Friday Sermon: Sacrifice

By Babatunde Jose

Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or humans to a higher purpose, in particular divine beings, as an act of propitiation or worship. Evidence of ritual animal sacrifice has been seen at least among ancient Hebrew and Greeks, and possibly existed before that.

The word ‘sacrifice’ “etymologically … comes from the Latin term sacrificium, made up by the two words: sacrum and facere meaning “doing something sacred”. In this sense, sacrifice is connected to sacredness, which implies that sacrifice is associated also with the Divine.

Among people the world over sacrificial offerings are made to the accompaniment of rites and rituals as restitution of thanksgivings for sins, confessed crimes and other offences. We even hear of human sacrifices being made to unseen powers as propitiatory offerings or redemption of vows.

The offering up of sacrifices is to be regarded as a divine institution. It did not originate with man. God himself appointed it as the mode in which acceptable worship was to be offered to him.  Here in Africa too, the offering of sacrifice is part of traditional religion.

Prayer and sacrifice are closely connected. When supplication by prayer brought results, the sacrifice was a thanksgiving or the redemption of a vow. Later developed the practice of atonement after the Mosaic law brought a fuller knowledge in the Ten Commandments.

In Islam the sacrifice is to symbolize submission to the will of God. It is clearly stated in the Quran; To every people did We appoint rites (of sacrifice) that they might celebrate the name of Allah over the sustenance He gave them from animals (fit for food). 16:35-36. See also 22:34.

In Islam, all that is demanded as a sacrifice is one’s personal willingness to submit one’s ego and individual will to Allah. Quran 22:37: Neither their flesh reaches Allah nor their blood; it is your piety that reaches Him……. Abul Ala Maududi translation.

Every year during the festival of Eid al-Adha, Muslims around the world sacrifice an animal — a goat, sheep, cow, or camel — to reflect Prophet Ibrahim’s (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son, Ismail (Ishmael), after Allah (God) instructed him to in a dream.

The story tells us that sincerity and purity of intention are the most important part of the sacrifice. Quran 5:27

Through sacrifice we “return to God” in the sense of giving back what we owe him. Of course, we can’t possibly repay God for his gifts with an equal return—he is the source of our very existence! Nevertheless, we can do our part: our small personal sacrifices signal the return of self-back to God.

The language and the idea of sacrifice pervade the whole Bible. Sacrifices were offered in the ante-diluvian age. Leviticus 1-7 describe five types of offerings: The burnt offering. The grain offering. The peace offering. The sin offering. And the trespass offering.

Perhaps the greatest sacrifice is self-sacrifice, which our friend, Very Revd. Adebola Ojofeitimi, Provost, Cathedral Church in Lagos defined as the giving up of one’s own interests or wishes in order to help others or advance a cause. It can be associated to self-denial, selflessness, altruism, self-discipline, asceticism, abnegation, self-deprivation, abstemiousness, abstinence, moderation, austerity, temperance, abstention, renunciation, and continence.

This is where we run into a problem. The concept of self-sacrifice is lacking in our clime particularly among our leaders.

Our leadership exist only for themselves, their immediate family, and cohorts. They think not nor have consideration for their poor followers who are left to wallow in misery, want and abject poverty. They eat caviar and ask their people to eat sand and stone. They are inconsiderate and unconcerned that they flaunt their ill-gotten and stolen wealth amid want and general deprivation of the people. They are happy to arrive at weddings in a fleet of 100 private jets and a convoy of 500 SUVs to the utter incredulity of the masses who watch in dismay at the obscene and sacrilegious display of wealth and cold-hearted and callous distribution of very expensive gifts, the cost of which is enough to elevate them out of poverty and tattered penury. They are content at wasting food at such parties to the dismay of the hungry who heap curses on them for their display of ungodliness and socio-economic paganism.

There can be no self-sacrifice on the part of these leaders who are bereft of the milk of human kindness and empathy. They have read their Quran and scriptures upside down.

While the cost of food is increasingly getting out of reach of people, these wretched and insane leaders are distributing gift-packs worth over a million Naira each to guests at a party. What manner of people are these?

God, therefore, must judge these people. If God fails to judge the perpetrators of these atrocious crimes against the people, then, as one Bishop Ukaegbu once said, ‘God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah’: What was their offence? They committed homosexuality and sodomy (coined from Sodom), which the western world is today legalizing and arm-twisting Third World countries to legalize. They even attempt to re-write the Bible to accept the approval for this aberration. Today they call it LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (often used to encompass any sexual orientations or gender identities that do not correspond to heterosexual norms).

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, said, “The drama of this life is not complete; there must be a second scene to it, for we see the tyrant and his victims without seeing justice being executed. We see the conqueror and the subjugated, without the latter finding any revenge.”

One commentator had this to say: Our leaders, top to bottom, without exception, have become like the Benin proverbial three wise monkeys, “who see no evil, hear no evil and talk no evil”. We have the very A-heroic as leaders; little wonder we move from bad to worse and worse to the very worst of unthinkability! The security of lives and property, which is one of the fundamental principles of the Nigerian nationhood, has become the exclusive preserve of only our leaders, their immediate families and their proxies who are holed up in the villa. The rest of us, flotsam and jetsam that we are, can perish in our thousands for all they care.

Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend