But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
~Matthew 9:13

I was walking to lunch earlier this week, just thinking about life, observing people passing by me on the sidewalk, and cars driving by in the road near work. For whatever reason, the verse popped into my mind, and I reflected on it as I walked.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

In Hosea, the verse goes as such:
“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”

What was the point here, hidden in this well-known verse.

God desires for us to be merciful. Does that mean we should not be sacrificial?

I pondered that for a moment and thought, No, that can’t simply be it.

All love is sacrificial, and because mercy is a shade of the kind of love God asks us to live, the expression of mercy itself is a form of sacrifice, since mercy is the offering of forgiveness, compassion, or kindness to one who has wronged us in the past.

“I desire sacrifice- not sacrifices” seems a little more like it, because God is truly more interested in us developing a disposition of compassion and care for those around us, instead of being enslaved to sin and failure focused, always making amends for love we failed to live with others through reconciliation rites and rituals. Doing the rites and rituals do nothing to help us expand our capacity to care for others in our lives except remind us of failures to do so in the past, or even keep and guard us from doing the very sacrifices he initially designed us for, serving one another.

When we love and serve another, we acknowledge God through our careful activities towards them. Our engagement with others helps illuminate our own connection with God. Burnt offerings simply purge our past damaging actions through a destructive activity, which makes that kind of sacrifice a grand non-productive great cancelling rite.

The Israelites ended up having to perform ritual sacrifices before the priests because they would not perform the relationship sacrifices necessary to live in a community consecrated to Love.

In the big design, sacrifices were meant to be made for others people, and not on pyres. That’s how love works.
And that’s why Jesus said he came not for the righteous but for the sinners: there are those who know they need help learning how to love and serve others, because they know that is what they were designed for, but they have lost the capacity, out of fear, mistrust, or unforgiveness, to live out on their own that commission.