In the world Jesus was born into, everybody made offerings to God, or to their gods.
A farmer brought a lamb. A poor mother brought two birds. Rich men brought bulls. In Jerusalem, priests killed animals at the great stone altar of the temple every morning and every evening, and the smoke went up all day. Across the sea, the Greeks and Romans did the same thing for their own gods. It was the most normal religious act in the world. It was how people tried to win God's favor.
The books of Moses were full of rules for it. Which animal, which day, which part gets burned, which part the priest keeps.
Not one of the four gospels ever shows Jesus offering a sacrifice.
No lamb. No knife. Nothing burned. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the four accounts of his life, put him in synagogues, at the temple for the feasts, at dinners, at weddings, on boats and on hillsides. Not one of them ever shows him at an altar with an animal.
He is God in human flesh, and he never made an offering to God. He did not need to, and he did not ask anyone else for one either. That is the whole teaching. The rest is how he showed it.
He washed their feet
John tells this in chapter 13. It is the night before Jesus died, at his last supper with his friends. Just after it, he tells them that one of them, Judas, is about to hand him over to be killed.
Every god people knew wanted to be served. People knelt before gods. People brought gifts to gods. So here is what God in human flesh did at that supper.
He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded. (John 13:4-5)
Washing feet was a servant's job. Roads were dirt, and people walked them in sandals. Jesus got down on the floor and did it himself. Then he sat back down and told them plainly who had just served them.
Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. (John 13:13-14)
Their whole religion said people must serve God with offerings. God came, and he served people. He did not ask for anything to be killed for him. He asked them to take care of each other.
He threw a prophet's words at the experts
Matthew tells this in chapter 9. Just before it, Jesus heals a man who could not walk. Then Jesus calls Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him, and goes to eat at a table full of tax collectors and people everyone called sinners. Just after it, people ask him why his followers do not go without food the way other religious men did.
The Pharisees were a religious movement of teachers of the law. They saw who he was eating with and complained to his followers. Jesus heard them and answered with a line from Hosea, a prophet who lived about seven hundred years before him.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matthew 9:13)
"Go ye and learn." He said that to men who spent their whole lives studying the old books. He was telling the experts they did not understand their own book.
He did it again in chapter 12, when the same men attacked his friends for picking grain on the rest day. He used the same verse, and then he said something no one had ever said in that land.
But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. (Matthew 12:6)
The temple was the one place on earth where their law allowed sacrifice. Jesus said he was greater than it.
He used their own rule against them
Mark tells this in chapter 1. Jesus touched a man with leprosy, a skin disease that made a person an outcast, and healed him. Then he told the man to go to the priest.
And saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them. (Mark 1:44)
Read quickly, it sounds like Jesus is keeping the rule. The last words matter most: "for a testimony unto them." A testimony is proof shown to someone. Jesus had already broken Moses' law by touching the man. Now he sent the man, healed, to stand in front of the priests whose job was to keep lepers out. The healed man was the proof. The offering was not.
This is how the gospel writers often tell it. They wrote for people who still lived by these laws, so they softened it. They let Jesus use the old rules to show how empty they were, and they left it to the reader to see.
He shut down the temple market
Mark tells this in chapter 11. Just before it, Jesus curses a fig tree that has leaves but no fruit. Just after it, his friends find that fig tree dried up from the roots.
The temple courts were full of sellers. People bought animals there to sacrifice, and they changed their money into the coins the temple would take. Here is what Jesus did.
And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. (Mark 11:15-16)
Doves were what poor people bought to sacrifice. He flipped over the seats of the men selling them. He would not let anyone carry anything through. For that day, the buying and selling of sacrifices stopped, because Jesus stopped it, in public, in front of everyone.
Why he never did it
Jesus never offered a sacrifice because he knew his Father never asked for one. The rules for killing animals at an altar were written in the books of Moses, and people said they came from God. Jesus, who is God, ignored them his whole life and put mercy in their place.
About forty years after he died, in the year 70, the Roman army took Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Their law allowed offerings in only one place, so the offerings ended there. Nobody has needed an altar to reach God since.
If you were taught that God needs something from you before he will love you, a payment or a ritual or something given up, Jesus spent his life showing that was never true. He never brought God an offering. He knelt down and washed feet.
Here is something for today. Instead of trying to give God something to win his favor, do one plain kind thing for someone near you. That is what he did, and that is what he asked for.