Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Robert Howson
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Blood. More specifically, my blood. Generally, it goes unnoticed until we see it being lost. It’s quite likely that all of us have injured ourselves in an accident which didn’t really hurt until we looked down and saw blood coming from the wound. The five or six quarts found in the human body are absolutely essential to life. Without it, life ceases to exist. Traveling through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels, this life-giving agent services each of the one hundred trillion cells in our body. The numbers are so large they overwhelm the mind. A single drop of blood the size of the letter “o” contains 5,000,000 red cells, 300,000 platelets and 7,000 white cells. An average red cell makes a half million round trips through the body in four months before dying and being recycled. This, and the following observations are found in an extremely worthwhile book by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey entitled In His Image.
For New Testament writers the image of blood was a powerful one. They employed the term three times more often than they used the term “cross” and five times as frequently as “death” when referring to Christ’s sacrifice. Yet their Jewish mindset harbored a long term aversion to blood. When the Council of Jerusalem met to determine what laws Gentile converts must abide by, they included the prohibition against the drinking of blood and the eating of meat with blood still in it, believing it was still binding. This was done in contrast to the removal of the long-held practice of circumcision. And yet to that culture Jesus issued the revolting message that “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53)
Why, knowing how offensive this would be to the Jewish mind, would He use such provoking words? The suggestion is that Jesus wasn’t seeking to offend, but to “bring about a radical transformation in the symbol”. Instead of being just a reminder of His death, it also pointed forward to the present realization of His life within us, without which, no life would be possible.