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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Saved By The Blood?

 What The Passion-Sayings of Jesus Reveal

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Many people believe that "the blood" of Jesus offers a kind of magical talismanic value, like a rabbit's foot. These ideas are quite pagan and primitive, part of ecclesiastical stage-craft and magic-show religion.

"The Blood" is merely a metaphor indicating the great costliness to Jesus, his tremendous personal investment, in our spiritual development.

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Leslie Weathhead's The Meaning Of The Cross.

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It would seem reasonable, in trying to understand the meaning of the Cross, to study the words which Jesus himself used about it when he realized that his death, so far from being the end and failure of a ministry, was itself a baptism into a wider one, the costliness and scope of which are beyond our apprehension and could be disclosed only gradually even to him...

[There are about] fifty passion sayings which may be considered.

• Click Here for a list of the 50 passion sayings, compiled by Dr. Vincent Taylor.

From these I have chosen some half dozen which seem to me the most significant, and I want at this stage to state the conclusion to which I think they all point... The conclusion is of immense importance...

• The words of Jesus about His suffering and death reveal that He willingly committed Himself to some mighty task, costly to Him beyond our imagining, but effecting for all men a deliverance beyond their own power to achieve, and that in doing so He knew Himself to be utterly and completely one with God the Father.

What the task and the cost and the deliverance were we shall ask in subsequent chapters...

Let us study the sayings...

1. Chronologically the first was the one ... which immediately followed Peter's confession, after our Lord returned from Tyre: 'The Son of man must suffer many things... (Mark 8:31)'...

[I would like to] focus the reader's mind on the word must... And here is yet another most significant word which Jesus himself spoke after the Resurrection: 'Ought not Christ to have suffered these things,' ... or, as Moffatt puts it, 'Had not the Christ to suffer thus?'

Whence this sense of must and ought? Was he the victim of the circumstances of evil? ... Was it the ought of Caiphas? ... Is this just another story of martyrdom...?

My answer is a most emphatic No! ... The must and ought came ... from God himself... [Ought means] 'Wasn't it fitting?'

You listen here almost breathlessly, for you expect those to whom the question was put to burst out with, 'No, of course, it wasn't fitting!' ...

But none of the apostles protested. From the beginning it seems that they never regarded his death as a vile murder. It was that, but it carried a divine meaning and significance... No New Testament writer called it a damnable crime... They gloried in the equivalent of something worse than the hangman's rope...

2. ... another saying ... the Transfiguration (Luke 9:30-31). 'There talked with him two men ... Moses and Elijah ... and spoke of his decease which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.'

What strange words!... The word for decease in Greek is exodus. The word for accomplish in Greek is fulfill... the word exodus used immediately after the allusion to Moses, surely was meant to indicate that, as Moses led those under the tyranny of Egypt to a Promised Land by means of what we call the Exodus, so Jesus would lead those under a greater tyranny through a greater deliverance to a greater glory by his exodus or decease.

... we see a still greater significance in the fact that Jesus appeared to fail. He was crucified... Moses also appeared to fail and died on Mount Nebo...

Elijah also, felt an abject failure... requested for himself that he might die... In one sense Moses and Elijah and our Lord were all saviors of the world. If any one of them had failed, it is hard to see how Christianity could have come to be, and yet all three had a sense of failure that felt like despair... [this] surely points to our prestated conclusion that Jesus had committed himself to a mighty task...

3. Turn to the word 'cup' as Jesus used it. None of his hearers would fail to know that 'to drink the cup' meant to accept a divinely appointed lot. We remember how James and John asked for the highest places in the kingdom. Jesus replies, 'Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?' In the Garden ... he prays, 'O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.' And yet again he says, 'O my Father, if this [cup] cannot pass away, except I drink it, thy will be done.'

But the most poignant of all is the sentence in the Fourth Gospel: 'The cup which the Father has given me, shall I not drink it?'

If the cup represented simply a martyrdom, then John and James could have drunk the same cup. Tradition says they did. If the death of Christ were only the result of the successful plotting of the priests to get a troublesome teacher out of the way, why should Jesus speak of 'the cup which the Father has given me?' He might more accurately say 'the cup which Caiaphas has given me.' Does not the answer point once more to our prestated conclusion?

Another question... Why did Jesus shrink as he did from drinking this cup ... the lovers of Jesus were thrown to lions, boiled alive in burning oil... they bore it without a whimper. Who can suppose that the one who called forth such faith could not suffer his own death ... with equal fortitude? ...

The sufferings of Christ, "I believe ... have a far more profound significance than any sufferings any other human being has ever endured, not because of the measure of their physical torment and agony, but because of who Christ was and is, and because they marked his initiation into something often unsuspected, but something which is the very heart of the gospel. This initiation is suggested by the way in which he speaks of the Cross in terms of a baptism: 'Are you able ... to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?' (Mark 10:38) and, 'I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!' (Luke 12:50)

We have a similar thought in the idea of a covenant in the words, 'This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many.' These are not words about the physical sufferings of a man.

• Baptism, covenant, used as Christ uses them, are words about an initiation into a mighty ministry on the part of a Divine Being... costly to him beyond our imagining.

• Jesus saw the Cross as the beginning of something, not the end.

What that was we will try to indicate later.

4. [Jesus said his life was a ransom (Mark 10:45).] I am ... aware that fantastic theories have been built upon" this word... "such as ... that the death of Jesus formed the ransom price of our deliverance which God paid to the Devil to bribe the latter to let us off hell. It is strange now to think that that peculiar theory held the thinking of Christendom in thrall for nine centuries...

• It is commonly assumed that the modern Church's teaching on the atonement -- the "debt theory" -- has always been and is the only possible teaching on the subject. In fact, the Church taught the "ransom theory" regarding the Atonement for 900 years!

[The word ransom, a metaphor used by Jesus, suggests a] "price to be paid." The takes us back to our "prestated conclusion" in that the atonement work of Jesus was extremely costly to him, a "price" or "ransom" being required, metaphorically speaking. However, we should read the word "ransom" without any view of another receiving this "price," which is pressing the analogy too far.

5. So when we come to the story of the Last Supper, our prestated conclusion seems once more supported. Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it; and he gave to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matt. 26:26-28; cf. Mark 14:22-24)

I shall only ... make [these] comments...

There can be no reasonable doubt that they refer, and that Jesus meant them to refer, to his imminent death. The reference to the Last Supper in First Corinthians (11:23-26) is earlier than that in any of the Gospels -- it is, if fact, the earliest statement of the New Testament institution of the Supper -- and it adds the clause, 'For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come.'

The words used, This is my body, cannot be the basis of any interpretation that makes Jesus and the bread identical, for when they were first spoken Jesus was reclining at table with his men.

• When Jesus spoke the words, This is my body, he was holding the bread in his hands; are we to assume that he meant to say that there were now two of him?!

This means my body; this means my blood, would be an accurate translation of the words, and Dr. Moffatt translates them in this way.

• My body is to be broken and my blood poured out for the sake of the many -- that seems to me a fair interpretation of the sacred words.

Dibelius writes: A Jewish Christian Church with its dread of blood would scarcely have made Jesus say 'this is my blood' (in the cup), but rather 'this cup means a new covenant which is instituted by my blood, i.e. by my death.'

But, as Taylor says,

• Jesus does not invite his disciples to drink blood, or to drink blood symbolically, but to drink wine as representing his life surrendered for many... There is no probability that Jesus saw any objective virtues in blood, or implied that his word transformed the 'substance' of wine into the 'substance' of blood.

No Jew ... could possibly miss the association of ideas when Jesus used the words covenant and blood... Every Jew kept the Feast of the Passover" which was the beginning of the Old Covenant with the doors of houses sprinkled with blood.

• It is as though Jesus said, 'The pouring out of my blood means another covenant with God, effecting this time not a physical but a spiritual deliverance.'

The idea of drinking Christ's blood was not intended. It was a pagan idea revolting to the Jew. It was familiar to the pagan world, where the god was consumed that his nature might be reproduced in the worshiper...

I think that [these words] all support the statement ... Let me state it again:

• The words of Jesus about His suffering and death reveal that He willingly committed Himself to some mighty task, costly to Him beyond our imagining, but effecting for all men a deliverance beyond their own power to achieve, and that in doing so He knew Himself to be utterly and completely one with God the Father.