What's Tony Thinking

The Blood of Christ

The second session of our Lenten webinar based on Fleming Rutledge’s book, The Crucifixion, didn’t happen last evening. A glitch. It happens. Apologies.

The chapter on the agenda, and which will be again next Monday, March 24, was entitled “The Blood Sacrifice.” It is a terrific chapter, which covers a lot of important ground. What I want to do in this post is mostly to excerpt some key quotes from the chapter.

Let’s start at the end, the chapter’s powerful closing words, which Fleming draws her colleague at Princeton, George Hunsinger.

“Christ’s blood is a metaphor that stands primarily for the suffering love of God. It suggest that there is no sorrow God has not known, no grief he has not borne, no price he was unwilling to pay, in order to reconcile the world to himself in Christ . . . it is a love that has endured the bitterest realities of suffering and death in order that its purposes might prevail . . . the motif of Christ’s blood signifies primarily the depth of the divine commitment to rescue, protect, and sustain those who would otherwise be lost.”

Having begun with the chapter’s last word, let’s go back to its opening lines in which Fleming notes the negative reaction in mainline/ liberal congregations to “blood” imagery. (Not the case in African-American congregations.)

“In the modern period,” writes Fleming, “there has been a negative reaction in the mainline churches to the concept of the cross of Christ as a sacrifice. Disdain for the “blood” imagery of the New Testament has become widespread . . . This chapter will argue for its enduring importance.”

“One reason for the reaction against the sacrificial motif is surely the literal-mindedness of a culture unaccustomed to reading poetry. It is one of the peculiarities of our time that we support a vast entertainment industry specializing in ever more explicitly gory movies and video games while at the same time covering ourselves with a ‘politically correct’ cloak of fastidious high-mindedness.”

“When an African-American congregation sings the gospel chorus, ‘There to my heart was the blood applied/ Glory to his Name!’ they are not thinking literally, and it seems almost perverse to imply that they are. They are thinking of the power of the crucified Jesus in their own lives. We are once again in the realm of poetry.”

Part of the reason for the “negative reaction in mainline churches” is however well-founded. As I noted last week, the cross of Christ has often been presented, especially by conservative/ fundamentalists, as propitiation of an angry deity. In this it is very similar to the human, even child, sacrifice practiced in many pre-modern cultures. Such sacrificial propitiation was seen as a way of placating an angry and capricious deity. This is not what is going on in the crucifixion. “This misconception can, one hopes, be firmly laid to rest . . . the sense of placating, appeasing, deflating the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of [God] is inadmissible.”

Fleming continues, “The more important, and truly radical, reason for firmly rejecting this understanding of propitiation is that it envisions God as the object, whereas in Scriptures, God is the acting subject.” In other words, this is not a sacrifice to an angry God on high (an object) but God acting (the subject) in suffering love and identification with those marked out as sub-human by the powers that be, and thus said to have been abandoned by God.

I remember seeing the sacrificial pyramids and temples in Mexico last year. The victim ascended a mountain of steps up to a distant god. In Christianity, God descends to us, to the depths of the human condition.

Another great quote: “One of the simplest ways of understanding the death of Jesus is to say that when we look at the cross, we see what cost God to secure our release from Sin.” Sin is understood here not so much in the plural, i.e. sins, but singular, Sin. A condition and as a power which holds humankind in thrall and bondage. If you doubt that, check the news.

And another: “The paradox of the cross demonstrates the victorious love of God for us at the same time that it shows forth his judgment on sin.” To put a finer point on the latter element, Jesus was put to death by the combined powers of state and religion. Who killed Jesus? We did. We humans did.

Fleming also devotes extended attention to what she terms, “The unpopularity of self-sacrifice in today’s culture.” She suspects this is because we tend to see self-sacrifice as a form of weakness (an increasingly popular view in post-Christian America, now shared and sanctioned by our highest authorities), rather than an alternative form of power (as demonstrated in, e. g., the Civil Rights movement).

In this connection I’ll quote one final section, which she begins by referring to Dorothy Day, the founder of The Catholic Worker” movement.

“The important distinction is that Dorothy Day’s commitment to a sacrificial life arose from a place of strength, not a place of weakness. Such a life, rightly understood, is uniquely empowering because it is aligned with the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ. Wherever there are gracious acts of unselfishness, there are signs of God’s kingdom of remade relationships based on mutual self-offering.

“Even in this old world ruled by Sin and Death, who would want to live a life of utter selfishness? To show any sort of care for others at all, some sort of sacrifice is necessary every day — to be magnanimous instead of vindictive, to stand back and let someone else share the limelight, to absorb the anger of a teenager in order to show firm guidance, to be patient with a parent who has Alzheimer’s, to refrain from undermining a colleague, to give away money we would like to spend on luxuries, to give up smoking, to bear with those who can’t give up smoking — all such things, large and small, require sacrifice. What would life be without it?”

I hope this whet’s your appetite for tuning in next week.