Sacrifice

“Offer your other cheek!” That is, for a slap, not for a kiss, of course. It’s perhaps one of the most derided Christian challenge. Somewhat a goal beyond perfection, many Christians do take the teaching seriously albeit somewhat apologetically, “I tried and I continue trying but just don’t know how.”

Yet that position of apologetic inadequacy is a privillege quite under-appreciated. Not knowing how to possibly offer the other cheek is a privillege often grossly taken for granted-missing the fact that many others do constantly offer their other cheek, sometimes many moments of every day of their entire lives. Sometimes carried over generations.

There are people who offer the other cheek without thinking, let alone trying. Let alone learning. Slaves did; and slaves continue to. Victims of various forms of exploitation take on that unelected, default role of offering the other cheek. No way out.

Not knowing how to offer the other cheek is a super-privilleged inadequacy.

At any moment in time, across latitudes and around longitudes, sacrifices take place. Sometimes the sacrifice is voluntary, with its meaning straight-forward and immediate, e.g. dedicated to loved ones parents caring for children and children caring for parents. Other times, for a greater cause e.g. firefighters risking their lives to save.

Sometimes, any meaning of the sacrifice may be far too remote and too painful to be fathomable e.g. families and communities losing Emmett Till, Jordan Neely and Eli Beauregard (whose memorial I had the privilege to attend).

Sometimes, the many dimensions of a sacrifice can only be deciphered and decoded many years later, as deliberated by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. Sometimes we are the ones paying the price, hopefully for a greater good. Other times those who have gone ahead of us paid the price for us. I paid the price for growing up in an ecosystem where support was not in the lexicon and my only destiny seemed to be to get the minimal education before becoming the house servant.

Sometimes, by good journalism journalists get martyred as unmarked as the corpses and graves they risked and lost their lives journalizing. Yet their blood didn’t even spill over to the headlines. Unmarked martyrs.

Where pain meets love the thickest-in sacrifices and martyrdoms-the process and the persecution usually take longer than commonly imagined. It is usually not as instantaneous as the persecutor commanding the persecuted to denounce a belief, the persecuted refuses, the persecutor then shoots the persecuted dead, and the persecuted becomes a martyr. The process is usually more complex and more trying, in a space no one wants to be, “Get me out of here!” It is usually a grueling drag involving a full cast not far from that of The Passion-costing more than a kissing betrayer, more than three cock crows, more than a guy scurrying away, more than a piece of linen dropped and abandoned.

Voluntary or not, or anywhere in between-fathomable or not, or anywhere in between-someday the sacrifice and martyrdom usually bring forth some common good.