Note: I preach in a variety of styles, from traditional text behind a pulpit to no-notes and walking about. An intermediate style begins with a short sketch, though I often wander away from the text during delivery. The following sketch is prepared for the March 16 service with the lectionary reading focusing on Nicodemus.
Most of us were forced to read T.S. Eliot’s classic poem The Wasteland in high school, long before we had the maturity or skill to interpret this complicated text by a well educated and experienced poet.
Often, Eliot’s work is interpreted as depressing, the complaint of a morose observer in a bleak time. This interpretation misses something fundamental in Eliot’s masterpiece. The Wasteland is a modern and poetic retelling of the Fisher King story found in the Arthurian legend, itself an interpretation of ancient and often pagan rituals and myths related to fertility and life.
Rather than a depressing tale of life in the early 20th century, The Wasteland is a story of hope, for it ends with rain and birth. The wasteland is restored. The land that was barren due to the infertile king, pierced in the groin, is once again fertile.
The ancients often engaged in blood sacrifice as propitiation. In Frazier’s classic 1922 text The Golden Bough, we are reminded that an infertile King was often killed, his blood spilling into the soil, with a new King. New life, new fertility for the land and for the herds
Eliot is a Christian interpreter of an ancient pagan form. Questions of fertility and vitality run throughout all ancient text, including our holy Scripture. In fact, if we are honest, it is not always easy to tell when the primitive Canaanite fertility cults morph into what we might think of as proto-Judaism or the early Hebrew trajectory. We know that despite our desire and the censoring of later editors, that other gods were often worshiped during the millennia before the birth of Christ, and that that worship often focused on fertility, both for people and the land. We have reason to believe that before we arrive at what we think of as the Hebrew religion, the context of the patriarchs did in fact still include human sacrifice.
Fertility and blood are intermingled in both the prescriptions and proscriptions of ancient Hebrew ritual. Blood becomes the sign that death should pass over the houses of the Hebrews as it strikes down the firstborn of Egypt. That blood is not sacrificial blood but a sign, for the lamb is eaten and the house that is marked will be abandoned in the morning as the people journey to freedom. This is critical for those who would interpret Christ as a Paschal Lamb, for one cannot be a Paschal Lamb, that is the Lamb of Passover and a lamb used as a send sacrifice at the same time.
The blood of women, at birth and menstruation, is a matter of grave concern. In fact, blood itself is viewed as mysterious, vital in the literal sense of the word. The ritual practices of the temple, the eating practices that we now think of as kosher, these are all about blood which is life.
Today’s text, the story of the interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus, touches on fertility in a strange way. For Jesus says to Nicodemus that he must be reborn in order to live. And we know that in the messy chaos that is birth there will be blood.
In fact, we know that in the days ahead for Jesus there will be blood.
This is not the blood of sacrificial atonement. This is not the blood of those strange hymns that tell us we can be washed white as snow in the blood of the Lamb. Seriously? Have these people ever tried to get blood out of anything! This is not the blood of choice, it is the blood of necessity. It is the blood of new birth.
It is the blood of Jesus and the early Christians. It is the blood of Zwingli dead at the gates of Zürich. It is the blood of patriots at Concord and Lexington. It is the blood of those who dared sit at white only lunch counters, of those who dared register African-Americans to vote, of St. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of St. Oscar Romero, of young people yearning for freedom in Ukraine.
There is life in the blood, but it is not always the blood of martyrs, it is not always the blood of weeping, it is sometimes the blood of birth, of new birth — in the chaos and mess, in the pain and turmoil, new life can emerge.
Nicodemus cannot literally return to the womb of his mother to be born again. But he can be born again in spirit just as Jesus tells them. And no one ever said that that would be easy. To be reborn is to kill off some of the life we leave behind. In the maternity wards of our spiritual rebirth, we find the shed blood of false idols, of the toxic fear that eats away at our souls
Preachers can stand in front of thousands and issue altar calls, baptize hundreds, thousands even — but the real rebirth does not happen in the moment, under the lights, it is not in those carefully staged moments.
New life, rebirth, the real bloody chaos of it, comes when the Christian is asked to enter the world new and raw, seeing as if for the first time, hearing as if never having heard, putting on the mantle of Christ and being new then changing how we interact with what is around us.
Where something new is happening there will be blood for blood is life. Where there is fertility, where there is birth, where there is revolution, there will be blood.
For Nicodemus, for Jesus, for you and for me there will be blood. Washed in the blood, not blood demanded by some angry God, some sacrifice, some King who must restore fertility to the wasted land, but the blood of what is new. On our Lenten journeys, marked by ashes, clouded with dust, there will be blood. It is the blood of life and new birth.