For the Sacrificed

Bread and Wine Reading: "For the Sacrificed", Dag Hammarskjold

Scripture Reading: John 13: 1-5
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

In his writing, Hammarskjold depicts the last night of the life of a young man who was “adamant in his committed life.” Those around him, as much as he loved them, did not really understand him. Hammarskjold asserts that even Jesus had not really understood where this road might end. At this point, he was being forced to face the possibility that, as Hammarskjold says, “the end might be a death without significance—as well as being the end of the road of possibility.” So, loving them until the end, he got up from the table and began to wash the disciples’ feet.

So Jesus walked that road of possibility all the way to the end without remorse or even a request for sympathy from others. And he chose even to walk it alone. Hammarskjold reminds us that in this hour, faith is the only thing that really counts, “faith without any hope of compensation other than he can find in a faith which reality seems so thoroughly to refute.” Jesus was not, then, a martyr. He did not see himself that way. Hammarskjold claims that “what we have later added was not there for him.”

Martyrdom is defined as a state that denounces or furthers certain beliefs. On some level, honorable though it may be, it is done to prove a point. Jesus did not die to prove a point. Jesus did not choose death to prove anything. His faith even unto the end was part of who he was. And when his faith journey turned toward the Cross, he knew that was the way to go. He did not die a martyr. After all, what would that say about our Christian faith, if the requirement was that someone had to die to further it? I don’t think that is what it was. The Crucifixion was not to further a religion or even to further our faith. It was, rather, a road through the ultimate sacrifice into what Hammarskjold calls the “Divine possibility”, a new fellowship, the fulfilling of a destiny that Jesus had chosen to walk. I love the thought of that “Divine possibility”, a road toward something that we cannot possibly understand but one that will become clearer and clearer as we approach what I think is really just the next turn rather than the end. And it is the way that we are called to go. It is part of who we are as one made in the image of God, in the image of Christ.

Discussion Questions:
1.) What meaning would that hold for you to think that even Jesus was facing the question of significance of his acts and, perhaps, of his life?
2.) Do you see a difference between martyrdom and Jesus’ act of sacrifice? What does that mean in your faith understanding?
3.) What does it mean to you to say that we are called to walk that same road toward the Cross?

So go forth toward the cross, toward the “Divine possibility”!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli