The Language of Blood

I have no intention here of reducing everything I want to say about Jesus simply to the category of sacrifice. There could be a whole lot of things associated with Jesus' death. But they might not all fit into the category of what Jesus does in his sacrificial work. The sacrifice is a process, and when it involves an animal, it involves slaughter. So there's no sense in which that should be forgotten or dismissed or only preparatory. And within that process, there may actually be elements that are more important than the slaughter. If we just view blood as automatically language that is metaphorical for death, those options are foreclosed. They don't even occur to us. It opens up