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Mystic Mantra: The meaning of sacrifice

“Preaching Christ’s message without his Cross is like eating soup with a fork!”

No cross, no Christianity!” says Salvadoran theologian Jon Sobrino pinpointing the essence of Christianity. He adds, “Preaching Christ’s message without his Cross is like eating soup with a fork!”

Before being crucified, Jesus preached: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit”. Unnoticed by us, the cosmos ceaselessly undergoes a silent death as caterpillars die to birth butterflies, as sown grains die to engender golden harvests and flowers drop to produce fruits.

Human beings too suffer and die. Some human suffering is natural as we grow old, and die. However, there is manmade avoidable death of aborted babies, malnourished kids, abused children, exploited women, the poor and so on. If we treat all human beings as God’s children, then it’s our sacred duty to ensure that these deaths are avoided.

“It’s not enough to take pity on the poor,” explained Sobrino, “one must protect the poor.” To protect someone the protector must be a shield. This puts the protector’s life literally in “grave” danger, often leading to the grave. Indeed, as I write this, I’ve heard that Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt, who had been living in Syria since the early 1970s, has been murdered for protecting the poor.

People with altruistic attitudes are admired by all. Asking nothing for themselves, they’re ready to sacrifice everything to protect life. Sacrifice is central to the Torah, the Quran, the Bible and Vedic religion. The yagna in ancient India was sacrifice to the Divine. Later, there is a stress on the process of interiorisation with true sacrifice understood as an inner attitude of detachment and surrender. Yagna gets associated with giving (dana) and penance (tapas) in the Bhagavad Gita.

Jesus is an embodiment of self-sacrifice. His plea, “Take up your cross and follow me” is not passivism, but a call to become conscious of cosmic dying-and-rising, and a challenge to combat rigid ritualism, and victimisation. Sacrifice derives from Latin sacer + facere, meaning, to make holy. Making small sacrifices for others’ will make every week a “holy week” and every day a “holy day”.

( Source : dc )
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