Audio of the sermon is here:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I don’t know if this has happened to you, but I would guess it’s not uncommon in college. We grow up speaking certain ways, calling things by the names that our parents or family called them, and then all of a sudden we meet someone who calls a thing by a different name. And then it seems like our whole way of thinking is called into question. The things I thought were true or common or typical are not necessarily any of those things. I think something like that can happen with our Christian language. There is a sort of “Christian-ese” we learn to speak, and then we meet other people who don’t know the language, and suddenly we find ourselves having trouble communicating, or having to explain a lot more than we normally do. Some people might say that, for that reason, you shouldn’t use “Christian” words that other people might not understand. But just like in your family, or in your hometown, there’s nothing bad or wrong about the words and language you use to refer to things. It just takes a little time to recognize that not everyone knows the same language.

Neither is it bad or wrong to have “Christian” words and “Christian” language and a “Christian” culture in the Church. Becoming a Christian means learning the language, learning the rituals, learning the stories, learning what it sounds like and looks like to be a baptized child of God in Jesus Christ. And when you learn it very well, sometimes it will happen that you’re going to be caught up short when you realize not everyone knows what you’re talking about. Not everyone is going to think that the things of God are normal. People who don’t know the language and the culture, who do not live from the Word of God, or have the Holy Spirit, are going to find strange many of the things we take for granted.

Every time I pray the Prayer of Thanksgiving in the Divine Service we’ve been using, and it says, “Grant us faithfully to eat His body and drink His blood…” it catches me up short a little bit, and I wonder if there’s someone sitting in the congregation thinking, “What? ‘eat His body and drink His blood’? What’s going on here?” Because talk of eating flesh and drinking blood conjures up unholy images, like grotesque rituals, or cannibalism, or vampires. When people find our comfortable and familiar language uncomfortable and unfamiliar, what should we do? Some people might say we should get rid of it and use only words that every other person can understand. But, listen, if we get rid of the language of the Christian Church, we do not necessarily help unbelievers understand more. These things are spiritually discerned; that is, they’re understood by those who have the Holy Spirit by the Word of Jesus and faith in Him. We can change all the words we want, but if there is no faith, there will be no true understanding.

So when people do not understand what we’re talking about, and it shakes us out of our comfortable familiarity, we ought to go back to exactly what we’re saying, and why we’re saying it. Because eating flesh and drinking blood has never been, eh, whatever. Have you heard of that Uruguayan soccer team that crashed in the Andes Mountains? They were forced to cannibalism to survive. And they were forced to reckon with the deep religious and cultural taboos about eating human flesh and drinking human blood. There is something deeply troubling about the idea, even when you’re starving.

And yet Christians regularly talk about eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ. In fact, they must have talked about it enough, from the very beginning, that the Romans around them thought they actually were engaged in cannibalism. Well, it isn’t just ancient Romans, or modern Americans who find it strange and even absurd. And it wasn’t just a taboo for Israel; it was a command: immediately after the flood, God told Noah that He gave all living things to them as food. “But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning; from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image’” (Genesis 9:4-6). In Exodus, they don’t drink blood at the Passover; they put it on their doorposts, and it is a sign on the houses where you are. God says, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:13).

In Leviticus, God says, “If any one of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood” (Leviticus 17:10-12). And Moses tells the people the same thing just before they enter the land: “Only be sure that you do not eat the blood, for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the flesh” (Deuteronomy 12:23). Blood could be on the doorposts at the Passover, or on the altar, or it could be on the people, but it could not be in the people.

In this context, with 12 disciples who knew very well what Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy said, we could easily imagine one of them saying, “Wait a minute, Jesus. You don’t actually mean that we’re going to eat Your flesh and drink Your blood, right? Because that would be kind of weird, not to mention against the Law of God.” You must mean that it’s something symbolic, or it represents Your blood. And yet, neither Jesus, nor His disciples, nor Paul, nor anyone else in the first 1500 years of the Church ever said anything like that. They just believed the words, however unbelievable they might be.

The life of animals and people is in the blood. Some thought like this is, I think, the origin of Dracula and vampires. And it also relates to the rituals of various peoples, such as Roman gladiators and Scythian warriors, throughout history, who drank the blood of their enemies when they defeated or killed them in battle. So there is an idea that if the life is in the blood, then you can get life from the person or the animal you’ve killed. But you can’t.

            Life is in the blood, but our blood is full of death. Death doesn’t get into us from the outside; it’s already there, in our hearts, from the beginning, from conception. And out of the heart comes every kind of evil. The disease of sin is a blood-borne pathogen, and it drives us forward to death, through envy, greed, lust, anger, hatred, pride, gossip, and unbelief, which is behind all of that. Our blood is hopelessly polluted, and there is no blood transplant in this creation that will fix it. Our hearts, pumping the disease throughout our flesh and out into the world, are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

But something has happened that has changed everything. The Creator has appeared in His creation, with His own heart, and His own blood, and now there is true and divine and holy life in a man’s blood again. In His blood alone is real and eternal life amid all our bloody death. Here alone is blood that is life for all people. “This cup that is being poured out for you is the new testament in My blood” (Luke 22:20). Here, alone, is blood that one might drink and have life, believing the promise of the one who gives it. No blood of any animal, and no blood of any other person, will give you life. In fact, the shedding of blood itself is bound up with death. And death only breeds more death. Except when it’s God’s death. If God suffers and dies in flesh, if He pours out divine blood, then you can drink it and have life. It is to wine that He has attached this blood by His Word, and it is to bread that He has attached His flesh. It is there even if you don’t see it or taste it or feel it, but you can only receive that life by believing Him and His word. Outside of faith, it is still His body and blood as He says, but you can only meet Jesus in two ways: in faith for salvation and in unbelief for condemnation. Thus, the words “for you” require all hearts to believe.

And He has given you this faith. If you do not yet believe, hear the words of the One through whom all things were made: this is My body and this is the new testament in My blood, poured out for you on the cross. Here is the only sacrifice whose blood you can drink. For it is His blood that makes atonement for you as He gives up His life. Here is both the blood that marks your door so that death passes over, and the life-giving blood poured out for the life of the world. Jesus Himself promises: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food and My blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on Me, he will also live because of Me” (John 6:54-57). Here, for you. The life is in the blood. The life is in His blood.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

— Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 4/16/25