Blood used to be mystery. Before we figured out that it was the iron in the blood that both makes it red and carries oxygen to the brain and other organs and that is what keeps us alive. Earlier humans just knew what they saw: when blood was drained from a creature it died. Blood was life force.
And those earlier humans engaged that mystery. They surmised that somehow the life contained in every little creature must in some way be connected with the Great Life Force. In efforts to control or cajole or assuage that Great Life Force they experimented with the life force they could reach. Offer a little of our precious life force to touch the Great Life Force. And we called it sacrifice.
Some of our ancestors offered the life force of crops or trees, and others saw it in animals. Some offered the most precious ichor they knew: our own. This mystery of blood as a life force is also at the heart of the Christian schema. “Drink from this, all of you,” the gospels say that Jesus said, “this is my blood (my life force, God’s Life Force) given for you.”
But somewhere along the line some Christians screwed up the mystery. Instead of Jesus the Christ being the gift of the Great Life Force, it was reduced to a terrible tit for tat commerce appeasing an angry, petulant God who has a blood fixation for payment. And just blood wasn’t good enough for some of these Christian thinkers. It became about how that blood was spilled. It wasn’t a donation given at the blood bank. It had to be blood extracted through suffering. In this way of thinking Jesus had to suffer (not just die, not just offer the life force) to expiate the sins of the world.
Maybe we dreamed up this nightmare to in some way justify or explain or even deify our own suffering. But suffering is never a virtue unto itself. We’ve just gone through the liturgical season of the Incarnation, which proclaims Emmanuel: God with us. We pray, “Thank you, God, for giving yourself to us in Jesus Christ.” It is life that this whole story is supposed to be about. Not death. Not suffering. It’s about the mystery that the stuff that keeps us alive connects us with Life itself.That’s the mystery of the blood. And in this screwed up, suffering world it’s past time for a transfusion.
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