Chapter Thirteen

WISE BLOOD

I TURN UP THE COLLAR OF MY WOOL TOPCOAT and bow my head against the moisture-laden wind. Snow is gradually transforming the modern city of London into a Dickensian Christmas card, floating down to cover potholes, gutter, cars, and sidewalk with a blanket of softly glowing white. From somewhere I hear music, the muffled tones of brass and what seems like human voices. On a night like this?

I walk toward the sound, the music growing louder with each step, until I round a corner and see its source: a Salvation Army band. A man and a woman are playing a trombone and trumpet, and I wince as I imagine metal pressed against lips in the numbing wind. Three other Salvationists are lustily singing a hymn based on a poem by William Cowper.

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains.

An unavoidable smile crosses my face as I hear those words. I have just come from hospital rounds where real blood was being drawn from some veins, transfused into others, and diligently scrubbed off surgical smocks and nurses’ uniforms. With my church background, I understand the origin and meaning of the Christian symbol. But for the bystanders, what images must fill their minds as they hear that hymn? Would not the phrase “washed in the blood of the Lamb” seem to the modern Briton as bizarre as a report of animal sacrifice in Papua New Guinea?

Nothing in modern culture corresponds to the notion of blood as a cleansing agent. We use water, with soap or detergent, to clean. Blood, we try to scrub off, not scrub with. What possible meaning could the hymn writer, and Bible writers before him, have intended?

In fact, modern medical science reveals that the jarring symbol of cleansing conforms closely to blood’s actual function. The image immortalized in Cowper’s hymn reflects good biology as well as good theology.

If you truly wish to grasp the function of blood as a cleansing agent, I suggest a simple experiment. Find a blood pressure kit and wrap the cuff around your upper arm. Have a friend pump it up to about 200 mm. of mercury, a sufficient pressure to stop the flow of blood in your arm. Initially, your arm will feel an uncomfortable tightness beneath the cuff. Now comes the revealing part of the experiment: Perform any easy task with your cuffed arm. Flex your fingers and make a fist several times in succession, or cut paper with scissors, or drive a nail into wood with a hammer.

The first few movements seem quite normal as the muscles obediently contract and relax. Then you feel a slight weakness. Almost without warning, after perhaps ten movements, a hot flash of pain strikes. Your muscles cramp violently. If you force yourself to continue, you will likely cry out in absolute agony. Finally, you give up, overcome by pain.

When at last you release the tourniquet and air escapes from the cuff with a hiss, blood rushes into your aching arm and a wonderfully soothing sense of relief floods your muscles. The pain is almost worth enduring just to feel that bracing recovery. Your muscles move freely, soreness vanishes. Physiologically, you have experienced the cleansing power of blood.

The pain came because you forced your muscles to keep working while the blood supply to your arm was shut off. As muscles converted oxygen into energy, they produced certain waste products (metabolites) that normally would have been flushed away by the bloodstream. Because of the constricted blood flow, however, these metabolites accumulated in your cells. They were not cleansed by a steady stream of blood, and so in a few minutes you felt the agony of retained toxins.

No cell lies more than a hair’s breadth from a blood capillary, lest these poisonous byproducts pile up. The bloodstream flowing inside these narrow capillaries simultaneously releases its cargo of fresh oxygen and absorbs hazardous waste products, which it transports to the kidneys. There, the renal artery divides and subdivides into a tracery of a million crystal loops so intricate that some observers judge the kidneys second in complexity only to the brain. After the kidney has sorted through the blood’s payload to extract some thirty chemicals, it promptly reinserts the rest back into the bloodstream. One second later, the thunder of the heart resounds and fresh blood surges in to fill the kidney’s tubules.

One group of people view the kidney with an attitude approaching reverence: those unfortunate enough to have dysfunctional kidneys. Fifty years ago all of them would have died. Now they have time to contemplate the wonders of the kidney—too much time. Thrice a week for five hours they lie or sit still while a tube drains all their blood through a noisy, clanging machine the size of a large suitcase. This technological marvel, a kidney dialysis machine, crudely replaces the intricate work of the soft, bean-shaped human kidney. Our natural one, however, weighs only one pound, works around the clock, and normally repairs itself. Just to be safe, our body provides a spare—one kidney would do the job just fine.

Other organs join the scavenging process. A durable red cell can only sustain the rough sequence of freight-loading and unloading for a half million circuits or so until, battered and leaky as a worn-out river barge, it nudges its way to the liver and spleen for one last unloading. This time, the red cell itself is picked clean, deconstructed into amino acids and bile pigments for recycling. The tiny core of iron, a “magnet” for the crucial hemoglobin molecule, gets escorted back to the bone marrow for reincarnation in another red cell. A new cycle of fueling and cleansing begins.

Spiritual Cleansing

Medically, blood sustains life by carrying away the chemical byproducts that would interfere with bodily processes—in short, by cleansing. As I reflect on a spiritual Body, the blood metaphor offers a fresh perspective on a perpetual problem in that Body: sin. To some, the word sin has become fusty and timeworn. Blood, however, provides the perfect analog to reveal the nature of sin and forgiveness with bright clarity. Just as blood cleanses the body of harmful metabolites, forgiveness cleanses away the waste products—sins—that impede true health.

Too often we think of sin as a private list of grievances that happen to irk God, and in the Old Testament God seems easily irritated. Yet even a casual reading of the Old Testament shows that sin is a blockage, a paralyzing toxin that inhibits our full humanity. To repeat a lesson learned from the Ten Commandments, God gave laws for our sakes. In the midst of a withering attack on Israel recorded in Jeremiah, God makes this poignant observation: “They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my anger. But am I the one they are provoking? . . . Are they not rather harming themselves, to their own shame?” (Jeremiah 7:18-19).

Pride, egotism, lust, and covetousness work like poisons to interfere with healthy relationships. Sin results in separation—from God, other people, and my true self. The more I cling to my private desires, my thirst for success, and my own satisfactions at the expense of others, the further I will drift from God and others.

The Israelites had a stark pictorial representation of this state of separation between God and humanity. God’s presence rested in a Most Holy Place, approachable only once a year (the Day of Atonement) by one man, the high priest, who had purified himself through an elaborate ritual. Jesus Christ made that ceremony obsolete by his once-for-all sacrifice. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” he said as he instituted the Last Supper (Matthew 26:28, emphasis added).

The Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist, as celebrated today, contrasts sharply with the Day of Atonement. No longer must we approach God through a ritually purified high priest. On the day Jesus died, the thick temple veil of separation split from top to bottom. Now all of us can enter into direct communion with God: “We have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body” (Hebrews 10:19-20).

The Lord’s Supper commemorates Christ’s sacrifice as continuous and ongoing. Wine stands as a symbol for blood that both bathes every cell with the nutrients of life and also carries away accumulated waste and refuse. Following our analogy, in the act of repentance each cell willingly avails itself of the cleansing action of blood. Repentance is for our sakes, not to punish us but to free us from the harmful effects of accumulated toxins. “This is Christ’s body, broken for you”—for your gossiping, your lust, your pride, your insensitivity—broken to remove all those and to replace them with new life.

Why do any of us go to church and sit on rather uncomfortable furniture, lined up in rows as in a school classroom? Perhaps because each of us feels a pang of longing and hope—a hope to be known, to be forgiven, to be healed, to be loved. Something like this longing lies at the heart of the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper.

Symbols are weaker than the reality behind them. Christ has given us the wine and the bread, received in person and ingested, as signs that we are forgiven, healed, and loved. The elements work their way inside us, becoming material as well as spiritual nourishment, bearing a message to individual cells throughout each body.

If sin is the great separator, Christ is the great reconciler. “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:10). He dissolves the membrane of separation that grows up every day between ourselves and others, between ourselves and God. “But now in Christ Jesus,” said Paul, “you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace” (Ephesians 2:13-14).

Near the end of his life, François Mauriac, the French Catholic novelist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature, reflected on his love-hate history with the church. He detailed the ways in which the church has not kept its promise: the rifts and compromises and moral failures that have always characterized it. The church, he concluded, has strayed far from the precepts and example of its founder. And yet, added Mauriac, despite all its failings the church has at least remembered two words of Christ: “Your sins are forgiven you,” and “This is my body broken for you.” The Lord’s Supper brings together those two words in a quiet ceremony of healing.

Overcoming

Blood has one more property that gives rich meaning to a puzzling biblical image. In one of his visions, the apostle John describes a cosmic confrontation between the forces of good and of evil. He describes the ultimate victors over the personification of evil this way: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:11 NKJV).

How can such a word apply to blood? Overcome connotes strength and power: a terrorist with a knife or gun overcomes an airplane crew; a Japanese sumo wrestler overcomes his opponent. On the other hand, blood connotes weakness and failure—a bleeding person has been overcome.

How to make sense of this strange combination of words? Once again, the biology of blood hints at an answer. To grasp the meaning, I search for ways in which physical blood might be said to overcome. The relatively recent procedure of immunization reveals the process.

When the body confronts a new invader, it normally requires hours to break the code and manufacture antibodies to combat the threat. For centuries humanity lived at the mercy of this time gap, which sometimes resulted in the annihilation of entire populations. Immunization, which derives from brilliant pioneering work by Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, ingeniously solved the time problem. By exposing the body to a weakened or “killed” virus in advance, a vaccine gives the body a crucial advantage, shrinking the time gap. Now the body can flood the scene with prepared antibodies and quickly overwhelm the intruders.

No other medical procedure has done more to conquer disease, as the story of smallpox vaccination wonderfully demonstrates. From the dawn of civilization smallpox ravaged the world, killing half a billion people in the nineteenth century and almost that many in the twentieth. After a stupendous effort of vaccination, in 1980 the World Health Organization declared it the first infectious disease in history to be eradicated.

On a visit to Bogotá, Colombia, I stood at the foot of a bronze memorial to twenty-two young boys who became living links in a courageous saga of immunization. Their story brings to light the secret of how blood overcomes.

In the year 1802, a smallpox epidemic broke out among the natives and Spanish settlers of Bogotá. Aware that the disease could easily decimate an unprotected population, the city’s ruling council petitioned Spain’s King Carlos IV for help. The king had an active interest in the new technique of vaccination, for his three children had received Jenner’s controversial treatment. But how could cowpox vaccine be transported to the New World? Within Europe, vaccinators ran threads or quills through cowpox sores and stored them in glass vials for delivery to other countries, but the virus would dry up long before a ship could cross the Atlantic.

One of the king’s advisers suggested a daring and innovative plan. An expedition was born, with the grandiloquent name Real Expedición Maritima de La Vacuna (Royal Maritime Expedition of the Vaccine), headed by the physician Francisco de Balmis. Soon the Spanish ship Maria Pita left port with a cargo of twenty-two boys, aged three to nine, conscripted from a nearby poorhouse. De Balmis vaccinated five boys before departure; the others would form a human chain to keep the virus alive.

Five days into the voyage, vesicles—small craters with raised edges and sunken centers—appeared on the infected boys’ arms, and on the tenth day lymph flowed freely from the mattering sores. De Balmis carefully scraped that valuable lymph into the scratched arms of two uninfected boys. Every ten days two new boys were selected, vaccinated with the live virus, and quarantined until their harvesting time.

By the time the Maria Pita reached Venezuela, the very last boy was keeping the vaccine alive, the sole hope for staving off further epidemics. De Balmis selected twenty-eight more boys from the local population and stayed long enough to vaccinate twelve thousand people. DeBalmis’s assistant headed for the original destination, Bogotá, now in desperate straits due to the long delay. A moment of panic struck when his ship wrecked on the way, but the carriers of the live vaccine survived. Everyone in Bogotá was vaccinated, smallpox soon faded away, and the assistant went on to vaccinate Peru and Argentina.

Meanwhile, de Balmis himself journeyed to Mexico, where he launched a frenzied vaccination campaign. After crisscrossing the country, he organized a new boatload of volunteers for the dangerous voyage to the Philippines. Those islands, too, eventually received protection from the unbroken human chain that stretched all the way back to an orphanage in La Coruña, Spain. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in debt to those original twenty-two orphans.

How Blood Overcomes

As a child in India I experienced the full force of person-to-person transmission. My parents had very limited quantities of vaccine and no facilities for cold storage, so they relied on the same source as did de Balmis: previously vaccinated human beings. Runners would bring the vaccine up mountain paths and hand the precious lymph to my father. Even before the runner caught his breath, Father would break the little tubes of lymph and begin vaccinating the waiting crowd. Later, from one infected arm he would draw enough lymph to vaccinate ten other villagers. Those ten yielded enough to vaccinate a hundred more. The blood of each vaccinated person locked away the memory of the pox virus, which allowed it to counter any threat posed by smallpox.

From this property of blood overcoming through person-to-person transmission, I gain new insight into the biblical use of the word. For example, at a very tender moment, during his last evening with the disciples before his crucifixion, Jesus said this: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). In view of what followed, that declaration has a hollow tone, and those triumphant words must have soured for the disciples as they cowered in the darkness watching Jesus’ death on a cross.

Later, in the book of Revelation the image of a Lamb appears again and again to represent Christ. We can easily miss the irony of the weakest, most helpless animal symbolizing the Lord of the universe—and not only that but a lamb “looking as if it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). This, then, provides the background for the phrase that used to puzzle me: “overcome by the blood of the Lamb.”

A pattern emerges: God responds to evil not by obliterating it but by making evil itself serve a higher good. Jesus overcame evil by absorbing it, taking it on himself, and, finally, by forgiving it. Jesus overcame as the One who goes before, by going right through the center of temptation, evil, and death.

Think of a scientist staring through her microscope at a microbe population that threatens the world. She longs for a way to remove her lab coat, shrink down to micron size, and enter that microbe world with the genetic material needed to correct it. Now imagine God, after observing with great sadness the virus of evil that has infected creation, joining humanity in order to vaccinate us against its effects. An analogy points to truth weakly; nothing could have more force than the simple assertion, “He became sin for us.”

The author of Hebrews spells out what God’s Son accomplished:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-18)

Somehow, by drawing on the resources of Christ, I become better equipped to overcome my own temptations.

When we lived in Vellore, an epidemic of measles struck the city, and one of my daughters came down with a severe infection. We knew she would recover, but our infant daughter Estelle was much more vulnerable because of her age. When the pediatrician explained our need for convalescent serum, word went around Vellore that the Brands needed the “blood of an overcomer.”

While not actually using those words, we called for someone who had contracted measles and had defeated that disease. We located such a person, withdrew some of his blood, let the cells settle out, and injected the convalescent serum. Equipped with borrowed antibodies, our daughter successfully fought off the disease. She overcame measles not by her own resistance or vitality but as a result of a battle that had taken place previously within someone else.

A person’s blood becomes more potent as that person prevails against outside invaders. After antibodies have locked away the secret of defeating each disease, a second infection of the same type will normally do no harm. A protected person has “wise blood,” to use a term Flannery O’Connor originated. Recall the just-quoted passage from Hebrews: “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18). And again, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Today, when we partake of Communion wine, we are reminded to reflect on the wise and powerful blood of the One who has gone before. It is as though our Lord is saying to us, “This is my blood, which has been strengthened and prepared for you. This is my life which was lived for you and can now be shared by you. I was tired, frustrated, tempted, abandoned; tomorrow you may feel tired, frustrated, tempted, or abandoned. When you do, you may use my strength and share my spirit. I have overcome the world for you.”