The Ultimate Sacrifice

The Ultimate Sacrifice
2 Kings 3:4-27

The writer of a letter in today’s newspaper, in the aftermath of the U.S. president’s firing of his top commander in Afghanistan, asks whether “we must continue to sacrifice our brave men and women” there. By the time you read this, we will probably know whether the United States and its allies can think in terms of having succeeded in Afghanistan; then the “sacrifice” may seem to have been worthwhile. The image of sacrifice is a telling one in this connection. In commenting on Genesis 22 in Genesis for Everyone I noted how Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac provided the poet Wilfred Owen with an image that compared and contrasted with the actual sacrifice of our brave men (not so many women then) in the First World War, and it did the same in the context of Vietnam for Leonard Cohen...