“Blood is a very special juice.” – Goethe
“The life of the body is in it’s blood.” – Leviticus 17:11
Blood. Doc Martin vomits at the sight of it. People swear oaths by it. What is it that is so powerful about this fluid? I remember the first time I ever bled. I must have been about 3 years old. There was an exacto knife on a shelf of our basement. Curiosity got the best of me, wondering what this shiny point was at one end of this stick-like thing. I put my thumb on it to get a sense of it. There was a strange pain. Looking at my thumb, a deep red fluid started pouring out from it. It was terrifying! Something told me that this was my very life escaping my body. I screamed at the top of my lungs while my mother came rushing down the stairs to see what was the matter. After a trip to the hospital to get stitched up I slowly realized everything was going to be o.k. I was going to live. Whew! I still bear the scar from this incident on my right thumb to this day. Talk about a learning experience!
In his “What is Life?,” Erwin Schrodinger says that living organisms feed upon negative entropy to compensate the entropy increase they produce by living, and that while living matter doesn’t elude the laws of physics, it is very likely to involve other laws of physics not yet known. But once these laws have been revealed they will form just as integral a part of this science as the former.
Preston Harold says
In blood, the organic and inorganic realms are yoked. Hemoglobin, the blood protein, “can be split into two substances, heme and globin. While the latter is a simple protein, the former is not protein at all, but an iron-containing substance, with none of the properties ordinarily associated with protein. In hemoglobin, this nonprotein portion is tightly joined to the protein. Hemoglobin is, therefore, a conjugated protein…” (Asimov, “The Genetic Code”) Poetically speaking, at some point in creation, prime “stuff” that was iron-substance must command prime “stuff” that was simple protein to “partake of my substance” (or vice versa) in order to have life, in order for hemoglobin to be.
The word protein means: of first importance. Jesus’ teaching points to man’s psychic makeup that parallels the makeup of blood. This is to say, God is no longer a “simple protein,” God is now a “conjugated protein” in the enjoinment of Father and Son, the Holy Spirit the matrix in which they have their being. Jesus’ blood is shed, is given, that a new testament, a new statement, of this truth may come into being: God as The Absolute is no more, Father and Son are as a one-to-one correspondence.
Jesus likens the relationship of the makeup of our blood to the makeup of the very being of God. So in giving us His blood, He gives us “very God of very God.” What more “Biotheology” does Jesus have to reveal to us? We will continue to probe this thread in our next installment. Until then, peace.