Was listening to an imam today. He spoke about why our sacrifices, though similar and undoubtedly worthwhile, pale in comparison to prophetic sacrifices. He said that while we undoubtedly experience pain, eg at the loss of a brother, we are not ourselves perfect siblings.

The more perfected you are as, say, a mother, the greater the sacrifice required from you or the greater your trial in the loss of or harm of your child.

Now we obviously feel pain and give up a great deal during our trials, tribulations, and sacrifices, and this is proportionate to our completeness as beings in relation to the thing being trialled.

Since prophets are the most complete and most perfect human beings, their trials and sacrifices are the most weighty.

I had never thought of it in this way before, though the question of in what sense prophets experience the greatest trials has bothered me for a while.

I kind of half agree and half don’t. To be fair to the imam, he only mentioned sacrifices, not trials/tribulations. In the context of sacrifices I think this is clearly correct.

But in the context of trials (again, I have extrapolated it to trials, and perhaps he would say something different), I am not sure this reasoning would hold. Since the difficulty of a trial seems related to your sabr/patience, and isn’t prophetic patience most complete?

But then again, maybe I am wrong, because maybe I have it mixed up: the difficulty of a trial is proportional to your relationship to whatever you lose or are tested with, and that is separate from the patience you exhibit in the trial (which doesn’t determine its difficulty)

So maybe the fact that they have the most sabr is precisely due to the fact that they had the weightiest trials, rather than the weightiness of the trials being determined by their sabr.

I suppose another option (to maintain that prophets experience the greatest trials) is that the consequence of “failing” a trial is much much greater for the prophets. As God says in the Holy Quran, He would destroy a prophet who lied about God. So that is probably p terrifying

And I suppose a last option is — though I’m uncertain about this — that the trial is weighty as it is from God, but the sabr is the prophet’s own doing, so even if it relieves the pain of the trial, it doesn’t reduce the weightiness of what was sent.

Spoiler alert: the imam was a Shia maulvi and he was talking about the greatness of Imam Hussain’s (ra) sacrifices in Karbala.

I’ve thought of a few more reasons like for example a sacrifice is something you do, so a more perfected person towards x is giving up more in acting to give up x
I guess that doesn’t apply to a passive trial, like Hazrat Ayyub’s (as), right?
Sacrifices & trials are diff, right?