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Cultivating Love: The Core Message Of Religious Sacrifice

Cultivating Love: The Core Message Of Religious Sacrifice

Last updated on: October 3, 2025 at 1:23 am by Henry Karlson

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Cultivating Love: The Core Message Of Religious Sacrifice 2025-10-03T01:23:30-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Anonymous: Prophet Hosea From The Menologion Of Basil II / Wikimedia Commons

We are to live our lives offering to God, and to all others, our love and devotion. This is what God wants from us. God does not want us to engage religious rituals without that intention. God does not want “sacrifice” if our engagement of such sacrifices do not come from our heart. This is what the prophets had to explain to the people of Israel: it was not the sacrifices which God wanted, but the intention which came from them. Theodoret, commenting upon Hosea, explained this well:

Because I want mercy and not sacrifice, knowledge of God rather than holocausts. But they are like someone breaking a covenant, there they scorned me (vv. 6-7): whereas I have no need of sacrifices, I accept them out of considerateness for the limitations of their way of thinking. These two things, on the contrary, I require: the right disposition towards me and lovingkindness towards the neighbor, these also being the first obligations I imposed, “You will love the Lord you God with your whole heart, your whole soul, you whole mind and your whole strength; and you will love your neighbor as yourself.” [1]

Our devotions, therefore, should come from our hearts and minds, and not performed merely with the attempt to appease God through rote rituals. This is not to say rituals are unimportant; they have value, but they should be seen as tools used to express our hearts rather than magical incantations which require legalistic focus on the words and actions for them to be successful. We can make mistakes. We can fumble. What is important in our hearts, and if we try to do the best we can, God’s grace will perfect what is imperfect. This can be seen in the way we engage the eucharist; the ritual, the liturgy, is quite important, and with it, all the sacramental theology which underlies it, is important, but there remains another truth and that is, what prepares us and makes us “worthy” for communion lies not with the ritual but our hearts. Jesus told us if we have evil thoughts in our minds, thoughts which influence our hearts and actions, we must work to overcome them and purify ourselves from them before coming to the altar, which is why Maksim Vasiljević said our worthiness is bound to the way we love our neighbor:

Since eucharistic worthiness is “bound up with neighborly love,” we are forced to expand the notion of Liturgy to “before” and “after”: not only “Liturgy after the Liturgy,” but also Liturgy before the Liturgy. St. John Chrysostom calls the poor the “living altar of the body of Christ.” As the bearer of the sacrifice, the altar is the cradle of he through whom death was, is, and shall be overthrown.[2]

St. Leo the Great pointed this out when he indicated that we should purify ourselves, not by engaging some discipline like fasting, but by engaging charity, by looking to others with love, and by honoring the human dignity of all, especially those in most need of our love and help:

But, since our souls do not attain to salvation by fasting alone, let us supplement our fasting with acts of mercy toward the poor. Let us spend on virtue what we withhold from pleasure. Let abstinence on the part of someone fasting become nourishment for the poor. Let us put our efforts to the defense of widows, the advantage of orphans, the consolation or mourners, the reconciliation of rivals. Take in the stranger, relieve the oppressed, clothe the naked, care for the sick – in such a way that whoever of us will offer from honest labor a “sacrifice” of compassion to God the Maker of all good things, they might deserve to receive from him as a reward the kingdom of heaven. [3]

To be sure, when we realize our imperfections, when we recognize the evil in our hearts for what it is and struggle against it, our contrition opens us up to grace, grace which helps us so that it is enough and we find ourselves worthy for communion thanks to grace which comes to us from our contrition (this truth is revealed in various liturgical prayers, such as one common in the East, where the faithful ask God to make them worthy to receive communion before they do so).

It is imperative, therefore, for Christians to learn from Hosea and understand their liturgical rites must be celebrated in the right spirit, one which is open to mercy and love. Hosea, while speaking to his own situation, revealed universal truths; we must not get so caught up in our rituals, and the sacrifices contained in them, that we think of them merely in a transactional manner where we give God something God needs in order to receive what we want or need from God:

The words of Hosea, confirmed by Jesus Christ, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt. ix, 13), marks a turning point in religious ideas. When primitive man offered up his sacrifices he thought that God required them just as he, man, required the divine clemency; according to this conception the deity did, indeed, give life to man, but also lived himself, so to say, at man’s expense. The voice of God spoke against this idea; “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” means that God does not want what we offer to him, but he does want to give us what he gives us. [4]

Our rituals, our worship, and the sacrifices we make for God, are opportunities for us to connect to God; we are to detach ourselves from our own improper attachments, that is, from anything which gets in the way of authentic love. This is what fasting is meant to help us do. This is what other forms of ascetical disciplines, other kinds of sacrifice, are meant to help us do. They are not the point. They are not what God needs. What God wants from us is our hearts, not because God needs them, but because God wants to share with us the divine life. As the divine life is the life of love, because God is love, to be open to it, we must not only be open to receiving God’s love, but we must integrate it in our lives so that what we do, how we live, is geared towards and reflects that love. Anything which gets in the way of living out that love, we must either transform so it so it can help us properly live out what God wants from us or give it up. And that is what proper sacrifice is about. This is the sacrifice which God wants from us. The sacrifice of love, the sacrifice which makes us merciful and loving to everyone.

[1] Thedoret Of Cyrus, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets. Trans. Robert Charles Hill (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006), 56 [Hosea – Chap 6].

[2] Maksim Vasiljević, Theology as a Surprise (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 146.

[3] St Leo the Great, Sermons. Trans. Jane Patricia Freeland CSJB and Agnes Josephine Conway SSJ (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), 54 [Sermon 13].

[4] Vladimir Solovyey, God, Man & The Church. The Spiritual Foundations Of Life. Trans. Donald Attwater (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2016), 36.

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N.B.: While I read comments to moderate them, I rarely respond to them. If I don’t respond to your comment directly, don’t assume I am unthankful for it. I appreciate it. But I want readers to feel free to ask questions, and hopefully, dialogue with each other. I have shared what I wanted to say, though some responses will get a brief reply by me, or, if I find it interesting and something I can engage fully, as the foundation for another post. I have had many posts inspired or improved upon thanks to my readers.

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