Photo by Rebecca Boyd
We are often caught wondering if sacrifice is worth it. It was worth it to God...and it is for me, even if I know this only as feebly as I do.
Sacrifice is always about something more.
...this reading seems helpful to me today, especially these observations regarding violence and the role of liturgy in calling us to something different than what our culture so often offers:
This anti-liturgy is met in the true liturgy of the Eucharist, where the body of the victim makes possible the creation of a new body which lives by resurrection hope and loves by a power not of its own making.
As Lent moves toward its conclusion and its purpose, Christians journey toward resurrection where we will enact the liturgy of hope not fear, of embrace not exclusion. This liturgy is "political" in the truest sense of the word: the gathered community, the polis, enacting a counter-story to the world's politics.
If our deepest Easter metaphors have mostly to do with butterflies, we will miss this. The Easter proclamation, as Fleming Rutledge has noted, "is not a cheerful message about longer hours of sunshine. It is a world-overturning announcement about the reorientation of our entire existence."
-- Debra Dean Murphy
This is why sacrifice was worth it then and remains worth it now...because sacrifice is more about what is gained, than what is lost.
