Day 6: Cult of Blood

What helps us get a clearer understanding of what Jesus Christ accomplished on our behalf? An article I read a few weeks ago taught me more about the different “vocabularies” used to help us understand it based on familiar situations in life. To name a few of the more common (these are brief and simplistic summaries): 1. Forensic: Language of the courtroom. We stood charged, guilty and condemned before the Judge, and we have an Advocate who steps forward and takes the verdict and sentence of punishment in our place, so we are justified, acquitted, all charges are dropped. 2. Military: Our enemies had overpowered us in battle but we were saved from certain death and brought to a safe open field. A Victor won the war and defeated our opponents. 3. Financial: We owed an impossibly large debt and someone paid the debt for us, credited our account for the full amount. At the final reckoning, we will owe nothing on the balance. 4. Bondage: We were slaves under the oppression of sin and death until someone paid a great price to redeem us, lead us out of captivity, and set us free to serve a new Master. 5. Cult of Blood: We had blood on our heads, and when our blood was demanded to right the wrongs, a Lamb was offered up instead as a sacrifice of atonement. A High-Priest entered the Most Holy Place for once and for all by his own blood.

Now this last one with the “blood cult” vocabulary wouldn’t make much sense unless we were familiar with a religion that involved priests who performed rituals using blood: priests slaughtering animals, chopping animals to pieces, pulling out and washing different internal organs, starting fires, burning animal fat, splashing blood all over, sprinkling blood, smearing blood on ears, thumbs and big toes. When I was a pre-teen I heard rumors that this kind of thing was being done by devil-worshippers at midnight down in Crete by some bridge that you shouldn’t drive near if you wanted to live to see adulthood. I never drove through Crete alone at night, so I’m not really familiar with cult of blood ceremonies, unless you count what I learned about the Levites in 5th grade Bible. I may have read Leviticus for an assignment in a college theology class, but not much of it stuck, because I probably skimmed it the night before the quiz at 2 am. A few days ago I listened to the end of Exodus and most of Leviticus during a long drive in the car, a high quality recording, with different people reading different characters, and sound effects in the background. The sound effect, mostly, during Leviticus, was the sound of liquid splashing, and the liquid I was supposed to see in my mind’s eye, mostly, was blood. The Levites were up to their ankles in blood when they were doing their special jobs on behalf of the Israelites. What was it all for?

If I was second guessing a last week whether it’s overkill (ha, ha) to think about blood for a few weeks, now I’m wondering how I’ve been a Christian all my life and thought so little about blood at all. Maybe if I were killing my fried chicken meals in the backyard like some of our moms did as kids on the farm, I would feel more at home in the book of Leviticus, but right now as I sit in my smell-free, animal-free, generally clean and quiet surroundings, I have a hard time imagining the sights and sounds and smells and sloshings that were part of worshipping God back in the day.