John 13.1-17
Self-sacrifice
is headline news, and what is more, different understandings of self-sacrifice
are colliding in some of our news stories.
In
modern Islam a new radical understanding of self-sacrifice has emerged. It’s
prompted by a desire to turn the wheel of history and create a new Kalifate or
Islamic state. It feeds off the notion that there are no shades of grey in this
life, only a clear distinction between black and white, belief and non-belief.
And it has an absolute disregard for the value of human life.
This
new version of Islam claims to be firmly rooted in tradition, but if we
imagined a new strand of Christianity that looked for its justification to
medieval theology instead of to the Bible, and argued that it was right to kill
Muslims because that’s what the crusaders did, then that would be a good
analogy with this new kind of Salafi Islam. It’s backward looking but very
selective in its choice of ancient texts.
Suicide
bombers see themselves as making the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of their
ideas. But it’s not a sacrifice to save others. It’s a sacrifice designed to
catch other people unawares and attack them at their most vulnerable. If we
imagine Samson praying to God for strength to bring down the temple roof on his
tormentors we’ve got an insight into the mindset of the suicide bomber.
Suicide
bombers aren’t really interested in self-sacrifice. They go to their deaths
expecting a reward, and not even a spiritual reward. They’re expecting to gain
everlasting wealth, sexual gratification and high status as holy warriors.
In
contrast, the importance of the footwashing episode at the end of Jesus’ life
is that it underlines his absolute commitment to service and self-denial.
He didn’t go to his death expecting any reward save that of knowing that he was
doing God’s will.
Suicide
bombers can justify their self-centeredness by arguing that the people they
kill will also enter the afterlife. What happens to them there is not the
bomber’s fault but depends on their own worthiness or unworthiness. Again, in
absolute contrast, Jesus went to his own death to secure a better future for everyone
- in this life and beyond.
The
recent TV serial The Crown
focuses on the Queen’s sense of religious duty to do the job of sovereign to
the best of her ability, and to sacrifice personal happiness if needs be, and
her own family’s happiness, to this cause. I don’t know how accurate that is,
but certainly Jesus was the ultimate example of the servant king.
Professor
Chetan Bhatt from the London School of Economics reminds us that
religious sacrifice has usually been interpreted as a way of trying to settle a
debt, or repay an obligation, to a God who needs to be appeased in a radical
and total way.[1] The end result is that, like the suicide bomber, the person
making their sacrifice can end up being very narcissistic and self-regarding.
Their aim, even if they lose their life, is actually to gain it, and often -
when they’re sacrificing just a part of themselves, some aspect of their life
or one of their prize possessions - it’s aim is to consolidate the power and
status they already have, to hold onto the good life or regain it by pleasing
God.
The
Jewish scriptures make clear that this approach to sacrifice is wrong. God
doesn’t want self-obsessed sacrifices and false piety. God hates burnt
offerings. His only concern is for justice and righteousness.
What
makes Jesus’ sacrifice authentic is the realisation that he had nothing to gain
in making it. He was already in a right relationship with God. He went to his
death solely for the sake of others. We may become his followers in
order to gain life in all its fullness, and to be remembered by him in
paradise, but he went to his cross solely for the sake of others.
But
Professor Terry Eagleton from Lancaster University argues that authentic
sacrifice isn’t actually about self-denial.[1] Instead he thinks it’s about
transforming weakness into power by self-giving. Suicide bombers seek to
transform their weakness into power in a deeply destructive way, whereas Jesus
set out to transform the weakness of death on a cross in a profoundly
constructive way by using it to empower a new way of living and dying.
Nevertheless,
traditional ideas of sacrifice do see it as about self-giving, usually
something that the person can ill afford to give, like their firstborn lamb or
calf, or their strongest bull or ram, or even their child. That understanding
has shaped the way that Christians think about the cross when they talk about
God loving the world so much that he gave his only son.
According
to this way of thinking, the only way to help people achieve their true
potential is a radical breaking and remaking of the way things usually work. It
will never be enough, the arguent goes, for people to work through their own
issues. They need radical intervention, someone who can be parachuted in to
help them. And that person is Jesus.
Salafist
Muslim martyrs don’t love the world; they want to break it and remake it
in a very literal way, whereas God does love the world and that’s his
motivation for getting involved in history through Jesus. Jesus didn’t give up
his life because it was worthless and he would be better off in heaven. He gave
it up, says Professor Eagleton, because it was the most precious thing he had
to give.
Unlike
the suicide bombers, Jesus didn’t want to die. He pleaded for the cup of
suffering to be taken away from him, but he went through with his arrest and
execution in order to remake the world and help his followers to flourish.
The
great insight of Christianity, as compared to militant Salifism for example, is
the realisation that dying in order to be promoted to glory is never going to
get us there. We have to really feel that we’re at risk of losing everything
if our sacrifice is to be genuinely Christlike. And that means being afraid and
having doubts, even to the point of wondering whether we’ve been abandoned and
left to our own devices.
Professor
Eagleton says that, like tragedy, genuine self-sacrifice comes about when we
allow ourselves to be stripped down to the point where we have to confront the
finality of suffering and death. We have to recognise that perhaps our
sacrifice won’t actually achieve anything, and yet go through with it anyway. Only then do we carry our own cross in imitation of Jesus.
It
was in this spirit that Jesus symbolically stripped himself down and washed his
disciples’ feet. ‘You do not know what I am doing,’ he told them, ‘But later
you will understand.’
And
so we come to the headline grabbing story where the two understandings of
sacrifice collide. A Salafi Muslim and self-styled Soldier of the Kalifate,
went on a killing spree in the French town of Trebes. He had already killed
three people and wounded 15 more, including a police officer out jogging with
colleagues, before he took hostage a female supermarket worker to use as a
human shield. However, he willingly yielded her up in exchange for the
commander of the local gendarme unit, Lieutenant
Colonel Arnaud Beltrame. Here was his chance to kill a senior policeman.
Colonel
Beltrame had led an exercise last December in which he and his colleagues
practised for an attack on a supermarket almost exactly like this one. Before
he joined the police he had been a member of France’s elite special forces, and
of the Presidential Guard, and he presumably felt that the buck stopped with
him.
People
have speculated that he entered the supermarket knowing he was going to his
death, but that can’t be quite true because he took his pistol with him.
However, when he agreed to change places with the hostage his fate was sealed.
He was immediately slashed with a knife and then shot. The terrorist died too,
gunned down by the police as they stormed into the building.
Here
we have one person sacrificing his life for purely negative reasons, to cause
as much harm as possible and win eternal renown as a warrior of Islam in the
warped version of paradise imagined by the Salafist militants. And this version
of self-sacrifice comes into collision with another, where someone gives up his
own life to save a stranger.
According
to his family, Colonel Beltrame would have said that he was only doing his job,
but in doing it he exemplified a style of leadership based on putting yourself
on the line instead of commanding others to do the job for you and - of course
- on the ultimate kind of service for others, being prepared to die, if
necessary, to save them.
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