Frankly I’m glad I couldn’t find the photograph described here: “In September of 1970, Arafat’s guerrilla warfare corps hijacked four international aircraft and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert, at Dawson’s Field. Jordan’s King Hussein used his army against the terrorist group, expelling all members from the kingdom. In revenge, Yasser Arafat secretly ordered the Red Prince to oversee the assassination of Wasfi al-Tal, Jordan’s prime minister, during the Arab League summit in Egypt the following year. As Tal entered the foyer of the Sheraton Cairo Hotel, a Black September gunman stepped forward and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. ‘They’ve killed me!’ Tal cried out as he fell to the floor bleeding. ‘Murderers! They believe only in fire and destruction.’ As Jordan’s prime minister lay dying on the floor, the assassin got down on his hands and knees and licked the blood flowing across the marble floor” (Jacobson, Annie, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, 178).
“A Message of Bloodshed” was the title of a 1.22.2107 sermon on Holy Innocents, Martyrs. You can hear it here https://www.trinityaustin.com/archive/sermons/1078, but it’s only tangentially apropos to this blog. Another thing my mad-internet skills couldn’t do for me was find a depiction of an aged-Luther in 1542, a year before his death, licking up the spilled blood of Christ. I had always been told or read that it was from the floor of the chancel, but this source says different: “In 1542, during a mass in Wittenberg, a woman hit the chalice with her mouth so hard that some blood and wine was spilt on her coat, her jacket and on a chair. Luther licked the spilt blood from the woman’s coat with great reverence. Afterwards, the chair was planed off and the shavings burnt with the woman’s clothes” (https://glossary.wein.plus/luther-martin#:~:text=In%201542%2C%20during%20a%20mass,burnt%20with%20the%20woman’s%20clothes).
Whether from flooring or clothing, Luther humbled himself to reverently consume the blood of Christ spilled from a chalice. The terrorist’s action and words were to terrorize others and humiliate his victim. Luther’s action was one of adoration of Christ’s blood.
We really don’t appreciate just how much blood was involved in the Divine Service of the Old Testament Church. We don’t appreciate that when Jesus crossed the Kidron on Maundy Thursday night that stream would have been running red with the blood of the thousands of Passover lambs having been sacrificed on the temple mount. Their blood had been caught in bowls and had been poured at the base of the sacrificial altar whose drains ran to the Kidron.
Spilled blood is precious – that of the prime minister assassinated to his family – but the blood of Christ is holy and precious to us who know we’ve been redeemed by the shedding of His blood and have access to it in Word and Sacrament.
Yes, we have tangible, touchable, smellable, and drinkable access to it in the Holy Communion, and it is glorious because as the hymn goes “He gives us His sacred blood for wine”. That means we, unlike the cold-blooded terrorist, do not taste blood but wine, not death but life, not a staining but a washing.
In one of my parishes, a longtime Lutheran was indignant when I preached the Circumcision of Our Lord as the first shedding of His blood. At another parish, a retired Lutheran School teacher, new to the congregation, questioned our practice of having the Lord’s Supper on Good Friday. I was surprised and proud of the Elders for their response. The found the practice “fitting and uniquely Lutheran.” To both long standing Lutherans the blood of Jesus in certain settings was apparently off-putting, much like the repugnant act of that assassin was, but when we’re talking the shed blood of our Savior for sinners there is nothing repugnant about drinking it or even licking it off clothing or the very floor. He humbled Himself far more deeply than that to shed it for us.
