In my Geography of Religion's class my teacher asked a question I, and many others, thought we knew the answer to. "What is a sacrifice?" One girl said a sacrifice was like when she was on the field for soccer and she was sacrificing her health in case an injury happened. Our teacher replied that was, while noble, taking a risk of your health, not sacrificing it. I said a sacrifice was when I gave up junk food for the Lenten season. He said that while that was too a noble thing, I wasn't sacrificing something, I was giving it up for a short while.
My teacher said a sacrifice was giving something up at the risk of not only your well being but your livelihood, in a complicated way I can't even do justice to try and repeat. He gave this example of a farmer with ten cows, sacrificing one of his cows for a religious ceremony, in hopes that he will still prosper and survive, even though he just sacrificed part of his livelihood to the god he worshipped.
Then he started talking about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. How God sacrificed his son to cleanse the sins of humanity even though sin would never truly go away. Then he said something that really impacted me. The idea of God giving his son up as a sacrifice doesn't resonant with modern people as it did with his followers.
So I started to look into it a little bit more.
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary a sacrifice is "the act of giving something up that you want to keep especially in order to get or do something else or to help someone." That kind of goes along with what my teacher had to say but I still wanted to know more. If it doesn't resonant the same with us as it did with people back then, how did the concept of sacrifice resonant with the people in the time of Jesus, or Abraham, or other key points in the history of religions?
In the view of Christianity, Jesus is considered the ultimate sacrifice. The Son of God sent to earth; to live and teach the people about what is coming and in the end to be sacrificed not only for them, but for all people past, present, and future. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is considered to "give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45b). It was God's sacrifice to us. Paul writes in Romans 8:32 that God, who gave up His Son for us all, which graciously give us all things. In Christianity Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice because he was given to people who were considered unworthy and full of sin, who only need to repent and they can be saved; human kind. He is considered the last sacrifice, because no sacrifice can be greater to absolve your sins. Even as a Christian, I still don't think I would ever be able to truly understand just how important Jesus' sacrifice was.
I do not know a lot about the Qur'an or Islamic religion. I am trying to learn more about it, so if I have any wrong information in what I am about to say, I am very sorry and hope to correct myself in the near future.
In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the story of Abraham sacrificing his son is believed in all three, with variations in some of the stories, especially in Islam. In the Biblical story, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (begotten by Sara) and when Abraham went to follow God's will, God intervened and provided another sacrifice since Abraham had passed his test. Animal sacrifices were seen as the only way for God to absolve your sins for centuries and centuries .
In Islam, the story is different. In Sura 37, Abraham has a vision of sacrificing his son Ishmael (begotten by Hagar) and tells his son of it, believing it to be from Allah. Ishmael tells his father to do what he thinks is right and right before Ishmael is sacrificed, Allah intervenes as a Spirit of Truth and gives them divine knowledge to prevent Ishmael's death. The thing is, in no part of the Qur'an does it say Allah gave Abraham the vision. In fact the idea of sacrifice to appease an "angry God" by absolving one's sins with the blood of another is nowhere to be found in the Qur'an. Islam has very different view point of sacrifice then Judaism and Christianity. For Islam the sacrifice is personal and about thanking Allah for what is provided until you get to him in the end.
Sacrifice has had so many meanings and connotations throughout history, especially in the last couple thousand years. Who knows how it might change in the next hundred years?
So what do you think is a sacrifice?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genes...
https://dailyverses.net/sacrifice
http://www.islamawareness.net/Qurbani/concept.html
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sacrific...
http://www.quran-islam.org/articles/abrahams_sacri...
