Scotch College

When the colours bleed into one

Graham Bradbeer

When the colours bleed into one

When the AFL introduced the blood rule in the early ’90s it was clear that in the popular mind blood was dangerous; it was important for our health that everything on the field be antiseptic. Where there was once said to be life in blood, the AIDS panic assured us there was death in the blood.

War and bloody violence are communicated to us daily on television, but are typically and thankfully remote from our personal experience. Today emergency and even primary health care is increasingly handled by specialists. Citizens are less and less exposed to blood. Meat comes on blood-free polystyrene trays. The Red Cross is critically short of blood donors. While everywhere else candour about blood was unacceptable, Alice Cooper’s counter-cultural song, ‘Only Women Bleed’, was a striking aberration.

Action movies wallowed in special effects, but depicting the real thing could cost ratings. The ads for sanitary napkins use blue. This trend is difficult for church-goers since the death of the bloodied Jesus is the climax of the Gospels. Holy Communion goes even further and brings into focus his words ‘this is my blood’.

It is clear that blood is not kosher, so to speak; it’s off the menu and vegetarianism is on the rise. Hindus, Buddhists and others embracing reincarnation theology generally believe that all living things are of equal value, hence the slogan ‘meat is murder’.

On the other hand, Jews, Christians and Moslems generally believe people matter more than animals, and as a result their diet includes meat. For them the killing of animals for food is legitimate, necessary and even holy. By definition, Kosher and Halal slaughtering requirements are religious rituals. This is a recognition that the life-blood of the animal has been poured out to provide life for the eater. The killing is thus a holy act. It is reminiscent of the sanctifying of meals by ‘grace before meat’ which typified our Christian forebears.

For those forebears of ours, the shedding of Jesus’ blood represented his sacrificial self-giving. It reveals the extent to which God in Christ is committed to the human family, his life given to provide life for us. Jesus said, ‘The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’ is how John puts it.

Why this sacrifice was necessary has to do with the nature of God and the reality of the human condition. Jesus’ self-giving has many facets in the New Testament, not all of which are palatable today. We readily accept that Jesus’ blood inspires and models sacrifice, but it also propitiates and atones. This is problematic, even offensive to some. For instance, JD Crossan critiques Mel Gibson’s Passion movie as ‘Hymn to a Savage God’. He particularly objects to atonement and propitiation. Who wants a God that calls for blood? Crossan wants a blood-free theology, a theology that makes no call for propitiation or atonement.

Life is not simple, clinically clean or antiseptic. Wherever we find real people, their relationships are muddied and bloodied. From ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica to our divorce statistics, we find people acutely hurting. Our experience is that when the hurt is close, the pain is increasingly personal and acute. For God it is always personal. The grief we cause one another grieves the God-who-wouldhave- it-different.

God is rightly angry. Only an act of atonement (atone) can reconcile God with us. But who can deliver justice for a murdered daughter or a child’s stolen innocence? Where does it stop? The cross of Christ is the Christian answer. Christ stands in for the guilty; he is our substitute, the ‘shock absorber’ for humanity. The apostle Paul marvelled that the Son of God ‘loved me, and gave himself for me’. In Christian theology, ‘everything needed, everything hoped for, and everything required has been resolved by this beloved person. Therefore, there need be no anxiety, no restlessness, no tentativeness, no fear, no uncertainty.’(NIB p.916) This is where a real and alternative vision of how things might be arises.

Critiquing the image, Bono asks, ‘Is rock ‘n’ roll for you just a pair of shoes and a haircut, or a certain sour existentialism or a certain sweet decay? That was one of my first definitions of art. Blood.’ (Bono by Michka Assayas) That’s what lies behind the U2 lyrics ‘I believe in the kingdom come/when all the colours bleed into one’.

The Scotch community has been challenged to be self-giving in a new and far-reaching way. How will we embrace the challenge of the Kapumfi Project? Rightly conceived, it calls for more than ‘a certain sour existentialism and sweet decay’. We need a passion and compassion which recognises the one blood that unites us, and the One whose blood, sweat and tears are for us all. Let us deliver for Christ's sake.

Graham Bradbeer
Chaplain