Our Only Hope

The scriptures referred to 1 Corinthians 15:19-26.

I don't know if this entered into their calculations but just a few days after this Easter, Disney and Marvel Studios will be releasing the second part of their Infinity War saga. In the last film, the villain Thanos got ahold of the magical Infinity stones that control space, time, power, mind, soul and reality. This enabled him to carry out his mission to save the limited resources of the universe by eliminating half of the people in existence. He snapped his fingers and we watched heroes like the Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and even Spiderman turn to dust. And there the movie ended! So we geeks can't wait to see how the remaining heroes like Iron Man, the Hulk, and Captain America reverse this. And we know it gets reversed because that's what happened in the original comic nearly 30 years ago. Plus if they don't, it would be the saddest superhero movie ever.

Why am I bringing up fictional heroes on the day we celebrated Jesus' triumph? Three reasons.

First, the gods of the old pantheons were more like superheroes than what we think of as divine. They were very powerful but they were very human in their faults. They could be petty, deceitful, lustful, recklessly angry, foolish, envious, and even arrogant. And they could die. In fact, in the Norse mythology, they would all die at Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Neither Odin, nor Loki, nor Thor survive, unlike the Marvel movie version.

Second, contrary to the popular theory that pagan gods died and rose again, they didn't. In Norse mythology, Balder the beautiful dies due to Loki's trickery but he does not come back to life. Quetzalcoatl dies and turns to ashes. Hawaiian and Japanese gods die, never to return. Ishtar and Persephone's deaths are associated with winter but in spring they come back as crops, not as themselves. Osiris stays dead, though his wife cobbles together enough pieces of him just long enough to impregnate herself. He promptly returns to being dead and the god of the underworld. The pagans did not see the gods, these overpowered beings whose fantastic stories they retold, as being immune to death. Death trumps everything and everyone.

In fact, it looks like the only actual dying and rising pagan gods come after Jesus, so if there was any borrowing of ideas, the pagans borrowed resurrection from Christianity, not vice versa. And of course our modern gods, or superheroes, also borrow the same idea and they die and return to life so often it is not a question whether they will come back but when. Their franchises are too valuable for Superman or Iron Man or Captain America to stay dead.

Third, from the perspective of storytelling, for a hero to die at the end is a bummer. The most famous version of the Arthuriad is Sir Thomas Mallory's La Morte d'Arthur, which gives away the ending right in the title: The Death of Arthur. It is essentially a tragedy, as are Beowulf and Ragnarok and Hamlet. And, for now, the first Infinity War movie.

In Jesus we see something new. Jesus is the only God who defeats death. But more than that, he is the only God who exists in history.

Along with the popular misconception that there were dying and rising gods before Jesus, there is an idea popular among less well-read atheists that Jesus was totally made up. In fact this idea that Jesus is fictional is so insidious that New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who is himself not a believer, nevertheless felt it necessary to write a book asserting that, whatever else he was, Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person. For one thing, he is mentioned by non-Christian historians of the time, such as Josephus, Pliny and Tacitus.

I would go even further. In view of how early the documents we have about him arose, it is hard to dismiss the theological claims about him being divine and rising from the dead as being late inventions.

Because of the expectation that Jesus' return would be very soon, the gospels were not the first parts of the New Testament that were written. The apostles were alive to tell Jesus' story. The earliest Christian writings are the letters of Paul. And the earliest of them were his letters to the Thessalonians. His first letter to that church was probably written around 51 AD. We can date this accurately because in Acts 18:12-17, Paul, on his second missionary journey, is brought before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia. We know that Gallio was an historical person and that he had that position in 51 to 52 AD because of an inscription found in Delphi. And according to 1 Thessalonians 3:1-2, Timothy was sent to check on the fledgling church in Thessalonica about that time. Seeing as Jesus was crucified around 30 AD, this means this letter was written only about 20 years afterwards.

How developed were the beliefs about Jesus in just two decades, when plenty of people who knew Jesus were still around? In the first chapter of this letter, Paul mentions “how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10) Already, Jesus of Nazareth, an historical person, is considered the Son of God, who was raised from the dead and who saves his followers. That is what Paul means when a few verses earlier he talks of the “hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 1:3)

And that is the crux of the matter. As we said when a hero's story ends in death, it is a tragedy. And indeed all of our lives end in death. If that is the real end, if there is no sequel, if there is no life after death, then we are left with grief and sadness. But if Jesus of Nazareth, an historical person, turned over to the Romans by Caiaphas, another historical person, and crucified by Pilate, yet another historical person, rose from the dead, then there is hope. Indeed Jesus is our only hope.

Everything hinges on the resurrection. There were other would-be Messiahs. Simon bar Kokhba led a revolt against Rome in 132 AD and was proclaimed the Messiah by the esteemed Rabbi Akiva. While he did establish a Jewish state for about 3 years, the Romans crushed it, killing 580,000 Jews and razing to the ground 50 fortified towns and 985 villages. Bar Kokhba is said to have died during the final siege or, according to another story, he was killed by the Sanhedrin for being a false messiah. In the 400s, Moses of Crete persuaded the Jews on that island to march to Israel through the sea, expecting it to part. It did not. Menachem Mendel Schneerson was hailed to be the Messiah by some of his followers. When he died in 1994, some still thought he would rise again. He has not.

Wikipedia lists 65 Messiah claimants from Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other backgrounds. Most of them you have never heard of. Jesus would be just another one of them had he not risen from the dead on a Sunday nearly 2000 years ago. The disciples, who in the immediate aftermath were hiding in an upstairs room for fear of suffering the same fate as Jesus, would have just returned to their former lives, disappointed. Some, perhaps those who were initially disciples of John the Baptist, might have moved on to the next messiah-wanna-be. But nobody would still be touting Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, much less as God Incarnate.

It was the resurrection that validated what Jesus said. How could his claims—“I am the Bread of life,” “I am the Light of the world,” “I am the the Resurrection and the Life,” I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”—be taken seriously if he had stayed dead? For that matter his ethics—“turn the other cheek,” “love your enemy,” “forgive people who sin against you,” “it is more blessed to give than to receive”—make no sense if there is no afterlife and no final judgment. Why not just lie, cheat, and bully your way to the top if this is the only life you get? Why pay the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unfortunate any mind? As Scrooge says, let them die and decrease the surplus population. That is the ruthless, Darwinian logic of Thanos. There are only so many resources for the living. Kill half and there's more for everyone else. Compassion and social justice be hanged.

When Jesus died, the hopes of the disciples died with him. As the two disciples heading to Emmaus said about Jesus. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:19-21) “We had hoped”: past tense. The dream was over. The reality was that Jesus was dead and so was his movement. They were getting out of town, dejected and despairing. Their hope only revived when they saw Jesus alive.

I think that was why Thomas didn't believe that Jesus had risen at first. Not only did he not have the advantage the others did of seeing Jesus on that first Sunday, but I think it was too hard for him to even think that way. When Jesus decided to go back to Judea to raise his friend Lazarus, the other disciples are concerned that the last time he went there, the religious leaders tried to stone him. But Jesus was adamant about going. And Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16) So Thomas was committed to following Jesus no matter what. And when his fatalistic view of what would happen to Jesus came true, it wasn't that he would not entertain the hope that Jesus was alive again; it was that he could not. Yet when he saw the risen Christ, displaying his wounded wrists and inviting Thomas to touch him, the previously doubting disciple could only stammer out, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:26-28)

And that was another consequence of the resurrection. How did these monotheistic Jews come to regard Jesus as divine as well? I won't go through all the probable steps here but it began with his resurrection. Jesus raised others from the dead, but so did the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Nobody but Jesus was ever raised without the intervention of a prophet. Without anyone asking, God raised Jesus from the dead, the same God who said to him at his baptism and at the transfiguration, “You are my Son, whom I love...” (Mark 1:11; 9:7) Before the resurrection people may have called Jesus “the son of God,” because it was a title used of King David. But after his resurrection, it did not sound so much like royal hyperbole as it did a factual description of what Jesus was. This was no run-of-the-mill prophet, no ordinary man of God; this man was God to all intents and purposes. Later on people would associate Jesus with the Wisdom of God, personified in Proverbs 8. Later on the church would formulate the working hypothesis of the Trinity, which was not intended to explain how 3 persons could be one God, but to preserve the paradox. I doubt the disciples could explain it to a theologian's satisfaction. They just knew that in addition to experiencing God as creator, and experiencing God's Spirit within them, they saw their time with Jesus as a direct experience of the presence of God. The veil lifted from their eyes the minute he appeared in that locked upstairs room before the cowering lot of them and said, “Peace be with you.”

N.T. Wright points out that all of the quotations of the Old Testament which point out the precedents and prophesies that apply to Jesus drop out of the gospels at the moment we reach his resurrection. It was unprecedented. Aside from the people raised by Elisha and Elijah, the Hebrew Bible only mentions resurrection explicitly twice (Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2) and both of those refer to the general resurrection of all people. There are a few other passages from which it can be inferred. But the resurrection of the Messiah is not spelled out in the Old Testament. In Jesus God was doing something new, something disruptive to the usual order of things. In Jesus God is asserting his dominion over death and his identity as the God of the living. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, when the one who never deserved to die let himself be killed in the place of the guilty, death itself began work backwards.

As we said, even non-believing historians concede that Jesus once lived but they are at a loss to explain why his movement continued to thrive after his crucifixion. Nobody follows Simon bar Kokhba or Moses of Crete or Ann Lee of the Shakers anymore. Why did a bunch of fishermen and tax collectors proclaim that a crucified construction worker was the Son of God and had come back from the dead? Why did they no longer fear death, even when renouncing their claims would have saved their lives? How did a small Jewish movement manage to grow, despite periodic persecutions by various emperors, to the point where 300 years later an emperor would feel it politically acceptible to become a Christian? How is it that it is now the largest and most widespread religion in the world?

As we said, when a hero dies at the end of his story, it is a tragedy. When a great man or woman dies, it is a tragedy. And everyone of us will die. Within 4 or 5 generations most of us will not be remembered. The works of our hands will not last forever. Though the Cathedral of Notre Dame will be rebuilt, the tower, the construction of which took up nearly half of the life of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc 200 years ago, has been destroyed. How long will my blog last after I am gone? I hope that in 40 years Lutherans and Episcopalians will continue to worship Jesus on this island. It's unlikely any of us will be among them. Death comes for us all. And if that is the end of our story, then it is a tragedy.

As Paul said, “If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:19-20) How could Paul be so sure? Because the risen Christ appeared to him. Paul had been trying to wipe out the heresy of Christianity and after his encounter with a very much alive Jesus, he rethought everything. And when he started proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected Christ, his life was never safe again. Besides being threatened by his own people, he was imprisoned on numerous occasions, flogged 5 times, beaten with rods 3 times, once he was stoned and left for dead, and he went through 3 shipwrecks. (2 Corinthians 11:23-26) He ended up being beheaded by the emperor Nero. And yet, facing his death, he said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is to gain.” (Philippians 1:21) Either he was crazy or he knew something. The same could be said for all the apostles. The only reason a rational person would devote one's whole life to such a painful and dangerous mission is if one knew it was worth it. Such as if you knew someone who had died and who came back to life and who could pass on eternal life as well. If you knew death was not permanent, there would be nothing that could stop you from letting others in on the good news.

Retired Bishop Frade's favorite movie quote was, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, it's because it is not yet the end.” Death is not the end. Jesus has flipped the script. In John 11:25-26 the one and only God who has ever risen from the dead says, “I am the resurrection and the life. The person who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Well...?

Peace, Fellowship, Sacrifice, Meal

The scriptures referred to 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.

During our Lenten Bible study we examined the sacrifices made in the Tabernacle and Temple. We used this definition: sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or lives to a higher being as an act of worship, or for a higher purpose to gain something more important, worthy or valuable. Most of the offerings had to do with sin and guilt. But in our last session we looked at what is called either a fellowship or peace offering. And we looked at the Passover. In both cases they are meals, the physical preparing and eating of foods, but they have great spiritual significance.

The shalom or peace offering was unique among the 5 types of offerings laid out in Leviticus because it was not wholly given to God, as was the case in the burnt offering, nor parts shared only with the priests, as with the grain, sin and guilt offerings, but everyone, including the person offering it, got to partake of the meal. That's why it is also called a fellowship offering. It was a meal where the worshiper symbolically got to eat with God. In the Middle East to eat with someone is to be at peace with them. In addition, the offering was not a mandatory but voluntary one, usually made in thanksgiving for recovery from illness or escape from danger or safe return from a journey. The person is thankful for God's protection and healing and their resulting wellbeing, which is another meaning of the word shalom. The peace offering was a happy occasion and you invited family and friends to join you in the meal. To ensure that, nothing could be left over. It was a feast.

Tonight we celebrate the institution of the Lord's Supper. The disciples were literally sharing a meal with God made man. And during the meal Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my own peace I give to you; I do not give it as the world does.” (John 14:27) And I wonder if this is what inspired Paul to write that “...we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...” (Romans 5:1) or “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross...” (Colossians 1:19-20)

Through the sacrifice Jesus made we are reconciled to God. We are no longer in rebellion against God but at peace with him. And Jesus may have been thinking of that when he was speaking at the meal. But he was definitely thinking of another sacred meal.

A Jewish wag once summarized all Hebrew holidays thus: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat!” That's especially true of the Passover. It is a festival in which Jews commemorate being liberated from slavery in Egypt. If the death and resurrection of Jesus is at the center of the Christian faith, Passover is the center of the Jewish faith. It is the event that defines them. The Talmud says, “In every generation, each must see himself as if he went forth from Egypt.” Each Sabbath, Jews bless a cup of wine and in their prayer recall the Exodus from Egypt. And that was true in Jesus' day as well.

And you can imagine how fraught this Passover was for Jesus' disciples. They had acknowledged him as Messiah, God's anointed one, who will bring in the kingdom of God. He was given a royal welcome when he entered Jerusalem just 5 days ago. The city was packed with Jews from all over the empire. They are about to celebrate God liberating their people from a foreign pagan government. This could be it! Jesus could start the revolt against Rome!

There was probably no Haggadah or authorized liturgy of the Passover in Jesus' day as there is now but the focus was nevertheless on the retelling of the story of the Exodus. So when Jesus took the unleavened bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, the disciples were expecting him to say something like, “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate when they came from Egypt.” Instead he says, “This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” What was going through their minds as they were passing the bread and eating it? Jesus said and did surprising things. They were used to that now. But what was he doing with the central commemoration of Judaism?

After supper, he took what was either the 3^rd or 4^th cup of wine one drank on Passover, gave the traditional thanks for the food, for God's care of his people and for his protection of Jerusalem. And then Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Again though the disciples are not recorded as saying anything, their minds must have been on fire with questions and speculations. What was Jesus saying here? Why is he saying the elements of the Passover were things a Jew would never eat: human flesh or any kind of blood? Why is he asking us to remember him? Where is he going? Why?

“Why?” was probably the question that echoed in their brains the most. Jesus took a sacred meal that already had a meaning, and whose foods already represented things, like the bitterness and tears of their enslaved ancestors, and gave them new and, let's face it, rather strange meanings. Why did he do that? As with a lot of things Jesus did and said the meaning would become clearer to them after the events of the next 3 days.

From our perspective what Jesus meant is easier to discern. Jesus is taking bread and wine, staples of life back then, and identifying them with himself. The bread is obvious. It is one of the oldest prepared foods, going back perhaps 30,000 years. The oldest evidence of bread making has been found in Jordan, 14,500 years ago. Consequently it stands for the basic necessities of life, which is why in the Lord's Prayer, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That's why we call the family's provider the “breadwinner.” In fact the English word “lord” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “bread keeper.”

You would think that water would be the other element Jesus would use but, while everyone prized fresh water, trustworthy potable water only came from springs and wells. Even a creek or river, especially if it was downstream from a town or city, might not be healthy to drink. Plus in an agrarian society most of your water would go to irrigating your fields and hydrating your animals. Even today 70% of water used by humans goes to agricultural uses. So wine was the standard beverage.

Wine was part of Jewish rituals, especially on the Sabbath and in the Passover. Red wine was also associated with blood in ancient Egypt and by Greek and Roman cults. And in Genesis (49:11) and Deuteronomy (32:14), wine is poetically called “the blood of the grape,” though Jews rarely called it that, probably because they were prohibited from eating blood. (Leviticus 17:10) And in the verse immediately following that prohibition the reason is given: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar; for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement.” (Leviticus 17:11) The life poured out, the spilled blood of the sacrifice, provided atonement.

Why didn't Jesus just use the blood of the Passover lamb? Wasn't it dabbed on the door frame and wasn't it the sign that the Israelites were to be passed over by death? Yes, but that was only done on the original Passover, not on subsequent reenactments. No Jew does it today, either. So it wasn't available for Jesus to use. Plus, if we go by the crowd's reaction to Jesus' address in John 6, where he tells them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood, this may also have been a test which separates those who get what Jesus is saying spiritually and those who can only perceive things in a literal fashion. Jesus lost a lot of followers when he gave that speech. Jesus says to them, “The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.” (John 6:63) Yet many left him. Jesus then says to the Twelve, “You do not want to leave too, do you?” And Peter replies, “ Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:67-68) So when this comes up again at the last supper, it's possible the disciples thought, “Well, this is just something Jesus says from time to time. Maybe he'll explain it later, like he does the parables.” If he did explain it, it would be after his resurrection. And, unfortunately, it was not preserved so as to cut off all the debates in Eucharistic theology.

But there are some things about the Lord's Supper practically all Christians agree on. Jesus commanded it. The only two sacraments all churches agree on are baptism and communion. Baptism brings us into the body of Christ and communion nourishes the body of Christ. And whether they believe that the body and blood of Jesus are literally in the bread and wine, or that they are merely symbols used in a memorial, or that Christ is really here in a way we are not knowledgeable enough to define, Christians believe that there is a spiritual significance and benefit to partaking of communion. It is, as St. Augustine put it, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. God communicates with us through physical things all the time. We call Jesus the Word of God made flesh. It is appropriate that he communicate his spiritual nourishment of us and our dependence on him through bread and wine.

The first description we get of the Lord's Supper is not in the gospels but in Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth. At that time, it was the highlight of an actual meal called the Agape or Love Feast. Unfortunately it was getting out of hand: some were getting drunk or overeating, some were bringing their own private suppers and others were left out. The significance of the Eucharist was getting lost. So Paul reminds them what is really going on when we share the body and blood of Christ. “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:26)

Jesus was obviously thinking of what was going to happen in just few hours: he would be arrested and crucified. He was tying the Passover feast, the celebration of God protecting his people from death and freeing them from slavery in Egypt, to what he was about to do, free all people from slavery to sin and thereby protect them from spiritual death and separation from God. He was also tying in the ideas of sacrifice and covenant. Technically Passover was neither. The lamb was not offered to God but was eaten by the family. The covenant was not made at Passover but later at Mount Sinai. Yet Passover, sacrifices and covenants all involve the shedding of blood. That act showed how serious these matters were.

We do not sacrifice animals anymore. God the Son's sacrifice of himself ended all that. But we share the bread and wine in remembrance of what Jesus did for us. He died that we might live. God's Son became a human being so that humans might become children of God. He took the brunt of the evil we unleashed on God's creation to heal the breach between us and God. He came to free us from our enslavement to sin and the self-destructive things we let take control of our lives. He came to make a new agreement between divinity and humanity in which God shows his love by giving us his Son and his Spirit and we in turn are to reflect that love in all we think, say and do to everyone we meet and to everyone whose life we impact.

Jesus was distilling all of that into what he said and did at this meal. And in a few minutes we are going to commune with God at a simple meal, sharing the body and blood of Christ that we might be the body of Christ in this world, proclaiming God's love as seen in the death of Jesus until the risen Christ comes again to welcome us into the wedding supper of the Lamb.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

The scriptures referred to Leviticus 1-7 and Hebrews 9 and 10.

During our Lenten Bible study we examined the sacrifices made in the Tabernacle and Temple. We used as our definition for sacrifice one which I cobbled together from a couple sources. Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or lives to a higher being as an act of worship, or for a higher purpose to gain something more important, worthy or valuable. We primarily looked at the first part of that definition by examining the various offerings laid out in the Torah. And some of the descriptions of how it was to be done were pretty gory with all the shedding, pouring and sprinkling of blood. Andrew Henry, a religion studies PhD candidate and host of the You Tube channel Religion for Breakfast, described how, while watching a video of the sacrifice of a goat, he got woozy even as he was trying to remain clinically detached. I wonder how many of you would be here if every week I killed, exsanguinated, butchered and burned an animal at the altar, even if we did enjoy a barbecue afterwards. Though we eat meat much more often than people in the past, we are farther removed than them from the process of getting that meat.

Yet we are omnivores and it is difficult to get all the amino acids, proteins, iron, B12 and fats you need to stay healthy if you don't get it from animals. Our ancestors were less squeamish about killing animals, out of necessity. Yet they understood that life is precious and taking one is serious. And virtually all ancient cultures practiced animal sacrifice as a part of worship. The Bible first depicts sacrifice in early Genesis when Abel offers God choice portions of the firstborn of his flocks. (Genesis 4:4) Nothing in the text suggests that God commands this, though some see sacrifice indirectly instituted by God when he makes Adam and Eve clothing from animal skins. (Genesis 3:21) This may indicate a connection between sin and death.

Evil always has a cost. Usually it is in the form of injury on the part of someone, either physical, psychological, social or financial. Typically it is the victim who pays, though sometimes the perpetrator may suffer as well. Punching someone is a good way to break the bones in your hand. If you are caught trying to ruin someone else's reputation, it can ruin yours as well. You may suffer guilt feelings from the harm you've done to someone. And though it seems to be rarer, sometimes ruining someone financially will lead to the ruin of the perpetrator, as it did with Bernie Madoff. But the person causing the harm doesn't always pay directly.

The problem for any group is if you administer absolute justice, punishing every instance strictly, you will decimate your ranks and endanger the peace of the community. If you prioritize peace and allow some injustices not to be addressed, certain people will begin to feel they can do what they want with impunity. Both they and their victims will then share a contempt for authority and ironically peace in the community will eventually break down. How do you keep the peace and administer justice, especially when no restitution can be made? Is there a third way? Requiring the costly sacrifice of an animal that would otherwise be a good breeder or a good meal was one way.

Sometimes, however, the cost can be borne by another person besides the victim or the victimizer. A person can bail out or help monetarily someone who has suffered a financial loss. In the Bible a relative who did this, such as buying someone out of debt slavery, was called a redeemer. Today a crusading journalist can uncover the facts and publicly exonerate someone who has had their reputation smeared. A therapist can help a person overcome psychological trauma. And sometimes a person can step in front of a blow or a bullet meant for someone else.

One example of that is Dr. Liviu Librescu. A Romanian survivor of the Holocaust, Professor Librescu was teaching at Virginia Tech when the infamous shooting spree took place. Shouting for his students to leave through the windows, Librescu held the door of his classroom closed against the shooter, even as he fired through the door. Librescu was shot 5 times but never moved from the door. All but one of his students escaped with their lives. Librescu sacrificed his life to save the lives of others.

Of course, when he went to his class that day he had no idea that he would be called on to do that. Others go into situations to confront evil fully aware that it could spell death. Noor Inayat Khan was a children's author and the daughter of an American woman and an Indian Sufi Muslim teacher. She fled with her family from Paris to England when the Nazis conquered France. Though raised as a pacifist, Khan became a wireless operator and was recruited by the Special Operations Executive because of her accuracy and speed in sending Morse code. Speed was important because the Gestapo was also swift in tracking down the origin of radio transmissions from the French Underground and capturing the operators. In fact the life expectancy of a Resistance wireless operator was about 6 weeks. In June of 1943 Khan became the first woman in that capacity to be sent into the field. From occupied France she managed to send back vital information to the British for a record 4 months before being betrayed by a double agent and arrested. Even so, she managed to escape, greasing her small, slender body and literally slipping between the bars of her cell. When recaptured, she was kept in shackles. She refused to talk about her network even under brutal interrogation, though other prisoners remember her crying at night. She was transferred to Dachau where she was beaten and shot. Her last words were “Liberte!”

Noor Inayat Khan knew death was a real possibility when she went on her mission, but, as her escape attempt shows, it wasn't Plan A. Lieutenant John Robert Fox knew death was a certainty in his case. He was a forward observer stationed in a small Italian village directing artillery fire on German troops. On Christmas night 1944 enemy soldiers infiltrated the village in civilian clothes. By morning the town was largely in their hands. While most of the US Infantry withdrew, Fox and other members of his observer party stayed in their second floor post to direct artillery fire on the Nazi troops. He kept adjusting the artillery fire closer and closer to his position to stop the German advance. Finally he was told by radio that the next adjustment would take out his own position. Acknowledging the danger, Lt. Fox simply said, “Fire it.” When the town was retaken by Allied troops, the body of the 29 year old black officer from Cincinnati was found surrounded by the bodies of approximately 100 Nazi soldiers.

Like Samson, Fox sacrificed himself to take out the enemy. But some people save lives in a way that harms no one but themselves. Maximillian Kolbe was a Polish priest and Franciscan monk, who, despite bad health, taught in seminary, started missions in China, Japan, and India, published Catholic newspapers and started radio stations. When the Nazis invaded Poland, he was one of the few monks who did not flee. He turned the monastery into a place for refugees and even hid 2000 Jews. Kolbe refused to sign a document granting him the rights of a German citizen, which he could have claimed because he father was German. Eventually, the Nazis shut down the monastery and Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz. There he continued to serve as a priest and was harassed, beaten and whipped. Once friendly inmates smuggled him into the prison hospital to be treated for his injuries. Then one day a prisoner escaped and the deputy camp commander picked 10 men to be starved to death in an underground bunker in retaliation and to end further escape attempts. One of the men selected cried out for his wife and children. Kolbe volunteered to take the man's place. In their underground cell Kolbe led the men in prayer and song. After 2 weeks without water, only Kolbe was alive. To empty the bunker, the guards gave him a lethal injection. It is said that the priest calmly raised his left arm to receive the injection.

Noor Inayat Khan was given the George Cross posthumously. Likewise Lt. John Robert Fox was given the Distinguished Service Cross in 1982 and was finally awarded the Medal of Honor in 1997. Maximilian Kolbe was canonized a saint in 1982. We are not certain exactly what motivated the self-sacrifices of Khan and Fox but we know what motivated Kolbe. It was the example of Jesus Christ. His death was the offering of one's life for a higher purpose to gain something more important, worthy or valuable. In the case of Jesus, he gave his life not to save one person but all mankind.

So to recap, humanity realized early on that evil had a cost. They knew that evil was serious and that if the injustice was not dealt with it would corrupt the community. They knew that the price they would have to pay would be steep. They knew that the price for keeping the community alive with food was the death of animals. They applied that same principle to keeping the community safe from evil, sacrificing costly animals to absorb its impact.

Some societies even sacrificed people. Evidence of human sacrifice is found in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Rome, Greece, China, India, West Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas. The Bible mentions that Israel's neighbors would give their children as burnt offerings to Moloch, something God condemns several times. And to demonstrate this, we are even given an enacted parable, if you will, in Genesis when God tells Abraham to sacrifice his heir Isaac. Abraham, a child of that time, prepares to do so. God stops him and provides a ram in Isaac's place. That part of Mt. Moriah is thereafter called “The Lord Will Provide.” The moral is that God will never ask us to sacrifice our child to him; he will provide the sacrifice.

And in Jesus, he does. Paul, obviously thinking of how the person making the sin offering put his hand on the head of the sacrifice, symbolically transferring his sin to the otherwise unblemished animal, says of Jesus, "God made the one who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God." Chapters 9 and 10 of the book of Hebrews draw the parallels and highlight the differences between the continual sacrifices made by the high priest in the temple and the one all-sufficient sacrifice Jesus made. Had we an extra Wednesday to do it I would have led a Bible Study on those 2 chapters alone. Suffice it to say, that the major differences are that, first, Jesus, unlike the normal high priest, need not make a sacrifice for himself since he is sinless. And second, Jesus' sacrifice is made for the whole world and, third, it is made once and for all. Jesus did what all those sacrifices could not: take away the penalty for all sin forever. We can stop punishing ourselves; Jesus took the punishment for us. Now is the time for healing and forgiveness.

If you just can't get past the idea of religious sacrifice, let us reframe how we look at it. Since the idea of sacrificing oneself in a wartime situation seems more acceptable these days, then think of God sending Jesus on a suicide mission. Like Khan, he is to enter enemy-occupied territory incognito, gather a network of the resistance, and spread his message. When captured by those who oppose his mission, due to the betrayal of a double agent in his own network, he refuses to give up his allies. (John 18:8) Like Fox, Jesus completes his mission, though he knows it means certain death. Like Kolbe and Librescu, Jesus dies in the place of others, though in this case it is in place of all people everywhere and everywhen.

The sacrifices of Khan, Fox and Kolbe did not mean the end of the war, just as the D-Day landings did not mean the immediate collapse of the Nazi Reich. It was, however, the beginning of the end. So too, Jesus' sacrifice, though decisive, does not mean all evil has magically disappeared. We his followers have to finish the mopping up. We need to spread the word and free people and make more allies and confront evil in the places we encounter it as Jesus did. And just as Khan, Fox and Kolbe were not the last sacrifices made in the effort to liberate Europe, so too some Christians followed Jesus even to death. To this day, people are dying for speaking and acting in his name.

Jesus never disguised the fact that following him required sacrifice on our part. When he revealed to his disciples that he would be killed, they were horrified. Their idea of the Messiah was then as it is to most Orthodox Jews today: a leader to establish a physical, political kingdom of God on earth. To do that, the Messiah can't die and lose; he must live and conquer. And Jesus shut that literalistic thinking down right there. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) There is no easy, painless way to deal with evil. Those who think so are fooling themselves and those who say so are trying to sell you something.

We live in a world where evil is shedding its sheep's clothing and no longer camouflaging its selfish and cruel agenda with polite words and symbolic measures. It is no longer considered beyond the pale for people to identify themselves as racist or greedy or unsympathetic to the underdogs in society. Contempt is common currency on social media and people are communicating in rude and simplistic memes rather than sincerely seeking discussions on hot button issues. Politicians will not cross party lines for policies that serve the good of all if it means losing the votes of their base. Pharmaceutical companies do not care if they kill patients with painkillers or let them die from being unable to afford their insulin. Corporations are willing to destroy this planet rather than leave one penny of profit on the table.

The only way to fight the evil is to be prepared make sacrifices. People need to sacrifice their smugness and the certainty they are always right and be willing to let others speak and to listen to them. Politicians need to sacrifice their desire for popularity among members of their party and their supporters to work with the other side on solutions that really solve problems and do not merely make a good vote-getting slogan or kick the can down the road. Corporations need to sacrifice potential profits in order to ensure that all people and the planet we live on survive. All of us will have to sacrifice some of our privileges and luxuries to keep peace and see that society is just.

And we need to sacrifice our time, talents, treasure and energy in fighting evil. If it is ignorance we can educate folks. If it is stupidity we can work out wiser ways to accomplish things. If it is the harm of neglect we must call it out. If it is willful harm we must stand in the way of the adversary. We must be ready to stand between those who victimize others and those they wish to victimize. And we must do it, regardless of the sacrifice we must make.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus said, “A new commandment I give you—that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:24, emphasis mine) And the next day, on a cross, he demonstrated how much he loved us. Can any of us say we have shown that kind of self-sacrificial love in return?