Sacrifice!

Jesus often asked, “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of heaven?” It’s a common task of theology, apologetics and preaching, to search out new metaphors, analogies, to explain Christian truth, in ways that communicate to cultures far-removed from the first century.

One notion, unpopular these days, is ‘sacrifice’: the idea of someone dying for another, an innocent person assuming someone else’s suffering. It seems unfair, a case of cosmic child abuse, which has been used to justify oppression and exploitation, political and personal.

Instead, ‘love’ is advanced as the supreme ethic motivating God’s free salvation. Defending a traditional understanding, however, Tim Keller used parenthood, to illustrate how ‘sacrifice’ is necessary for expressing love – sleepless nights, nursing sick children. A prosaic, domestic, example, ill-suited to more intense periods. 

Recently, however, the courage of NHS workers, during the epidemic, has provided a contemporary instance of sacrifice; especially with the numbers dying, among those serving in Intensive Care Wards.

Here is a ‘Type’ of Christ, the Saviour-Healer. Typologies go backward and forward through time: from Old Testament Messianic Types, to contemporary instances of heroic service. But not all analogies are felicitous.

After WW1, many memorials used Jesus’ words to sanctify the war dead: “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life….” A travesty of his words, contributing to the deification and idolisation of the nation in that century.

Nurses, however, fit the messianic bill; giving, not taking, life. Nevertheless, there are differences. Every analogy has its limits, beyond which it can’t be forced. Steven Poole has written in The Guardian, about the shortcomings of ‘sacrifice’ as applied to health workers.

Unlike Christ, who took on his death willingly (Jn. 10.18), nurses did not sign up for this. Their deaths are unwilling, the product of inefficiency and injustice, in the supply or provision of protective equipment and virus-testing.

A similar, class-based, inequality is revealed by the government’s recent instructions to return to work. It is only middle-class, professional, people, who can work from home, virtually and remotely. The working class and poor have to work, without social distancing, and risk exposure to the virus.

This is reminiscent of, what Poole identifies as, pre-Christian, pagan, models of forced sacrifice; and is similar to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the Homo Sacer, the person without rights, whose life is forfeit to the interests of the state.

Contextual Theology often fails to value doctrine, favouring an immediate slide into activism. But we can also find in our context the resources for a revaluation of beliefs, not their rejection but a positive re-valuing, a fresh appreciation of value and relevance.

Perhaps Covid-19 provides an opportunity to rediscover the resonances of concepts previously undervalued. In the movie, The Godfather, Al Pacino’s character removes the family’s lawyer, explaining he was a peacetime not a wartime consigliere.

Metaphors useful in quieter times do not resonate in times of krisis, and that is what characterised the modern age, according to Barth and Tillich – how much more our Coronovirus era?