another example is holocaust , from the Greek word for a whole-burnt offering. Today, you can’t read that word without remembering those Jews and others who were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

Though these labels are intended to ennoble innocent sufferers, their ennoblement is precarious. They are described as sacrifices because of the loss inflicted on them, yet without any reference to the noble aims that ostensibly make sacrifices meaningful. They may in fact demonstrate nobility in their response to suffering, but our use of these terms is not dependent on that. Since it has thus become such a hollow term of praise, victimhood is now sometimes even declared ironically, as a suggestion that such ennoblement is undeserved: “He’s just playing the victim.”

Secular metaphors of sacrifice, then, are widespread and varied in our cultural discourse. Whether noble, pernicious, or meaningless,

3 For example, see a feminist critique of sacrifice in Anderson, “SelfDestructive ‘Love,’” 29–47.

4 Zachhuber, “Modern Discourse on Sacrifice,” 27.

Copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Davis All Rights Reserved.

by Ancient Faith Publishing.

however, all these metaphors center on loss, and therefore they leave us with a sense of unease. Although we honor noble sacrifices in the abstract, we are reluctant to make them ourselves. We condemn pernicious bargains as delusional and destructive. We fear the emptiness of meaningless sacrifices. Finally, sacrifice has another metaphorical use today: it is a key term in Christian theology. This term’s prominence in our theology reflects its prominence in the Bible. In the Old Testament, we find God commanding continuous ritual sacrifice by the people of Israel as the heart of their worship (Ex. 29:38). In the New Testament, we hear that sacrifice is the heart of the gospel: “Christ loved us and gave Himself up for our sakes as an offering and sacrifice to God, producing a pleasant aroma” (Eph. 5:2). We also hear that being a Christian requires us to sacrifice our own bodies: “In view of the mercies of God, I exhort you, brethren, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God that is holy and pleasing, as your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). The New Testament refers to many Christian practices as sacrifices: worship, prayer, the Eucharist, obedience to God, giving to the poor, materially supporting God’s ministers, and even evangelism (more on this in Part IV). This sacrificial way of speaking was continued by the Church Fathers and in our ancient Orthodox Christian hymns.

But how do you honestly feel when sacrifice is preached from the pulpit or taught in religious classes? How do non-Christians feel when we talk about the Lamb sacrificed on the Cross? Since sacrifice has such negative connotations, it’s no wonder if we shy away from it, however deeply it is embedded in our Christian tradition. When it comes to it, we will honor Christ’s noble sacrifice because we’re supposed to. Yet it is growing harder to understand why God would use a sacrifice to save the human race and why sacrifice should be part of

our own lives. There may even be a temptation to eliminate sacrifice from our theology, putting it down like some family dog gone incurably rabid.

Yet, as inheritors of “the Faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), we aren’t allowed to rebrand the Christian message. We’ve received it, and our task is to learn it and live it—sacrifice and all. But how can we do that with heartfelt integrity if we have such discomfort and perplexity about sacrifice? Moreover, how can we invite others to embrace sacrifice if it finds no home in our own hearts?

This dilemma is like some monster hidden in our closet. While we try to ignore it, it remains lurking in the recesses of our mind. It is a threatening presence just out of sight. Yet, when we do steel our nerves, grab a flashlight, and open wide the biblical text, we find no actual monster there.

In the Bible, sacrifice is devoid of the reluctance, regret, fear, futility, and general negativity we associate with it. On the contrary, the Psalms describe it as an expression of joy:

And now, behold, [the Lord] has lifted my head above my enemies; I went around and sacrificed in His tabernacle a sacrifice of shouting; I will sing and play the harp for the Lord. (26:6 [27:6])

I will willingly sacrifice to You; I will praise Your name, O Lord, because it is good. (53:8 [54:6])

Let them praise the Lord for His mercies and His wonderful works for the sons of men, and let them sacrifice to Him a sacrifice of praise, and let them proclaim His works with great joy. (106:21, 22

[107:21, 22])

Copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Davis All Rights Reserved. Published by Ancient Faith Publishing.

In the Psalms, sacrifice was offered not reluctantly but willingly, not regretfully but with joyful shouting and singing. It was not fearfully avoided but boisterously proclaimed. It was inspired not by drudgery and duty but by love for God.

In Genesis, the patriarchs exhibited the same joy when they built altars and offered sacrifices. They did so as a spontaneous expression of gratitude. After God saved Noah from the Flood, he “built an altar to God and took some of each kind of clean animal and offered them as whole-burnt offerings upon the altar” (8:20). In gratitude for God’s promises, Abraham built altars in Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron (12:7, 8; 13:18). When God reiterated these promises to Isaac, the latter built an altar at the Well of the Oath (26:25). Jacob built an altar in Bethel to commemorate how God reiterated the same promises to him and protected him from Esau’s vengeance (35:1–7; see 27:41— 28:22). Even though sacrifice is not explicitly mentioned in some of these passages, the patriarchs’ construction of altars implies it: the main word for “altar” in the Greek Old Testament is thysiastērion, “place or implement for sacrifice,” from thysiazō, “sacrifice”;5 people built altars for the sake of performing this ritual.

The Bible’s most curious reference to sacrifice is found in Proverbs. It is part of a warning to young men about an adulteress’s seduction:

Taking hold of him, she kisses him, and with shameless face she speaks to him:

“I have a sacrifice of peace; today I am repaying my vows.

For this reason, I came out to meet you; desiring your face, I found you.” (7:13–15)

5 The suffix -tērion can indicate a place for a particular purpose (e.g., dikastērion , “court of law,” from dikazō, “act as a judge”) or a tool for a particular purpose (e.g., onychistērion , “knife or scissors for cutting nails,” from onychizō, “cut the finger- or toenails”).

Here, talk of sacrifice is the sequel to a shameless kiss. It is the pretext for a romantic interlude. It is the beginning of the “lip snares” by which this woman draws a poor fool toward spiritual shipwreck (7:21).

The specific sacrifice mentioned by the adulteress is a votive offering—that is, a sacrifice in fulfillment of a vow, as an expression of gratitude for divine favor. Such offerings were a subset of the peace offering (or “sacrifice of peace,” in the quote above), a type of Jewish sacrifice that expressed joy in God’s blessings. In these joyful sacrifices, large portions of the offered animal’s meat were returned to the offerer, cooked, and then eaten by him and his companions. (For more on Jewish peace offerings, see chapter 6.) These sacrifices were, therefore, occasions for feasting—eating and drinking in a celebratory atmosphere.

In fact, sacrifice was intimately related to merrymaking throughout the ancient world. On the wine vessels used at pagan Greek banquets, sacrifice was employed as a symbol of celebration, joy, and revelry (even carousing). 6 For the Greek philosopher Plato, sacrifice was part of a life of ease that might degenerate into profligacy, as he writes in the Laws:

Naturally, fear came upon me as I contemplated what one is to do for such a city [as Athens], where young men and women are well fed yet free from heavy and menial labors (which best quench willfulness), and where sacrifices, feasts, and dances are everyone’s main concern throughout their lives. How, in this city, will they possibly abstain from the desires that too often cast many to the lowest depths, . . . [especially] sexual desires?

6 Peirce, “Death, Revelry, and Thysia ,” 240–47.

In another of Plato’s works, “sacrifices and songs” are equated with “pleasures and feasts,” and sacrifice is a “childish pastime of pleasures.” 7

For the adulteress, her young man, and the readers of Proverbs, then, a “sacrifice of peace” was nearly synonymous with a party. This association was so automatic that no explanation was offered or needed. It’s as if she is saying with a wink: Come and celebrate with me, and who knows what might follow? But citing the sacrifice does add something to a mere party invitation: a veneer of piety. Here the religious pretext provides just enough of a fig leaf to obscure the invitation’s coarseness. It’s all a randy fool needs to justify himself in following another man’s wife into her home.

Can you imagine someone today using sacrifice as a pickup line? It’s truly inconceivable! Yet here is someone in the Bible doing precisely that. Whereas we are repelled by sacrifice, biblical people were attracted to it. We see it as drudgery; they saw it as fun. Today, only the greatest saints and heroes want to do it; in ancient times, even sinners and wastrels did.

In the ancient world, sacrifice exuded a fragrance of exuberant joy, spontaneous gratitude, and even seductive charm; today it reeks of violence and suffering. No longer a silver lining, it is now a cloud. What has changed? Where did today’s woeful idea of sacrifice come from, and does it make any sense for us to maintain this gloomy view?

7 Plato, Laws 835d–36b; Republic 364b–c, 364e–65a. See also Laws 803e.