There are words we use too readily. Sacrifice is one of them. We use it when we see hard work, a decision to give something up or a difficult period, as though watching what someone does were enough to understand what it truly costs them.
I believe we are missing a question: what do they stand to lose? And another follows straight away: if they wanted to stop, could they return to the life they had before?
Learning the ropes with a job already waiting
I imagine the son of a company owner starting out on the factory floor. He wears the same overalls as everyone else, keeps the same hours and learns a trade. Perhaps nobody knows who he is. At the end of the day, his hands really are dirty and his back really does ache. I do not deny that.
It can be a sensible choice. Someone who will one day run a business would do well to understand the work of the people who keep it running. He can learn a great deal, provided he is willing to listen and does not see the experience as a ceremony before taking a seat behind a desk already reserved for him.
But if behind those overalls there is still a fortune, a family ready to intervene and a secure future, his circumstances are not those of the worker beside him. One knows that this period will end. The other may not know whether there will still be a salary next month. One can afford a mistake without putting his home at risk; the other must also think about the people waiting for him at the dinner table.
So when this experience is presented as proof that he has known every difficulty faced by someone starting without a safety net, I pause. He has experienced the work. Not necessarily the circumstances of someone who depends on it. The effort may be the same. The fear of tomorrow is not.
Poverty is not a set of clothes
If I am wealthy and decide to live on very little for a month, I can give up comforts, eat poorly and sleep in an uncomfortable room. I may even feel embarrassed when I have to ask for something. But I know where my money is. I know there is a phone call that could bring this situation to an end.
That knowledge comes with me even if I leave my wallet at home. We do not have to use a safety net for its existence to change the way we experience hardship.
Someone who is genuinely poor and has nobody to rely on cannot decide that the experience has been educational enough and return to normal. They must work out how to pay a bill, what to do if the car breaks down and how to meet an unexpected expense. Even a peaceful day can be overshadowed by fear of the next one.
Poverty is not just having little today. It is also not knowing what you will be able to count on tomorrow. I can approach that reality, listen and help. But temporarily imitating its outward conditions is not enough to put me in the same position as someone who lives within it.
The question about the death of Jesus
This line of thought brings me to a more uncomfortable question: is the death of Jesus a sacrifice if he knows he will rise again? In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples of his death and his resurrection after three days. My question therefore begins with something in the narrative, not a desire to invent a provocation. (Mark 8:31 — Italian CEI text)
Yet I must also keep the rest in view: the same Gospel describes his fear and anguish in Gethsemane. It does not present the pain as make-believe. The prospect of coming through suffering does not automatically make it any less real while it is happening. (Mark 14:33–36 — Italian CEI text)
I also know that, in the Catholic faith, Christ’s sacrifice is understood as the free offering of his life out of love and for the salvation of humanity, not as a gamble with an unknown outcome. That is a specific meaning, which I can question without misrepresenting it. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 609 and 612–614 — Italian text)
And yet my objection remains. If I know that death will not have the final word over me, I am not in the same position as someone facing the loss of their life without being able to count on the certainty of returning. I am not saying that the pain disappears. I am saying that knowing how it will end changes the meaning of what is being given up.
I am not equating the Passion with a protected introduction to working life: the experiences are plainly different. I am questioning the criterion by which we use a word. I do not dispute the reality of the suffering. I dispute the idea that the certainty of returning is irrelevant when we speak of sacrifice.
Those who do not return to their lives
When I think of people throughout history who paid with their lives for choosing to protect others, I also think about everything their deaths interrupted. Not only their breathing, but the days still to be lived, the children they would have watched grow up, the people they would have embraced and the things left unsaid.
I cannot know what was in each person’s heart. Some will have had religious faith, some a hope, some neither. But hoping for life beyond death is not the same as being certain of resurrection after a few days. My argument concerns that difference; it does not claim to prove what does or does not exist in an afterlife.
There are people who never returned to the homes they had left. Those who remained had to go on living with their absence. When I think of sacrifice in its most radical sense, I think of what they lost and what nobody, in the life we know, has given back to them.
I do not want to rank the dead or decide who suffered more. I simply want their actions not to become a footnote: those who had no return to tell us about deserve to be remembered too.
Suffering alone does not make a sacrifice
This does not mean that only someone who dies can make a sacrifice. We can give up an important opportunity, part of our savings or time we will never get back, to care for someone or remain faithful to what we believe is right. We can hope that things will turn out well and still pay a genuine price.
For me, in the most demanding sense of the word, making a sacrifice means letting go of something precious that is ours for a good that goes beyond our own advantage. Hard work alone is not enough, nor is simply suffering a misfortune. And giving up for a few days something that remains safely ours is not enough to claim the burden carried by someone who might truly lose it.
A person’s wealth does not make every act of giving something up false. Someone who has a great deal can still give something that genuinely costs them. But I am not convinced by a measure that looks only at the gesture and ignores what remains available to the person making it: alternatives, protection and the possibility of recovering what was given up.
The measure of what we give
Two people can offer the same sum of money and give up very different things. For one, it may be an almost unnoticeable expense; for the other, a plan they have cherished for years. We do not need to despise the first gift to recognise that the second carries a different weight in the giver’s life.
The problem begins when someone with a safety net uses their own hard work to tell others that, because they succeeded, everyone else can succeed in exactly the same way. Or when they claim to have known from within a fear from which they have always had the option of sheltering.
Before telling others how much I have sacrificed, I should have the honesty to say which safeguards I never lost. That does not diminish the value of the effort. It puts it into proportion.
Nor would I want this argument to become a celebration of deprivation. Someone living without protection should not have to become a hero. They have every right to want a less exhausting life. Recognising the burden they carry should move us to lighten it, not to find beautiful words for leaving it on their shoulders.
What I would like to leave my children
My children, I hope you will have security, opportunities and people you can count on. I do not want to see you suffer to prove your worth. If life offers you an easier path, take it without shame, but do not forget what made it possible.
When you meet someone who is struggling, do not stop at comparing their working hours with yours. Ask yourselves what worries they take home. What would happen if they lost that job? Who could help them? How much room do they really have to choose?
If you can do some good, do it without dressing yourselves in other people’s difficulties to feel better about yourselves. You do not need to pretend to be poor to share something with someone who has little. You need to be honest about your means and use them responsibly.
And keep the freedom to ask questions, even about the most solemn words. Not for the pleasure of contradicting, but to understand. Listen to the answers, acknowledge what you do not know and do not let that stop you from expressing an honest doubt.
When you speak of sacrifice, think about what a person has given, what they still have and what they will never be able to recover. Behind the same gesture there may be profoundly different lives.
Sacrifice is measured not only by what we endure, but also by what we give up without the certainty of getting it back.
Papy