Let’s say the word “sacrifice” here represents our good efforts to help others. Let’s say “sacrifice” reflects our giving money for good causes, offering ourselves in service even when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable for us. Let’s say “sacrifice” shows our discipline to pray and worship. By placing mercy and sacrifice in contrast, does Jesus exclude sacrifice from a life of faith?

If sacrifice means self-sacrifice in the sense of constant self-abnegation or denying your needs altogether in the helping relationship, then I would say, yes. Doing too much good can sometimes just reflect our compulsiveness. We end up satisfying more our needs than effectively meeting others’ needs and thus enable dysfunction in the relationship more than anything. Sacrificing can burn you out. God doesn’t want that.

But is there something redemptive about ‘taking one for the team’? And in what situations?

I think about emergency room staff and first responders—doctors, paramedics, and nurses—who will see all manner of people coming through their ward. They will be performing life-saving surgeries, procedures, and therapies in intense, stressful situations.

But they’ll be doing all this not for their family members, not for friends and people they know, not for those who belong to their social circle. No.

Most people served by the health care system are unknown, completely unknown, to the caregivers. Health care providers spend their days helping complete strangers, some of them undeserving we might say. Still, they show mercy.

Edith Cavell was a nurse during the First World War in the last century.^[2]

By late 1914, Brussels was occupied by the Germans. The nursing school there became a Red Cross hospital, treating casualties from both sides, as well as continuing to treat civilians. Initially, Edith was asked to help two wounded British soldiers trapped behind German lines. She treated the men in her hospital and then arranged to have them smuggled out of Belgium into the neutral Netherlands.

Eventually, Edith became part of a network of people who sheltered Allied soldiers and Belgians eligible for military service, arranging their escape. Over the course of the year, she helped around 200 British, French and Belgian soldiers, sheltering them in the hospital and arranging for guides to take them to the border. On August 5, 1915, she was arrested for this activity and placed in solitary confinement.

Edith was tried and court-martialed along with 34 other people involved in or connected to the network. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. On October 12, 1915, nurse Edith was shot by a firing squad.

Edith Cavell’s undying service and sacrifice bled from a heart of love for the stranger, and all for a higher good. Her giving did not focus on sin or punishment. She didn’t discriminate nor judge others, whether they were the good guys or bad guys, whether they were deserving of her help or not. Her love reflected the heart of God, first and foremost, in leading with mercy and grace.

Why does God show mercy? With God, mercy is often expressed by forgiveness. So why does God forgive us? We know the act of forgiveness itself doesn’t take away the sin and its consequences. We know from experience that forgiveness doesn’t nullify or eliminate offensive actions. So, why does God continue to forgive us, and others?

Because “every time God forgives … God is showing a preference …for sustaining relationship over being right, distant, superior, and separate.”^[3] God’s love for you and for me is about God’s absolute ability to keep a relationship going with everyone and everything.

For Jesus, it’s about maintaining the relationship. Jesus didn’t just tolerate, or put up with, sinners and keep them at arms’ length. He ate with them. And that’s what drew the ire of the Pharisees.

Not only was Jesus breaking the rules by eating with sinners, but his action also exposed the Pharisee’s desire, deep within, to separate themselves, cut themselves off from people they didn’t like. Jesus exposed the Pharisees false claims to righteousness, a false righteousness which only justified their hate.

In the past I’ve mentioned to you a children’s story entitled “Six-Dinner Sid”^[4] about a cat named Sid. He was the cat that ate six dinners a day in six different, neighbourhood homes on Aristotle Street. But there’s more to the adventures of Sid the cat.

You see, for the longest time he was able to get away with it because the people on Aristotle Street didn’t know each other, didn’t talk to each other actually. They had no clue what Sid was up to. Each household believed the cat they fed was theirs, and theirs alone.

All Sid had to do was work hard remembering which name he would go by in each house, and the six different ways to behave at each. But his luck soon ran out. His scheme worked perfectly until Sid got a nasty cough.

The next thing he knew, he was taken to the vet not once, but six times, by six different families. By the sixth time the vet realized she was meeting the same cat with the same cough but coming with six different people and responding to six different names. Sid was found out and expelled from Aristotle Street. Sid’s owners said he had no business eating so many dinners.

Sid went to another street, called Pythagoras Place. And, like before, he started going to six different homes on this street. But on Pythagoras Place, the neighbours talked to each other all the time. So, right from the start, everyone knew about Sid’s six dinners.

By the end of the story, the six neighbours that provided the meals for Sid didn’t mind feeding him, didn’t mind that he was getting six meals a day, and didn’t mind giving grace upon grace to Sid. They all loved Sid, who was by nature a six-dinner-a-day cat.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice” means the starting point must always be mercy and love. Not judgement and rejection. Start with love in relationship.

It’s the heart of love that also loves the self, and sometimes puts down limits and recognizes healthy boundaries. In all the good we do, all our disciplines, all our offerings, the service we give, we must start with love. It’s the heart of love that generates the authentic and truly helpful sacrifice. It’s the heart of love that reaches out to the neighbour and grows relationships defined by grace and mercy for the other.

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[1] Matthew 9:9-13. In verse 13 Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings.”

[2] Imperial War Museum write-up on Edith Cavell ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aar8_iLtIcA

[3] Richard Rohr, “One Stream of Love” Evil is a Social Reality (Daily Meditations, www.cac.org, 19 May 2023).

[4] Inga Moore, Six-Dinner Sid (New York: Simon & Schuster, Aladdin Paperbacks, 1991). See my post “A Timely Meal” from www.raspberryman.ca posted on July 22, 2021.