Holy Thursday 2023

Homily: A Sacrifice unto Death

God was so violently angry at us that only the brutal death of his son could appease that anger.

OR

God was so passionately in love with us that only the freely offered death of his son could demonstrate the depth of that love.

What we have here is what we might call two fundamental understandings of sacrifice often referred to as Atonement Theologies. And if you look about you you’ll find both of these theologies operative in both our world and Church today. So with that in mind which of these two modes of sacrifice, would you say, most animates your own life and your life of faith?

Both of these forms of Atonement require a sacrifice unto death, but with a difference, a very important difference, the first is a sacrifice that ends in death, with death as its final result. The second is a sacrifice that actually faces down death with life as its final result.

And if we reflect further on these sacrificial mindsets we might also discover that they really determine a lot about who we think Jesus is and how we each live out our faith day to day.

In regards to Jesus, the first form of sacrifice, which I will call the Angry God Sacrifice reduces Jesus to a mere puppet controlled by a petulant God whose wrath was so fierce that Jesus had to be sacrificed unto death in order to quell the divine rage.

But in the second form of sacrifice, which I will call the Loving God Sacrifice, Jesus is a free human being who freely chooses to die because he knows death is not the end but rather the portal to deeper life, so driven by divine love he gives his life freely away.

So then, what about us? How might the Angry God sacrificial mindset seep into and animate our own lives and our lives of faith? Well, in this context, faith becomes a never-ending death-dance between fear and security. The greater the fear of a vengeful God the greater the need for security. So fear drives us to buy our guns, bolt our doors, bow down in worship at the altar of legalism, and build ever bigger barriers against the other, or worse get caught up in a continual scapegoating cycle where we keep killing the other, whoever the other may be, as a desperate attempt to protect our illusion of security. It’s a world where gates are locked, paths narrowed, doors shut and exclusion is justified, over and over again.

But how might the Loving God sacrificial mindset seep into and animate our own lives and our lives of faith? Well, in this context, we are compelled to not only wash the feet of our brothers and sisters, but their hands and heads as well! We bend down freely in humble service before the other, whoever the other may be, because if death is not the end then we’ve got nothing to lose. We choose to live outside the walls, as it were. We live outside the “camps” where the drive for security flourishes. We extend the length of our banquet tables always adding more place settings and we love unto an inclusivity that is shocking, uncomfortable and even destabilizing but it is the inclusivity at the very heart of the life of Christ.

So which of these sacrificial mindsets rule our own lives? I would suggest one of the most powerful idols of our culture currently is the Idol of Security. But I want to be careful here. I’m not talking about the basic human need for security, the basic need to feel safe. People have a basic right to feel safe. And we each bear some responsibility to help keep our brothers and sisters safe. But security, in the context of love, means I learn to feel fundamentally safe in God alone so I am free to sacrifice in love the life I’ve been given. I live, as St. Benedict might say, with an evermore expanding and inclusive heart. While security in the context of fear means Security becomes my God and I will stop at nothing to keep that Stone God firmly ensconced on my altar of exclusivity.

We live in a world where people are making sacrifices unto death every day. Which unfortunately, too often means, sacrifices made in honor of death, sacrifices that only end in death. We too must make sacrifices unto death, but with LIFE as the end and LOVE as our means.

This Holy Thursday we recall the sacrifice of Christ as a relentlessly free gift of self given out of love. So as we share in this Eucharistic meal let us ask: What mode of sacrifice most animates my life and my life of faith? May we, who are the Body of Christ, find out own hearts ever-expanding and extravagantly inclusive, by sacrifices animated by love.