Quotes about Sacrifice

He might have been a wafer in the hands Of priests this day, or music from the lips: Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips Away from church, shakes off our linen bands To don his apron with a nurse: he grips And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

Holiness is multidimensional.

we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

All this talk of "victory" means what it means because, as we have seen, on the cross Jesus died for our sins; the blood of the new covenant was shed for the forgiveness of sins. Sins, to say it once more, were the chains by which the dark powers had enslaved the humans who had worshipped them. Once sins were forgiven on the cross, the chains were snapped; victory was won. This opens up several vistas on the church's mission.

Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross.

This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of "atonement," there are thousands who will say, with Paul, "The son of God loved me and gave himself for me"—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world.

In most popular Christianity, "heaven" (and "fellowship with God" in the present) is the goal, and "sin" (bad behavior, deserving punishment) is the problem. A Platonized goal and a moralizing diagnosis—and together they lead, as I have been suggesting, to a paganized "solution" in which an angry divinity is pacified by human sacrifice.

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.

Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and many others speak of dying for the law, for one's country, one's friends, one's family, even for the emperor.