Our shared Christian heritage has woven the idea of sacrifice into the tapestry of our souls. If you were born into western culture (Europe, the Americas, and Australia), then this is true of you too whether you are a church-goer or not. After the Emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire 1700 years ago, the Roman Church gradually became the holder and transmitter of all wisdom and all literacy. Very few people outside of the Church and the royal courts could read. The only wisdom that the average person was exposed to came from the local priest, who competed only with folklore. Writings and ideas that contradicted or questioned Christian teaching were rigidly suppressed. Both the authors of alternate theologies and their books were burned and forgotten. Christianity made itself into the one and only choice. It is our only inheritance from the distant past.
All of western thought is saturated with the idea that the sacrifices of the God-man Jesus for humankind was history’s most powerful gesture of profound goodness. His biggest sacrifice for us, as taught by the Church, was to accept the mystical transference of all our sinful guilt to Himself. His endurance of a horrible death penalty was a symbolic punishment for our - not His - sins. The Bible and the Church were assembled at Constantine’s order. They taught that Jesus made many sacrifices during his life: healing illnesses without compensation, helping the poor with no expectation of reward, astounding witnesses with miracles, living a life of self-imposed poverty, selflessly doing good deeds, and teaching His wisdom to all who asked for it. He only asked that we love one another as He loved us. He commanded us to be kind and supportive of each other, giving to the poor, nursing the sick, and living a life of peace while awaiting the end of time and the beginning of immortality.
“The concept of self-sacrifice and martyrs are central to Christianity. Often found in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity is the idea of joining one's own sufferings to the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. Thus one can ‘offer up’ involuntary suffering such as illness, or purposefully embrace suffering in acts of penance such as fasting. Some Protestants criticize this as a denial of the all-sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice, but it finds support in St. Paul: ‘Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.’” - Wikipedia article.
Imitate Christ, we were told, and be good like Him. In the great classic of Christian meditation, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas À Kempis wrote, “It is good for us to have trials and troubles at times, for they often remind us that we are on probation and ought not to hope in any worldly thing. It is good for us sometimes to suffer contradiction, to be misjudged by men even though we do well and mean well. These things help us to be humble and shield us from vainglory. When to all outward appearances men give us no credit, when they do not think well of us, then we are more inclined to seek God Who sees our hearts.”
Our reward for compliance to these instructions, according to Christian teaching, is personal immortality accompanied by endless happiness - no small thing. The flip side of His message was that indifference to or defiance of His teaching would result in a horrible kind or immortality; one in which we would suffer the most acute possible pain endlessly - also no small thing.
To imitate Jesus’ example, we were required to sacrifice too. To be like Jesus, we had to be meek rather than aggressive, humble rather than arrogant, kind rather than brutal, loving rather than indifferent, and long-suffering rather than complaining - as He was. We had to put the needs of others above our own needs. We had to sacrifice ourselves for the good of the Church, the community, the state, and our own souls. And, we were constantly reminded, God was watching the progress of our lives and taking detailed notes, which are stored in our permanent records for scrutiny on Judgment Day. God even heard our thoughts, as if we were speaking them out loud, whether our silent prayers or our thoughts about college cheerleaders. This put considerable pressure on us to internalize the values that Jesus exhibited in the Gospels, so as to purify our spirits and so as to protect ourselves from God’s disapproval. Christians struggled mightily to tame the beast within each of their souls, knowing that God observed every act and heard every thought. The suffering that often accompanied a sacrifice became a kind of goodness. It was a painful but useful purification of the spirit, cleansing it of the impurities of sin like a painful medical treatment that restores health. There were occasions long ago, when Christians were fed to the lions, that Christians in the audience would voluntarily jump from the seating area into the arena, but they did not try to rescue their brothers and sisters in the spirit as we would expect. Instead, they were eager to suffer an agonizing death alongside their brothers and sisters, eager to be counted among the martyrs and saints (like some modern day Muslims), and eager to reach Heaven sooner. A few modern Christians - admittedly unusual ones - have themselves nailed to a cross on Good Friday or crawl many miles to a religious shrine. Catholic priests still assign little punishments for the faithful to endure, like chanting a particular prayer a certain number of times, to compensate God for the offense of continued sinfulness. Sacrifice and suffering became a kind of payment to God in the only coin he accepted: obedience, devotion, and suffering.
Saint Ignatius, wrote from his prison, “May I enjoy the wild beasts that are prepared for me; and I pray they may be found eager to rush upon me, which also I will entice to devour me speedily, and not deal with me as with some, whom, out of fear, they have not touched. But if they be unwilling to assail me, I will compel them to do so. Pardon me [in this]: I know what is for my benefit. Now I begin to be a disciple. And let no one, of things visible or invisible, envy me that I should attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.” His prayer was answered.
You will have to plumb your own mind to discover how much you confuse sacrifice with goodness. My advice to you is to be very thoughtful about who and what you will sacrifice yourself for. Our political leaders praise our soldiers in Iraq for their sacrifices, but we notice that their own children are not on the battlefields. Our corporate leaders praise our sacrifices when we work long late hours, neglecting our families to keep our noses to the grindstone, but they do not sacrifice anything themselves. In fact, they reward themselves with paychecks hundreds of times larger than our own. The leaders of our churches ride in stretch limos to the revival, where they ask us to sacrifice our money and time to the benefit of their TV programs, their wardrobes, and their mansions. Con artists have learned to carry a Bible.
In short, our leaders have learned to take advantage of our sacrificial inner conditioning. They articulate their demands as a call to sacrifice, and we respond as we have been programmed to respond. Sacrifice is good in our minds; selfishness is bad. To refuse to sacrifice is to refuse to be a good person. We believe that we should think of others, not ourselves. Our leaders, who think of themselves rather than others, take note of this weakness in our characters and exploit it.
If you choose to sacrifice your own interests for something or someone dear to you, then do so because you feel a need to do it. Sacrifice is a choice, not a virtue. Do not be shamed or cornered into making a sacrifice that is not one that you choose but one that is chosen for you - usually by someone who will personally benefit by your sacrifice, who is exploiting you, or who conning you.
That said, we must acknowledge the many wonderful actions of the many Christian churches and individual Christians. Their sacrifices were not pointless or meaningless, in my opinion. They have fed the poor, nursed the sick, taught the young, counseled the despondent, sheltered the homeless, clothed the poor, protected the weak, adopted the orphan, housed travelers, and held the hand of the dying for twenty long centuries.
They built cathedrals, universities, libraries, orphanages, kitchens, hospitals, monasteries, and homes for single pregnant girls. They composed hymns, wrote books of profound philosophy, sang in choirs, dusted pews, mopped cathedral floors, cooked for church picnics, commissioned our greatest works of art, defied Communist dictators, ironed the priest’s clothes, and marched for peace.
Every day, for more than seven hundred thousand days, one Christian has given Holy Communion to the other, beginning with the day Jesus broke bread and shared it among his disciples - an unbroken chain of twenty-five generations. Magnificent Christian cathedrals whose construction was begun by a great-grandfather were finished by his great-grandson.
That said, we must also acknowledge that Christianity’s leadership has often been brutal and corrupt. Christian leaders persecuted and slaughtered believers of other religions, launched their many Crusades, burned heretics at the stake, imprisoned those who disagreed with them, fleeced their congregations, embezzled Church funds, molested altar boys, and lived like kings while never noticing their own hypocrisy - as a Machiavellian would expect from any group of human apes. The best Christians have always been in the pews, not in the pulpit or on the throne. Positions of status and power - even religious ones - attract both weak and strong personalities.
Leo X was pope when Machiavelli wrote The Prince. “When he became Pope, Leo X is reported to have said to his brother Giuliano: ‘Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.’ The Venetian ambassador who related this of him was not unbiased, nor was he in Rome at the time, nevertheless the phrase illustrates fairly the Pope's pleasure-loving nature and the lack of seriousness that characterized him. And enjoy he did, traveling around Rome at the head of a lavish parade featuring panthers, jesters, and Hanno, a white elephant.” It was this Pope that Martin Luther defied, beginning the Protestant Reformation and the separation of Christians into hundreds of sects.