Squeamish about the Bible’s Blood Speak?

The Bible speaks of Jesus's blood three times more often than his death

Nearly a decade ago, Hannah Graham, a UVA student from my parish, went missing near her campus. Weeks later her body was found. She’d been assaulted and brutally murdered.

Theologically, I’ve always been committed to the sheer nothingness of evil. Rather than a thing with any substance or subsistence of its own, the tradition holds that evil is absence. Maybe evil is the privation of the good, as Augustine thought it, but during the prayer service I led in the days when Hannah was still missing, when everyone hoped for the best but suspected the worst, the presence of sin and evil was felt palpably throughout the sanctuary. In the months after then the devastation and trauma felt from her murder grew and festered. I watched with sadness and something like righteous anger as many of Hannah’s friends in my congregation struggled with depression, despair, and a loss of faith. When it was reported that Jesse Matthew, her accused murderer, had decided to plead guilty, I rejoiced confident that God rejoiced too now that Hannah would receive at least this measure of justice.

My takeaway from this experience:

A vital refrain of scripture gets obscured when we individualize and moralize sin.

Sin costs something.

Sin must be atoned for.

Yes, Jesus enjoins us to forgive as much as 70 x 7 times, but sin, like the sin done to Hannah and the entire community who loved her, requires justice too. As my mother used to tell me, “Saying sorry doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to repair the damage you’ve done.” Even for my mom, repair required sacrifice.

Sin costs something.

This is the convicting acknowledgment running through the rituals of sacrifice in the Book of Leviticus. Counter to the popular complaint about traditional atonement theories which asks, flippantly, “Why can’t God just forgive?” the fundamental presupposition of Leviticus is that there must be atonement for sin. Put aside distracting conceits like God’s offended honor and simply focus on the concrete, real-world devastation wrought by sin.

As Fleming Rutledge argues in her book, The Crucifixion:

“Sin can’t just be forgiven and then set aside as though nothing has happened. If someone commits a terrible wrong, Christians know that we are to forgive; but something in us nevertheless cries out for justice. The Old and New Testaments both speak profoundly to this problem. It is not enough to say, ‘Mistakes were made, or ‘I didn’t mean to’ ; the whole system in Leviticus is set up to prevent anyone from thinking that unwitting sin doesn’t count.”

In Part 2 of The Crucifixion, Fleming Rutledge examines at length the primary atonement motifs (her preferred term over atonement theories) in the biblical narrative. She gives considerable attention to the motif of blood sacrifice, seeing it not only as the foundational motif upon which many other atonement motifs depend but also because blood sacrifice, along with passover, is the primary lens through which the early Christians interpreted the death of Jesus. They did so, after all, because ‘their single source for discovering the meaning of the strange death of their Lord was the scriptures they had always known.’

They grappled with the meaning of Christ’s death in the terms available to them, in other words, and in their scriptures blood sacrifice was a recurring motif for understanding how sinful humanity is brought near to their God. In particular, the Book of Leviticus became fertile ground for interpreting the terrible mystery of the cross.

As Rutledge imagines:

“It must have been a very exciting process. Anyone reading Leviticus and thinking of  Jesus at the same time could hardly fail to notice a phrase like ‘a male without blemish’ in the list of stipulations. This is the sort of detail that would would jump off the page of  the Hebrew Scriptures in those first years after the resurrection.”

Mainline and progressive Christians frequently express disdain for the blood imagery of scripture. We judge it, snobbishly Rutledge thinks, to be primitive; meanwhile, we let our kids play violent games and we fill theaters for violent films. We exult in gore and violence in our entertainments, but we feign that we’re too fastidious to exalt God by singing “There’s a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Rare is the Christmas preacher bold enough take the Slaughter of the Innocents as his text while the Washington Post app on my iPhone makes it uncomfortably obvious that the slaughter of innocents goes on every day. Never mind that in its use of blood imagery, scripture remains reticent, refusing to dwell in gore by focusing instead on the effects of the sacrificed blood.

In our disinclination towards the language of blood and sacrifice, treating it as a detachable option in atonement theology, Christians today could not be more different from the writers of the Old Testament who held that humanity is distant from God in its sin and atonement is possible only by way of blood.

Viewed from the perspective of the Hebrew Scriptures, we make the very error Anselm cautions against in Cur Deus Homo.

We’ve not truly considered the weight of sin.

My friend, Tony Jones, once featured a guest post on his blog from someone who advocated altering the traditional serving words for the eucharist (The body of Christ broken for you. The blood of Christ shed for you.) to “Christ is here, in your brokenness. Christ is here, bringing you to life.” Or, “Christ broken, with us in our brokenness. Christ’s life, flowing through our lives.” Such redactions just won’t do the heavy lifting if one is committed to taking seriously the language of scripture. While the traditional imagery of blood sacrifice may make some squeamish, Fleming Rutledge insists it is:

“Central to the story of salvation through Jesus Christ, and without this theme the Christian proclamation loses much of its power, becoming both theologically and ethically undernourished.”

Editing out blood sacrifice commits the very act it’s intended to avoid, violence.

It commits violence agains the text of scripture by eviscerating the language of the Bible.

Scripture speaks of the blood of Christ three times more often than it speaks of the death of Christ.

Such a statistic alone reveals the extent to which blood sacrifice is a dominant theme in extrapolating the meaning of Christ’s death.