We’re entering the second week of our Lenten message series on sacrifice. Our first reading from the book of Genesis, Chapter 22, gives us a powerful and strange story. The Lord said to Abraham “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, … offer him up as a holocaust.” The Lord asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story has a happy ending, and in my homily this weekend, I’ll talk about its meaning. But if you are like me, you wondered why this even happened. Why would the true and living God even ask for this sacrifice?

Here are two important facts. First fact: Human sacrifice (some human beings ritually killing another human being as part of religious worship) has been widely practiced in human history; that’s the sad truth. Second fact: The children of Abraham (the ancient Israelites and the Jews) denounced human sacrifice; that’s the strange truth. Strange, because so many nations around them practiced human sacrifice. Why did Abraham’s children get right what others got so wrong?

One reason was the Lord’s command to them through Moses, forbidding human sacrifice. The Lord said: “You shall not offer any of your offspring for immolation to Molech” and “When you come into the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abominations of the nations there. Let there not be found among you anyone who causes their son or daughter to pass through the fire” (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 18:9-10; Molech was an ancient false god famous for accepting human sacrifice).

But another reason is older than the Lord’s command to Moses and goes back to his father in faith, Abraham, and the events of Genesis 22. Those events taught the Israelites that the one true God, the Lord God, did not ask for human sacrifice and did not accept human sacrifice.

Like some other terrible lies, human sacrifice twisted the truth. It was true that sacrifice offered something to God as a way to offer ourselves to God. But human sacrifice twisted that truth with terrible lies. There was the lie that we needed to wring, or force, blessings from God by doing something terrible and costly to command His attention. There was the lie that we could show God in worship that we loved Him most of all by killing a human being dear to us.

When the angel stopped Abraham from killing Isaac, the Lord stamped the Israelites’ memories forever. That same memory, handed down to their descendants, has shaped their culture and worship for almost over 35 centuries. The Lord taught them that He did not ask for and did not accept human sacrifice. 

God did not ask for human sacrifice to show love or faith, for Abraham had the greatest love and faith of anyone up to that point, and God stopped Abraham from offering human sacrifice. God did not accept human sacrifice in return for attention or favor, for God greatly favored Abraham, and watched over all his days, and God refused to take the offering of Abraham’s son. The Lord showed that He was not like the false gods of the neighboring nations, and that the Israelites should also worship differently than those nations.

When the Son of God came, He also rejected the lies of human sacrifice, the same lies which centuries before He and the Father and the Holy Spirit had condemned. As He stopped the sacrifice of Isaac, so also the Son of God’s sacrifice did not follow the false path of human sacrifice. Jesus did not inflict death on anyone else or on Himself. Instead, He spoke the truth and He loved, though his truth and love met with opposition to the point of murder. As they killed Him, He prayed for them: “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). Nor did Jesus attempt to wring blessings from God by doing something terrible and costly. Instead, he knew that His Father always heard Him, and that it was His Father’s will to seek and save the lost (John

Jesus also told us that his Father loves us as the Father loved Him (Matthew 6:8; John 3:16, 16:27). Jesus now asks us to offer sacrifice as He did, and with Him in the Eucharist. From Jesus, we learn the true path of sacrifice: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. … No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 13:35, 15:13). So Saint Paul tells us “by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:1-2)

May God help us by this Lent to grow more like Christ our Sacrifice, and may God bless you.