“Pulling an all-nighter” is, in our cultural memory, a kind of academic rite of passage. Maybe they have a new term for it now, but surely the idea will remain as long as there are assignments to do and people prone to procrastination. Despite the fact that you’ve known about the paper for a few weeks, you just haven’t found the time to work on it, so you stay up deep into the night while everyone else sleeps, staring at the computer screen and keeping yourself awake with candy or energy drinks or whatever.
I know how often this happened in my teaching days, both high school and college, because I’d see the time stamp of paper submissions at 3 A.M., 4 A.M., etc. Every time that happened, I’d ask: why didn’t you just ask for an extension? Or, at the very least, why didn’t you just take the lower grade for turning it in a day late? Chances are pretty good that what you produce at 3 A.M. isn’t going to justify the sacrifice of a night’s sleep.
As a preacher, I’ve had to learn this, too: burning the midnight oil on Saturday trying to produce some kind of homiletical magnum opus is rarely as edifying for my soul, or yours, as good rest.
We see these kinds of sacrifices elsewhere. Sometimes, maybe, they’re worth it, sometimes not. We’ve all met the person who basically sacrifices every single free moment for a sport or a hobby or some other good thing. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice if it’s what you really love. But in other cases, there’s a conscious sacrifice—I’m giving up this time, or freedom, or money I could spend elsewhere—to invest in this business, or to have a chance at playing college football or whatever. But there’s no guarantee—in fact sometimes the odds aren’t all that good—that such sacrifices will bring clear results.
Those examples are making sacrifices for good things. I’m sure we can all think about the sacrifices for things a little farther down the hierarchy of goodness. Sacrificing time with your family so that you can get ahead at work. Sacrificing your grades so that you can watch more YouTube videos. Sacrificing your sanity so that you can be right in a comment war.
All three of our readings today talked about sacrifice and suffering—and they all point to the sacrifice and the suffering of one person: the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
So here’s the problem. We hear all the time that we ought to imitate Jesus. And we hear all this stuff about sacrifice and suffering and serving others and so on, and this is all good, but often this idea morphs, in our imagination, into the assumption that Christian sacrifice means that it is noble to give up things that we need for things that we don’t need. For that is normally how we talk about and think about sacrifice in the world. People make “sacrifices” so that they can go on a cruise, or go to Disney, or buy a new car. On this deep, subconscious level, I think that many of us feel justified in making sacrifices for things that don’t matter because we’ve been told over and over again that sacrifice is good, period, and so we never move beyond that to the question of what we’re making sacrifices for, and whether the sacrifice we’re making is actually worth something.
It’s interesting how this language of sacrifice has permeated our vocabulary. In the old world, sacrifice was what you did for a god. So sacrifice for something else would be what the biblical tradition has always called idolatry. We may not claim to worship things like our good looks, our résumé, our voting record, or our bank account, but the sacrifices we make for them may suggest otherwise.
The picture we get in Scripture is different. It’s not just a celebration of sacrifice and suffering; it’s a celebration of a particular sacrifice and suffering that takes away sin. The sacrifice of Jesus is wonderful not just because it’s a sacrifice. It’s wonderful not even because he gives his life for other people. It’s wonderful because it works. It fixes things. It resets the world. It starts everything in a new direction. And that has everything to do with who Jesus is—God and man in one. In other words, not you or me.
So here’s the point: do not imagine that you are following Jesus just because you occasionally give up one thing for another thing. It’s tempting to be like James and John in their casual insistence that they can “drink the cup” of the Lord’s sacrifice. I’m not sure if they really grasp the meaning, or if they’re as clueless as the modern Catholic who can’t even bother to give up meat on a Friday. Either way, the Lord’s rebuke centers on the fact that they’re focused on the wrong goal; being willing to pay the cost is meaningless when you’re aiming for the wrong thing. The sacrifice entailed with following Jesus means offering our life in service to the good that he revealed.
So if you’re making sacrifices to do what is good, beautiful, and true, you’re on the right track. If you’re making sacrifices so that you can spend more time with the poor, or better support the Church, or pursue the beauty of holiness and virtue, you’re on the right track. On the other hand, if you’re making sacrifices just to do what you enjoy, or to maintain your personal image, you’re probably not on the right track.
To find the right track, the right path, is hard. It requires us to pay attention not to ourselves, and not even just not to ourselves, but to one specific person—Jesus—who alone can direct us to the source and meaning of all things. Only in looking to him, and to his sacrifice, can we learn what it means to be human, what it means to be God’s children, and what it means to suffer through the changes and circumstances of this world. Amen.