{"id":28451,"date":"2016-05-29T21:01:47","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T02:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=28451"},"modified":"2016-05-29T21:01:47","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T02:01:47","slug":"remembering-which-sacrifice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Which Sacrifice?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

It\u2019s an easy temptation, wherever the false doctrine of exceptionalism is rife, to treat national holidays as liturgical ones<\/a>, especially when they happen to occur in proximity.\u00a0 So let us be reminded: today, the universal Church celebrates the feast of the body and blood of Christ.\u00a0 Not anything else.<\/p>\n

The universality of the Church\u2019s feasts, and of the Eucharist itself, is a necessary guard against the imperial tendency to think ourselves the center of the world, including the Church<\/a>.\u00a0 Various countries may have their own particular days to memorialize those killed in war, but these stories are not the Church\u2019s story.\u00a0 The Church\u2019s story is the Christ-event, which continues in our Lord\u2019s living presence to us at the Eucharistic table, celebrated today by millions of Catholics around the world.\u00a0 The Church\u2019s memorial is to come to this table, and by so doing, to \u201cproclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the body and blood of Christ received in the Eucharist, moreover, that unify the body as Church, bringing us into communion with one another.\u00a0 Not only does this communion include Christians whose countries have fought and killed one another; by consequence it includes Christians whose countries have constructed sometimes-conflicting narratives that try to make sense of those deaths.<\/p>\n

On a certain level, the search for meaning in death is a natural part of grief.\u00a0 When we\u2019re looking for a reason to believe our loved ones did not die in vain, the\u00a0easiest thing, if they were members of the armed forces, is to seek solace in the vaguely heroic-sounding vocabulary that the national narrative provides.<\/p>\n

Thinking of this, I was particularly struck at Mass this morning by the word \u201csacrifice\u201d.\u00a0 The sacrifice the Church celebrates in the Eucharist is of a profoundly different nature from the sacrifice the State celebrates in its narrative of war, as Michael Iafrate once eloquently pointed out<\/a> before my time here. Granted,\u00a0there is some room for debate on the\u00a0extent to which\u00a0these different sacrifice narratives\u00a0are mutually exclusive, but there is a definite point at which they clash: their claims to primacy.\u00a0 That is why Christians cannot assent to, much less baptize,\u00a0the invocation of anything as\u00a0\u201cthe ultimate sacrifice\u201d other than the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

There are, of course, other sacrifices that are more conformed to his, both in the daily dying to self to which he calls us all who would follow him, and more noticeably, when his followers lay down their lives, without taking lives, for his sake.\u00a0 I heard the deacon tell a story in this morning\u2019s homily\u00a0of an Englishwoman who was martyred for her belief in the Eucharist and housing of priests.\u00a0 I thought also of Oscar Romero, martyred at the very altar of Christ\u2019s sacrifice.\u00a0 Deaths like these are united to Christ\u2019s because they necessarily follow<\/em> it: there is\u00a0an element of humility.\u00a0By contrast, while the word \u201csacrifice\u201d shows up frequently in the narrative of nationalism, the word \u201chumility\u201d is decidedly absent.<\/p>\n

The State can and will celebrate its own narrative.\u00a0 We can\u2019t escape its presence, and I\u2019m not suggesting we try.\u00a0 But as Christians we must never, ever confuse it with salvation history, nor set any other sacrifice equal to or above the one we celebrate in the Eucharist.\u00a0 To do so can have no other name than idolatry.<\/p>\n

May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and for the good of all<\/strong> his\u00a0holy <\/em>church.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is truly the ultimate sacrifice.\u00a0 There is no other.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s an easy temptation, wherever the false doctrine of exceptionalism is rife, to treat national holidays as liturgical ones, especially when they happen to occur in proximity.\u00a0 So let us be reminded: today, the universal Church celebrates the feast of the body and blood of Christ.\u00a0 Not anything else. The universality of the Church\u2019s feasts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2932,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[728,396,356,81,307,75,45,1519,304],"tags":[1379,1045],"class_list":["post-28451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholicity","category-eucharist","category-idolatry","category-memorial-day","category-militarism","category-nationalism","category-the-state","category-us-catholicism","category-war","tag-corpus-christi","tag-sacrifice"],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering Which Sacrifice?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's an easy temptation, wherever the false doctrine of exceptionalism is rife, to treat national holidays as liturgical ones, especially when they happen\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Remembering Which Sacrifice?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It's an easy temptation, wherever the false doctrine of exceptionalism is rife, to treat national holidays as liturgical ones, especially when they happen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Vox Nova\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-05-30T02:01:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Julia Smucker\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Julia Smucker\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/\",\"name\":\"Remembering Which Sacrifice?\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-05-30T02:01:47+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-05-30T02:01:47+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/#\/schema\/person\/e0277cf90bf320044a3256735af342c6\"},\"description\":\"It's an easy temptation, wherever the false doctrine of exceptionalism is rife, to treat national holidays as liturgical ones, especially when they happen\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/05\/29\/remembering-which-sacrifice\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Remembering Which Sacrifice?\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/\",\"name\":\"Vox Nova\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/#\/schema\/person\/e0277cf90bf320044a3256735af342c6\",\"name\":\"Julia Smucker\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8639cd2e58e4ed9c475ff4911dfe4857?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8639cd2e58e4ed9c475ff4911dfe4857?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Julia Smucker\"},\"description\":\"Julia Smucker is a Mennonite who has come into full communion with the Catholic Church, or a Catholic profoundly and gratefully shaped by her Mennonite heritage (depending on who she\u2019s talking to), and has been involved for several years with the ecumenical group Bridgefolk. 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