The shed blood of animals made atonement for sins by divine appointment. To offer blood was to offer life – a mystery so great that the chosen people were strictly prohibited from drinking blood. Hebrew life was never a bowl of gravies.
When I was growing up on the buckle of the Bible belt, you were often asked if you had been washed in the blood of the lamb. Today my dentist does not want to be touched by blood much less washed. He dons goggles for his eyes, a mask for his face, and rubber gloves for his hands. Dante envisions the horror of violent men immersed to their eyelashes in a boiling river of blood with fierce centaurs patrolling the banks (Canto 12). Only a few years ago people did not worry much about blood. In my football days, facemask penalties were never called, chiefly because football helmets did not have facemasks. Getting hit in the face was a common occurrence. I remember sadly the night I was kicked in the face, accompanied by an impressive gush of blood. To my disgust, I stopped bleeding before I got to the sidelines, thereby losing all hope of impressing our gorgeous cheerleaders with how tough I was. As you would expect, they continued their long term practice of ignoring me completely.
Since human beings are creatures of flesh and blood (Galatians 1:16), we live happily as long as both components are healthy. Early in life one is mostly evaluated by the flesh, which is why some of us wear tight skirts. In those days good looks is better than good blood. Later in life one is mostly evaluated by the blood. Good blood is better than good looks.
The Bible never stops bleeding because it is a bloody book. “The blood of Christ” is a phrase used more frequently than either “the death of Christ” or “the cross of Christ.” For example, we are told there is no life in us unless we drink the blood of the Son of Man (John 6:53). “In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7-8).
The blood of the matter is the seed of the church. Concerning the issue of blood there is a considerable flow among us. On our left side a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church when asked, “What do you make of the biblical phrase, ‘the blood of Christ’?” answered, “As little as possible.” The right side makes as much as possible, singing with gusto: “There is a fountain filled with blood/ Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;/ And sinners plunged beneath that flood/ Lose all their guilty stains [.]” Whichever hand you wash, the smell of blood continues to rise from the pages of the Bible and all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that fact.
Hebrews declares, “Apart from the shedding of blood there is NO forgiveness of sins” (9:22). Eusebius claims God alone knows who wrote the letter to the Hebrews, but I knew a twinkle-eyed lady who insisted that the Greek style is so elegant that Hebrews could only have been written by a woman – probably Priscilla. If so, Priscilla points out that the earthly high priest enters the Holy of Holies every year with blood NOT his own (9:25) but Christ entered once for all AND with his own blood (9:12). Since the Biblical connection among blood, sin, atonement, sacrifice, and covenant is so bloody obvious, no one with any theological sophistication can possibly avoid some kind of bloody conclusion. In the middle of his famous, twenty page plus paragraph (in The Bear), America’s greatest novelist (William Faulkner, of course) observed the profound truth that the human race learns nothing except through suffering and remembers nothing except when underlined in blood.
Putting aside for the moment my “too, too solid flesh,” the next time our presbytery conducts a theological examination I plan to ask the candidate to explain the meaning of the precious blood of Christ” (I Peter 1:18-9). According to my diagnosis, the health of the Presbyterian Church (USA) requires of our leadership a more accurate theological blood test. Otherwise, it will be too late for this part of the body of Christ to benefit from a transfusion. A bloodless church possesses only esprit de corpse.
