To follow on from my recent piece on the Mosaic Law, I got to thinking about the way that the apostles and elders recommended (rather than imposing!) some minimal parts of the Jewish law on their gentile brethren at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Given that the contentious issue was a keystone of the Old Covenant, circumcision, these stipulations were not the most obvious components of the torah to retain.
You will remember that the stipulations were these:
28 It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: 29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.
What happened to the weightier issues of the Law, upheld both by Jesus and the apostolic teachers, about murder, theft and so on? One answer is that these were already covered in the basic presentation of Jesus’s teaching. I’ve found it helpful to consider the “You have heard it said… but I tell you…” passages of the Sermon on the Mount not simply as the Word of God giving the correct interpretation of the torah, but as his having the divine prerogative to determine what has been fulfilled for all time in himself (such as the sacrificial laws), and what he mandates as the ongoing fruit of obedience to the gospel.
And indeed what he abrogates, such as the dietary restrictions, now that all nations are considered clean. For unlike Muhammad’s Allah, he does not simply change the Law at a whim, but rationally now that the time and the purpose of the Law is fulfilled. Remember that the Mosaic Covenant was always a temporary “codicil” to the Covenant with Abraham, and that it was cancelled by God, Israel having failed to uphold it, at the time of the Exile. The prophets promised a New Covenant in Christ, and where there is a new covenant and priesthood, there must surely be a new Law (Hebrews 7:12).
After all, for all the Jewish claims that the Law is eternal, that needs to be nuanced in many ways. No sabbath command, for example, existed for the Patriarchs, nor circumcision for Seth’s Yahwist line before Abraham. And whilst the sacrilegious murder of children may still exact God’s judgement in many contexts, I doubt that any have been offered to Molech – the precise object of the law in Leviticus 20:1-5 – for millennia. As both Jesus and even Rabbi Hillel pointed out, it is the core principles of the Law that are eternal – love for God and love for neighbour. Jesus changes the context of that radically, because he himself is the fulfillment of torah.
Returning to the Jerusalem Council, two of the edicts are almost self evident, but the third needs some unpacking. And so Paul deals at length with both sexual immorality (porneia) and food offered to idols in 1 Corinthians, but not specifically with blood or strangling. Interestingly, in neither case does he take obedience to a law as his main criterion.
In urging sexual purity, he accepts the Corinthians’ adage “all things are lawful,” but counters it with “not all things are helpful.” In fact, he explains sexual immorality as sin against one’s own body, as well as a reason to excommunicate a sinner to gain his repentance. Since the immediate sin in question was violation of the degrees of relationship in Leviticus 20, we can conclude that the Jerusalem Council’s advice summarised, and included, that whole chapter’s teaching. And why? I suggest that it was because it is one of the only parts of Moses’s Law that is specifically applied to all nations: porneia was the reason that God drove the nations out of Canaan before Israel (Leviticus 20:22-23).
The same universality is true of idolatry, which as we have already seen prefaces Leviticus 20. It was unclean idolatry that, like porneia, caused the land to “vomit out its inhabitants.” Once more Paul explains the edict not in terms of mere compliance, but of conscience. The false gods, he says, are demons with which believers should not associate. And yet the food offered to them, and sold in the markets, has no real taint in itself as God created it. It is the conscience of the weak Christian – or more especially of his neighbour – that dictates the rights or wrongs of food offered to idols.
So what about the advice to avoid blood or strangled animals, which to black-pudding eaters seems one of the least significant of the Old Testament laws, being laid on gentile believers? Well, once again I suspect the theological justification is that the commandment precedes Moses, and (unlike circumcision) even the Patriarchs, being part of the covenant with Noah on behalf of all Adam’s seed after the flood:
“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.” Genesis 9:4.
Let me first point out that, necessarily, Paul would have considered this a matter of conscience rather than strict scruple, for it is certain that none of the meat sold in gentile meat markets would have been kosher, or even halal. The issue is surely a matter of the Jewish theology of sacrifice, possibly at odds with some pagan ideas. As the torah says, the blood question is intimately linked to animal sacrifice, in which the blood must be poured out on the ground and not, unlike the flesh, consumed, because “the life of the animal is in its blood.”
We should understand that “life” here is nephesh, that is “soul,” in Hebrew representing the life-principle. What this means is that the propitiation achieved by animal sacrifice was by the substituting of the death of the animal for the worshipper’s own deserved death. But it was not the transfer of the life/soul of the animal to the worshipper “dead in sins and trespasses,” which instead was returned to the earth, or perhaps rather to the God who created it.
The Jews knew – as perhaps the gentile converts would not appreciate – just how central this non-transferability of animal life was to their covenant with God. In fact, there is only one instance in the whole Bible of God’s people being commanded to drink blood as a righteous act – and that was the command of Jesus, at the Last Supper and in John 6, that only by eating his flesh and drinking his blood could they find eternal life. It is scarcely surprising that his Jewish hearers in John 6 were so utterly scandalised. To us the idea of drinking human blood is high on the “Yuk” scale, if it doesn’t put us in mind of vampire movies. But to them it was supremely sacrilegious not merely in abominable human sacrifice, but even in animals.
Behind their scandal is the truth that no human life can atone for another. But Jesus, of course, taught that there is one exception, in the eternal Son of God made flesh, the New Adam, the Lamb that takes a way the sins of the world – which we will soon be remembering afresh as Easter approaches. The forbidding of blood keeps alive the unique truth that the sacrifice of Jesus is not only the substitution of his righteous death for our sinful judgement, but the unique impartation of his eternal life to us in New Covenant. That of course is remembered and re-enacted in the Eucharist, but also in the whole theology of the Church as Christ’s body, as the temple of which he is Cornerstone, as the True Vine and more.
It remains to examine how literally the Jerusalem Council – or at least the Spirit who directed them – saw the idea of “the blood is the life/soul.” We’ve already seen how Paul could have been no more bothered by the unwitting ingestion of blood than he was by the eating of idol-sacrifices from the market. He can therefore have no more believed that blood was literally the nephesh of a bull or a lamb than a modern scientifically-trained biologist does. It seems probable that he would have regarded God’s command to Moses, and before that to Noah, as the creation of a visible sign – the blood – of a metaphysical and theological concept – the life-principle of an animal.
It follows that Jesus intends a similar spiritual meaning when the cup of blessing, and the other blood-metaphors, are equated with his own eternal “life-force” empowering the believer’s life, by faith and by the physical action of drinking. To the traditional Roman Catholic, of course, the drinking of Christ’s blood is literal through transubstantiation. But the Catholic still cannot escape the metaphorical, for if the Thomistic “accidents” of the appearance, texture and taste of the bread and wine cover the actual blood, then they are still a metaphor, even if a physical and supposedly miraculous one. And there still needs to be an equivalence between actual blood and actual life, as if the soul of a living animal or human actually is in its blood, making blood transfusion as theologically problematic as eating black pudding.
In summary, what the whole biblical teaching on blood is demonstrating, and what, to us, is a somewhat surprising inclusion of that teaching in the directions to gentile believers by the apostles and elders, is that the blood – the life-force – of Jesus is uniquely important to salvation. Without the Cross there is no gospel. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. And, conceptually distinct from that propitiatory sacrifice is spiritual union: “unless you can eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6: 53-54).
For his blood is his life, and that is literally given to us.
