the blood of christ
“The Light is but one, which leads out of darkness and the dark world,
into the world which is without end…All loving the Light, ye love the one thing
which gathers your hearts together to the Fountain of Light and Life, and
walking in it, ye have unity one with another, and the blood of Christ cleanses
you from all sin.(1)
The knowledge of the letter, which you formerly got into your notions and
comprehensions, the dark mind gave dark meanings to it…” (2)
Now, an external God called God asserts that I have transgressed some undefined legal code, and so I merit eternal torment in hell. I couldn’t help it, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,(3) nevertheless the conviction and sentence are just. But out of his great love for me he has prepared a human sacrifice on my behalf, so my punishment devolves on him. Indeed it is more than a human sacrifice, for the victim is God and man in a unique combination made specially for this purpose. Who can explore his strange design? (4) At the root of it is the concept that without shedding of blood there is no remission. (5) This was a dark enough notion under the old covenant. The author of Hebrews says it is simply wrong. “The blood of oxen and goats cannot take away sins.” (6) But he does not say it is wrong because the idea is primitive, offensive to the sensibilities, opaque to the intellect and dishonouring to God since it contradicts his fatherhood. Instead he makes the offence far worse, and says that we are made holy by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, (7) leaving the principle of sacrifice intact. Dark notions indeed.
I can hardly begin to find an inner meaning for “without shedding of blood there is no remission”. I suppose I could say that our habitual modes of thought and self-image have to be cracked open if we are to make progress, but really with such savage stuff it is best to discard it.
So is there an inner meaning for “The blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin”? I accept the definition of blood as the life and power of God flowing round his body.(8) There is nothing outside the body, so the blood can never be shed, resulting in a dead body and a pool of blood. No. It is a living body, and the blood is coursing round it, doing the things that blood is designed to do, that is confer life and strength by means of nourishment and oxygen, carry messages using hormones, defend against attack, yes, and take away waste from the tissues. So after all there is an inner meaning to this unpromising material. The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life. (9)
And at the end, maybe I can find a meaning for the cross, one which satisfies me as no other that I have read or thought.
Christ, the eternal Son, is quite unable to suffer. By an amazing process He appears as a multitude of separate selves. They can suffer! They can fight each other, fear each other, be jealous of each other, go to war with each other, try to cheat each other, steal from each other, dominate and bully each other, rape and kill each other. There are also earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, famines and diseases. There is bereavement, loneliness and Alzheimer’s. This is the cross. It is the condition of being souls, it is nothing to do with sins committed by the souls. It is suffered by us, not by a godman on our behalf. It is a continuous process, not an historical event. Its purpose is to enable Christ to be conscious as God, not to satisfy the needs of a self-righteous prig of an external god, nor to transfer punishment imposed upon ourselves in some courtroom onto someone else. It enables our growth into God, it is nothing to do with reconciling to God, for we could never be separated except in seeming. All Humanity is in Christ, and is on the cross. There is no shred of guilt attached to the cross. It hasn’t stopped people trying to impose it, and darkening the feeling tone of the entire world:
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee.
I crucified thee. (10)
I here lift this guilt from the world. It is nonsensical, impertinent and irrelevant. Some deeply ignorant souls have called others “Christ killers”. There are none such, for the simple reason that Christ cannot be killed.
I do not say that guilt attaches to the perpetrators of the horrors listed above, which means that it has no real existence anywhere. They are ignorant and limited in their vision, but the whole encompasses their limitations. Some men created AIDS by combining existing viruses. Jescah Achieng is 14, has lost both her parents and her younger brother to AIDS, and has the HIV infection herself. Who has the greater problem?
There is no question of some being saved by the cross and others being damned because they did not avail themselves of it. I do not say that all have sinned. I say that all are on the cross. Moreover Humanity is on the cross until its last member achieves gnosis, or the knowledge of his Identity, or returns from his separateness to the Unity bringing his consciousness with him. Until then we are filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. (11)
Whoever said that suffering is redemptive? It is simply dreadful. Here we can learn wisdom from a most unlikely source, the jeering crowd: Since inwardly you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.(12)
And there is an inward cross as well. What a cutting off it was to make us feel as though we were separate. What a further cutting off to make us either men or women. And then we forgot even that we had been cut off. We were on our own in an indifferent universe. We were on the cross.
1. 1 John 1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
2. George Fox, Epistle 20 in “No more but my love – Letters of George Fox, Quaker” ed C W Sharman.
3. Romans 3:23
4. Charles Wesley, Hymn: And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood?
5. Hebrews 9:22
6. Hebrews 10:4
7. Hebrews 10:10
8. From the Pentecostals, Chapter 7 above
9. 2 Corinthians 3:6
10. Hymn: Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended? Robert Bridges, after Johann Heermann.
11. Colossians 1:24
12. Matthew 27:40
Now, an external God called God asserts that I have transgressed some undefined legal code, and so I merit eternal torment in hell. I couldn’t help it, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,(3) nevertheless the conviction and sentence are just. But out of his great love for me he has prepared a human sacrifice on my behalf, so my punishment devolves on him. Indeed it is more than a human sacrifice, for the victim is God and man in a unique combination made specially for this purpose. Who can explore his strange design? (4) At the root of it is the concept that without shedding of blood there is no remission. (5) This was a dark enough notion under the old covenant. The author of Hebrews says it is simply wrong. “The blood of oxen and goats cannot take away sins.” (6) But he does not say it is wrong because the idea is primitive, offensive to the sensibilities, opaque to the intellect and dishonouring to God since it contradicts his fatherhood. Instead he makes the offence far worse, and says that we are made holy by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, (7) leaving the principle of sacrifice intact. Dark notions indeed.
I can hardly begin to find an inner meaning for “without shedding of blood there is no remission”. I suppose I could say that our habitual modes of thought and self-image have to be cracked open if we are to make progress, but really with such savage stuff it is best to discard it.
So is there an inner meaning for “The blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin”? I accept the definition of blood as the life and power of God flowing round his body.(8) There is nothing outside the body, so the blood can never be shed, resulting in a dead body and a pool of blood. No. It is a living body, and the blood is coursing round it, doing the things that blood is designed to do, that is confer life and strength by means of nourishment and oxygen, carry messages using hormones, defend against attack, yes, and take away waste from the tissues. So after all there is an inner meaning to this unpromising material. The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life. (9)
And at the end, maybe I can find a meaning for the cross, one which satisfies me as no other that I have read or thought.
Christ, the eternal Son, is quite unable to suffer. By an amazing process He appears as a multitude of separate selves. They can suffer! They can fight each other, fear each other, be jealous of each other, go to war with each other, try to cheat each other, steal from each other, dominate and bully each other, rape and kill each other. There are also earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, famines and diseases. There is bereavement, loneliness and Alzheimer’s. This is the cross. It is the condition of being souls, it is nothing to do with sins committed by the souls. It is suffered by us, not by a godman on our behalf. It is a continuous process, not an historical event. Its purpose is to enable Christ to be conscious as God, not to satisfy the needs of a self-righteous prig of an external god, nor to transfer punishment imposed upon ourselves in some courtroom onto someone else. It enables our growth into God, it is nothing to do with reconciling to God, for we could never be separated except in seeming. All Humanity is in Christ, and is on the cross. There is no shred of guilt attached to the cross. It hasn’t stopped people trying to impose it, and darkening the feeling tone of the entire world:
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee.
I crucified thee. (10)
I here lift this guilt from the world. It is nonsensical, impertinent and irrelevant. Some deeply ignorant souls have called others “Christ killers”. There are none such, for the simple reason that Christ cannot be killed.
I do not say that guilt attaches to the perpetrators of the horrors listed above, which means that it has no real existence anywhere. They are ignorant and limited in their vision, but the whole encompasses their limitations. Some men created AIDS by combining existing viruses. Jescah Achieng is 14, has lost both her parents and her younger brother to AIDS, and has the HIV infection herself. Who has the greater problem?
There is no question of some being saved by the cross and others being damned because they did not avail themselves of it. I do not say that all have sinned. I say that all are on the cross. Moreover Humanity is on the cross until its last member achieves gnosis, or the knowledge of his Identity, or returns from his separateness to the Unity bringing his consciousness with him. Until then we are filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. (11)
Whoever said that suffering is redemptive? It is simply dreadful. Here we can learn wisdom from a most unlikely source, the jeering crowd: Since inwardly you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.(12)
And there is an inward cross as well. What a cutting off it was to make us feel as though we were separate. What a further cutting off to make us either men or women. And then we forgot even that we had been cut off. We were on our own in an indifferent universe. We were on the cross.
1. 1 John 1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
2. George Fox, Epistle 20 in “No more but my love – Letters of George Fox, Quaker” ed C W Sharman.
3. Romans 3:23
4. Charles Wesley, Hymn: And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood?
5. Hebrews 9:22
6. Hebrews 10:4
7. Hebrews 10:10
8. From the Pentecostals, Chapter 7 above
9. 2 Corinthians 3:6
10. Hymn: Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended? Robert Bridges, after Johann Heermann.
11. Colossians 1:24
12. Matthew 27:40