Life should be a sacrifice

There is no mistaking about this. If we study our Christian faith, it is quite clear that our life ought to be a sacrifice, that is, to be made holy. That’s what sacrifice etymologically means. It comes from the Latin “sacrum,” sacred, and “facere,” to make or to do.

And that’s because that’s how we originally were made. Even in the state of original justice when our first parents had not yet sinned, they were supposed to make things and themselves holy by following God’s will freely and responsibly. We always need to refer everything to God, who is our all.

That’s because even if God made us to be like him, he wants us to want to be holy like God also on our own volition. God is treating us the way he treats himself, precisely because we have been made in his image and likeness. He does not force us to be like him. He wants us to do that freely.

But our first parents disobeyed, and thus, sinned. It’s a sin that all of us would inherit. And even if erased through baptism, we would still be left with some scar that would dispose and tempt us to get attracted to evil instead of good that comes from God.

And so the duty to make things and ourselves holy or to make sacrifice now involves greater effort on our part and also the direct intervention of God himself, for we cannot make things and ourselves holy without both our effort and God’s grace. The two have to be together.

So from the beginning of our salvation history, this idea of  sacrifice was already inculcated in a steady fashion, starting with Abel and Cain down to the patriarchs and prophets like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, a mysterious character called Melchizedec, till Christ, who is both the perfect priest for the perfect sacrifice.

This sacrifice of Christ is perpetuated till the end of time in the sacrament instituted by Christ himself called the Holy Eucharist, one aspect of which is precisely the Holy Mass.

In the Mass, what is actually taking place is not just some ritual, some dramatization of a past event. It is the very sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. This is a truth of faith, a mystery, that unites time and eternity, earth and heaven. It also makes all of us contemporaries of Christ, inextricably involved in his continuing work of redemption.

Because of how God’s plan is for us, we are supposed to make our whole life a sacrifice by uniting it to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross made available to us through the Holy Mass. This is the underlying framework of our life.

Our every thought, desire, intention, word, judgment, reasoning,  and our action in all its variations and levels ought to be a offered to God through the Christ on the Cross, perpetuated at Holy Mass.

But I wonder how many of us realize this, and more importantly, how many of us know how to convert this truth of faith into tangible reality in our life. What we see around most of the time is wanton self-pursuit, self-seeking, self-absorption.

In the world of entertainment, for example, how many are the artists we see around who truly have great talents but who fail to offer their talents to God. In fact, many are those who ridicule the idea of offering their talents to God, who don’t see the connection between God and them, between God and their talents.

It gives me an experience more bitter than sweet, because while I greatly enjoy those talents, I also feel terrible at the outright expropriation of those talents from God to make them their own entirely. This may not be quite obvious in our country, but try to see the decadent West where you have many talents, and you know what I mean.

The area of politics is even worse. Here we see many political animals only paying lip service to faith and religion when such service is at their advantage, but who blatantly, without any seeming qualms of conscience at all, violate basic religious and moral tenets just to attain their personal goals. The values of charity, magnanimity, mercy, compassion, patience, truthfulness, etc., are shamelessly trampled upon. If ever some aspects of these values and virtues are present, you can be sure the are more caricatures than the real things.

We need a strong reminder about the true purpose and character of our life. It is supposed to be a sacrifice, to be made holy by offering it to God through Christ.

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