Lent is often a season of reflection and self-denial. Sacrificing sugar or caffeine isn’t exactly 40 days in the desert, but it can bring focus to the significance of the season. The story of sacrifice that ends on Easter is long and complicated. We see in the very beginning that God’s favor can be gained by proper sacrifice. Now we can show empirically that people who are able to delay gratification generally do better in life. We also know there are no guarantees. Things didn’t end that well for Abel. And Cain showed us that when our sacrifices are less than acceptable, things can spiral terribly out of control.
I worked at a grocery store as a teenager. For some reason, I remember a husband who had a pained look on his face as his wife tried to convince him to buy his favorite bread instead of the Winn-Dixie brand. It seemed like an odd thing to stress over at the time. But I don’t think he was struggling with that one decision. He was young, had two small children, and wore a uniform indicating he had a blue-collar job. I imagine that his wife was thinking that spending an extra 75 cents to make life more bearable was a good investment and that he was wondering if a small sacrifice multiplied over thousands of similar decisions would improve the lives of his family.
We decide what sacrifices are worth making by weighing potential problems against their solutions. I see this process play out regularly in the context of estate planning. There is no way to know if your son will get divorced, if your daughter’s business will fail, or if your spouse will remarry when you’re gone. All you can do is decide if you are more bothered by the possibility of something bad happening or by the sacrifices necessary to minimize the damages. Higher stakes and bigger goals justify greater sacrifice.
The scriptural focus on sacrifice builds over centuries, culminating with Jesus offering Himself to God and the world to be tortured and killed for the benefit of all of humanity. The ultimate sacrifice to reach the ultimate goal reached its crescendo with the final defeat of death. There is a lot to try to understand about that. But I’m pretty sure that one thing is that we could have more important goals. If Jesus was willing to suffer and die to reconcile broken humans with their creator, maybe we should have more noble objectives than dying with a lot of money and making sure our kids don’t lose their inheritance. There are no guarantees in life. But if our goals were higher, we might be more willing to embrace the pain of reaching them. Making it through Friday is easier when you know that Sunday is coming.