Chapter 1: 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.

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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.

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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 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. 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, 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.

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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?

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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])

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)

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?

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.

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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?

1 Schmidt, “Blood Sacrifice,” 205–8.

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

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

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

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”).

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

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

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

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