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Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-25
I donated blood last week and got my
Snoopy t-shirt that says “Be Cool. Give Blood.” And, I don’t know, but maybe
because of that, blood has been on my mind a lot this week. And I’ve been
thinking that our worship this morning is pretty bloody. There’s blood in the
lesson from First Peter today: You know
that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not
with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of
Christ. It’s in the Easter blessing at the end of the service: The God of peace, who brought again from the
dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the
everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every way to do God’s will. And,
of course, it’s at the center of our Eucharistic prayer: This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for and for many
for the forgiveness of sins. And, actually, when you think about it, the
whole Bible is steeped in blood. It’s there at the beginning, when the blood of
Abel cries out from the ground; it’s there at the end, when a great multitude
gathers around the throne of God, having their
robes in the blood of the Lamb.
Now, I don’t know about you, but blood is
not a pleasant image for me. I associate it with violence, horror movies, and suffering.
And perhaps some of you have negative associations as well. But whatever our
personal reactions may be, I don’t think we should just ignore all this blood
talk. It’s worthwhile unpacking it and seeing what that language is trying to
convey to us. And doing that brings to mind another blood drive I participated
in. The t-shirt I got that time said, “Give the Gift of Life.” In the culture
of ancient Israel, blood symbolizes life. More than that, blood is life. As the
Old Testament sees it, the blood of every creature is its life. That’s why no
meat is kosher unless all the blood has been drained from it, because the blood
is the life of the animal, and that life belongs to God. And that helps us
understand what the high priest did in the Temple on the Day of Atonement every
year. He took the blood of a bull and the blood of a goat inside the Holy of
Holies and sprinkled it on the ark of the covenant to purify it. The blood, the
life of those animals, represents the life of God, and the act of sprinkling it
in the Holy of Holies signifies that God washes away human sin. And the early
church, rooted deeply in the history and worship of Israel, used this same
language to understand the death of Jesus on the cross. Rather than
symbolically shedding God’s blood through the death of an animal, Christ
literally sheds God’s blood through his own death. The New Testament affirms
over and over that the blood of Christ, the very life of God, washes away all
human sin. And if you don’t like the
word “sin,” you can say it washes away all human fallibility, wrongdoing, and
failure. Only God can do that. It is God pouring out God’s very life for us
through Jesus that conveys to us that we are loved unconditionally and forgiven
completely for everything wrong we have ever done or ever will do.
In our culture, we are so used to
thinking about religion as commandments we obey, rules we follow, rituals we
enact, that we easily lose sight of the truth. The core of our faith is not
about what we do at all: it’s about what God does for us. The central symbol of
our faith, after all. is the cross: God in Christ pouring out God’s life for
us. But even now we can be like those two disciples on the road to Emmaus and
just not get it. Jesus does not rebuke them for failing to believe in the
resurrection: he rebukes them for failing to see the absolute importance of the
crucifixion: Oh, how foolish you are, and
how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not
necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his
glory? Don’t you see that God had to shed God’s blood for you? Love will
settle for nothing less.
I cannot overstate how important this is.
We do not love, do good, and work for justice and peace in order to get God to
love us. Rather, God’s love for us is what sets us free to love, do good, and
work for justice and peace. The First Letter of John says it clearly: We love because God first loved us (1 John
4:19). Our faith, our rituals, our acts of love and goodness are a response
to what God has done for us. That doesn’t mean that we always feel loved, or
that we always feel like loving. Our feelings come and go. But it’s not about
feelings, It’s about a deep acceptance of the truth. God’s unconditional love
and complete forgiveness are given to us as gifts which enable us to live full
and abundant lives. And the shedding of Jesus’s blood on the cross reveals that
in the most powerful and effective way possible.
My message in this homily is not that we
necessarily need to dwell on bloody imagery. Rather I offer an invitation to
look closely at our religious motivation. In our heart of hearts, are we trying
to gain God’s love and acceptance? We don’t need to. But if we are, why not
embrace the truth of the cross and accept that we already have God’s love and
acceptance? As someone who used to try to earn God’s love constantly, I have
found that accepting God’s love for me
as
the beginning of faith makes a huge difference. It makes me want to love more,
it motivates me to be my best self, because I’m not operating out of guilt and fear but out of gratitude and love.
And when I forget that and lose my way temporarily, it is always so helpful and
so life-giving to return to that basic truth: We love because God first loved
us. And if we struggle with that or disbelieve that, we can ask Christ for
help. And just as he did for the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he will find
a way to open our minds and our hearts to see the truth. In fact, because of
him, we won’t just see the truth: we can eat it and drink it.
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