Love will sacrifice for justice: we are creating the beloved community

[The Great Open Dance]

The love of Jesus reveals the love of God as active. Love is much more than a feeling or a thing—love is something you do (1 John 3:16–18). To participate in love is to participate in God; to refuse to participate in love is to refuse to participate in God.

Too often, faced with exploitation, oppression, and injustice—with an insufficiently loving and unjust society—we do nothing. We adopt a stance of apathy to protect ourselves from their suffering while we continue to profit from their suffering through cheap food, cheap products, and cheap services.

Faith understands the hungry to be our family whom we allow to starve. It also recognizes that, by God’s own choice, God has no other hands than ours. But becoming the hands of God will not grant us the kind of life we tend to fantasize about, a life of ease, recognition, and wealth. Instead, to become the hands of God involves sacrifice. This sacrifice is not to God, in order to placate the divine wrath. This sacrifice is for God, in order to create a more compassionate world and increase the divine joy. To use more technical language, the sacrifice that God values is not propitiatory—it does not attempt to appease God or atone for sin. Instead, the sacrifice is creative—it participates in God by repairing society, sometimes at great personal risk. To challenge injustice is to pick up the cross.

Creative suffering that overcomes injustice reduces the needless suffering caused by injustice. One example of unjust, needless suffering is the countless animals that have been killed over the millennia as sacrifices to appease wrathful deities. Like most early religions, ancient Judaism practiced animal sacrifice to purify the nation of its sins, thus making atonement with God:

[Aaron] shall slaughter the goat of the purification offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the curtain and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it upon the cover and before the cover. Thus he shall make atonement for the sanctuary, because of the uncleannesses of the Israelites and because of their transgressions, all their sins . . . When he has finished atoning for the holy place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region, and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:15–22 NRSV)

Our modern minds may have several reactions to this passage that ancient minds would not. First, we may note that neither the goat that was killed nor the goat that was driven into the wilderness had done anything morally wrong, they being goats. Like the legendary whipping boys of medieval Europe, they bore the sins of another, though innocent themselves.

The scapegoating ritual reiterates one of Adam and Eve’s first abuses of their moral freedom: blame externalization. When Abba asks why they are clothed and if they had eaten fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. This instinct to assign responsibility for our own transgressions to others continues in the religiously sanctioned ritual slaughter of animals. Prior to the prescription of ritual slaughter, Abba had already revealed themselves to the Israelites as merciful and forgiving: “I AM! I am God, YHWH, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and faithfulness; faithful to the thousandth generation, forgiving injustice, rebellion, and sin” (Exodus 34:6–7a).

Today, one wonders why the ritualists ever thought that a God who identifies as merciful and forgiving would be propitiated by the slaughter of the innocent.

We may also wonder why the ritualists thought that God needed sacrifice, or any kind of transactional relationship with humanity, as if God had an empty belly that only priests could fill. But this idea of exchange between humanity and divinity, of a mutual relationship based on mutual need, permeated the ancient world. During sacrifices in Roman religion, the priest would pray, Do ut des, or “I give so that you may give.” The sponsor of the sacrifice did not give out of gratitude or generosity; the sponsor of the sacrifice gave to get. The ritual presumed that the gods would materially benefit from the sacrifice and respond with material benefits to the sponsor of the sacrifice. The ritual presumed a divine-human ledger sheet.

God is an overflowing fountain of life, not a bartering merchant. The Hebrew psalmists recognized the inadequacy of such a petty, transactional god and encouraged the practice of gratitude instead of propitiatory sacrifice. Writing in the voice of God, Psalm 50 declares: “I don’t need oxen from your stall, or goats from your folds, since every beast of the forest is mine already; I have cattle on a thousand hills! . . . Do I eat the flesh of oxen, or drink the blood of goats? Offer me a sacrifice of thanksgiving instead, and fulfill the vow you make to me!” (Psalm 50 –10, 13–14)

The uselessness of sacrificial animals’ suffering is not an insight of the modern animal rights movement. Anyone with an adequate concept of God as beyond neediness would see the needlessness of ritualized animal slaughter, as did Isaiah thousands of years ago: “Slaughtering an ox is like murdering a person; sacrificing a lamb is like breaking a dog’s neck” (Isaiah 66:3).

Apparently, God rejects human sacrifice as well as animal sacrifice. The progenitor of the Israelites, Abraham, had come within a hair’s breadth of sacrificing his son, Isaac, to YHWH. This story reassured the Israelites that they were as devoted to YHWH as their religious neighbors were to Molech and Baal, even though their religious neighbors (according to Hebrew testimony) offered human sacrifices. The Israelites, on the other hand, had been forbidden from offering human sacrifices to YHWH (see Deuteronomy 12:31; Leviticus 18:21; etc.)

Nevertheless, it appears that, overawed by the ritual devotion of human sacrifice, some Israelites succumbed to temptation and practiced it. The prophets and historians of Judaism roundly condemn these actions. Ezekiel laments, writing in the voice of God, “You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols” (Ezekiel 16:21). Jeremiah repeatedly condemns the Israelites for child sacrifice. Writing in the voice of God, three times he laments their backsliding into an abomination which God did not command or decree, a crime so foul it could never have entered the divine mind (Jeremiah 7:31; 19:5; 32:35). According to the biblical historians, both Ahaz and Manasseh, kings of Judah, sacrificed their sons in the fire and were punished by YHWH for doing so (2 Kings 16:1–4; 21:1–6; see also 1 Samuel 15:22–23). All agree that human sinfulness is not reduced by inflicting useless suffering; it is increased.

Violence inspired by religion is unholy. Love inspired by religion is holy. The sacrifice that pleases God is the creative sacrifice that moves history toward the Beloved Community. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 191-194)

For further reading, please see:

Mattson, Stephen. On Love and Mercy: A Social Justice Devotional. Harrisonburg, Virginia: MennoMedia, 2021.

Soelle, Dorothee. The Inward Road and the Way Back. Translated by David L. Scheidt. 1979. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Soelle, Dorothee. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.