Living Sacrifices

Proper 16 Year A; Rom 12:1-8, Matt 16:13-20

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (Rom 12:1)

Some of our liturgies include this opening verse of today’s epistle to introduce the people’s offerings at the Eucharist. However it isn’t about monetary collections, or the bread and wine of the eucharist, except insofar as these are tokens of our whole selves.

It’s a striking notion, being a “living sacrifice,” partly because we tend to think of sacrifices as dead, or at least doomed. Some readers have surely imagined this invitation or appeal from Paul as a sort of call to obliteration of self, or to what is misleadingly called “self-sacrifice,” even to death. While we generally overdo the connection between death and sacrifice, here I think there is reason to bear death in mind, even when it is not actually mentioned. Nevertheless the point is not obliteration of self, but its fulfillment in life.

Through the Letter to the Romans, Paul has been juxtaposing death and life, the idea of the Christian dying with Christ in baptism and then being raised with him to a new existence constantly repeated. At least as far back as chapter 5—of which the Revised lectionary reads less than the Roman Catholic original, curiously—this is being pressed home:

just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (5:21)

The theme continued thereafter, and while we didn’t read that verse, the RCL did give us this instance in June:

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (6:4)

Here the fact of our solidarity with Jesus is made clearer; it isn’t just some general idea of new birth or fresh starts (let alone the rather feeble expressions of them in some ideas of being “born again”), but specifically a new identity with this one particular death-followed-by-life, that of the risen Savior.

Something like the “living sacrifice” idea was also anticipated in 6:13, along with this death/life juxtaposition: “present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.”

Along with the idea of new life after a death of sorts, Paul introduces the ideas (to be taken up in chapter 12) both of being an offering (“present yourselves”) and of our bodies in particular being offered; “members” here has that classic meaning of our bodies and their parts. This alludes to the fate and future of Jesus’ own body, and to its reality in the resurrection and for Paul especially now in the Church, which is his risen body.

The idea of presenting or offering parts of the body as “instruments” is a bit vague. The term thus translated (hopla) can literally mean weapons, but the metaphor suggests not warfare but its aftermath. A well-known form of offering was the trophy—a monument where the arms of the defeated, arranged on a frame like a scarecrow, were dedicated on the battlefield or in a temple after a victory. In any case, the metaphor is of offering our whole selves for service, not in a purely internal or spiritual way, but in terms of how we then live as our embodied selves.

Through the intermediate chapters (7-11), this dynamic of dying to one life and living into another continues, often with attention to how our embodied existence challenges us (see 7:14-21). So too the relationship between Jews and Gentiles keeps recurring as a sort of key example of God’s fidelity as well as of renewal, and of unity in that new body the Church. As we now open chapter 12, it is as though we reach the top of a hill in Paul’s argument and see the landscape of the new life in Christ and in particular of the Christian community, to which he now turns.

Sarcophagus, 4th century. Pio Cristiano Museum, Vatican. Photo: Lawrence OP.

It may be less surprising now to find the same emphasis on bodies, on our material selves offered to God, just as in chapter 6, as well as on a sort of implied hinge between death and life. Calling our bodies “living sacrifices” is a powerful if imprecise metaphor. Paul uses a more explicit idea of sacrifice now, not just of presenting an offering, but using the word (thusia) usually applied in Greek to animal offerings that were followed by a festive meal (not a destructive or whole-burnt offering associated with atonement and purification). So “living sacrifices” is partly ironic, because things sacrificed that way die; yet that irony hints at the transition from death to life that has been so prominent in the Letter before this. We have died to one kind of life, but now are truly alive because we live his own life, as his “members.”

Paul then describes the “sacrifice” of our bodies as “spiritual worship,” which may trip us up. This doesn’t sound like the physicality of presenting “bodies” (or “members”). That other-worldly-sounding phrase may trigger the misuse of the term “spiritual” in our modern context, as though it were a reference to some invisible and inward dimension of our being, rather than the divine origin and purpose of all being. We may be tempted to imagine Jesus’ call to new life as something “spiritual” in precisely the wrong sense. This is not about interiority or “spirituality,” at least in the common senses of the word, but about the whole self.

Some readers will recall a similar issue arising when reading 1 Peter in Eastertide; there the comparable idea of “spiritual sacrifices” had to be decoded, meaning something more like “rational” or “real” sacrifices, and the same is true here. Paul does not mean “inner” or “invisible,” but uses the same word we found in 1 Peter, logikos—yes, “logical,” yet in a more expansive sense than that English derivative. The offering of our bodies is a rational, truly reasonable form of worship. And while I won’t harp again on “worship,” we have also seen recently how in the NT this refers not to inner dispositions, or to liturgical worship (as such), but to our full commitment and service to God, which of course makes sense of this passage. To offer our whole selves to God is the real and reasonable way to serve, and this offering focuses clearly on our material, embodied existence.

As Paul then expands on this idea of living sacrifice, it has not only a personal but a clearly social and outward focus: it has to do, he explains, with the way the “members” of the body of Christ fit together, and the need to understand ourselves as part of that whole. The various gifts of ministry are the first set of examples given; a further and more expansive set will be read next week.

While the Gospel narrative and these Epistle readings each proceeds at its own pace at present, there are connections to be made. In the Matthew reading, the confession of Jesus as the Messiah constitutes a sort of “spiritual worship” by Peter, a rational and real acknowledgement of Jesus’ status that resonates with the “worship” offered by the disciples in the recently-read Walking on Water scene.

Yet while Peter speaks the truth about Jesus, we imagine Paul would be less impressed by the words than by deeds. The lectionary saves the sequel for next week, but it is hard not to be mindful already of how Peter will reveal that, despite acclaiming Jesus as the Christ, he has not yet understood what “worship” is; what is the kind of embodied service that Jesus’ messianic identity implies, or how it will demand his fulfillment of this half-understood confession.

Although Jesus’ critique will wait until next week’s Gospel, even his promise that Peter will be the “rock” cannot be read without a hint of what is to come, later still in the story. Peter’s acknowledged leadership will not be based solely on institutional power or influence, but on his own service, his role as a preeminent—with Paul—“living sacrifice,” who would understand eventually in his own body that to be greatest means being least, and that to save one’s life may mean to lose it.