The Body Temple: A Magical Juice
“Blood is a most magical juice.” (from Johan Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, “Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft.”)
by Jack Hoehn | 9 October 2024 |
Blood demands respect. The Biblical “life of the flesh” was in the blood, and Jews were commanded not to eat it. Ties to other humans can hardly be closer than to “our own flesh and blood.” Bread and the blood of grapes become the powerful symbols of a much closer spiritual connection to the God-sacrifice that ended all sacrifices to the gods.
An African Transfusion
It was very early in my medical career when I faced the possibility of the first patient about to die entirely under my young doctor care. I had been at the bedside of death before in medical school, and in residency, but always with a team, with senior residents, and attending physicians beside or behind me when death came. Or death was a cold cadaver on the anatomy dissecting table.
But now I was just a few weeks in Lesotho at a very rural mission hospital and the only physician within hours over often impassible roads. And this lady, still breathing and warm, had delivered her placenta afterbirth but would not stop bleeding. I performed the indicated surgery and packed her uterus as tightly as I could to try and stop the bleeding. We infused the saline infusions we had available, but she had lost a very large amount of blood. Her pulse was rapid and thready and we searched for a relative who was available to give an emergency donation of blood.
There was no blood bank, no Red Cross, no ambulance, no specialist to call. And I knew that without a transfusion her newly born baby was about to be orphaned. Even now as I type these words there is a sudden catch in my breath reminding me of what I was feeling at that moment.
There were nurses with me in that mission hospital operating theatre–white ones from racist South Africa. And the patient on the table was a Basotho woman from the Maluti Mountains, who lived in a thatched hut, and whose husband was working in South African mines as a non-citizen laborer. In 1973 they were not considered fit to eat in the same restaurants, ride in the same bus, or drink from the same water fountains as white people in apartheid South Africa.
I had never done this before.
And this South African young nurse said, “Doctor, I have the blood type she does. Could I give her a unit?” I had never done this before, but the nurse lay down on a gurney parallel to the operating table, and we jury-rigged the IV from the veins of the patient directly to the vein of the white nurse whose healthy blood pressure was enough to transfuse the patient in shock.
There was power in the blood. The patient survived, and… I’ll finish this story at the end of this article.
Blood Breathes
Blood is not a simple liquid. It is a mixture of water, proteins, antibodies, sugars, salts, and cells. It transports oxygen inside red cells, until it reaches the tissues needing oxygen where it magically releases it. The plasma of blood picks up the carbon dioxide and carries it back to the lungs where it magically goes out in your voice, song, or blowing your nose. The blood keeps the sleeping body defenders, leukocytes (white blood cells), constantly in circulation from your scalp to your toenails.
Blood Nourishes
Nutrients like glucose, fatty acids, amino acids are delivered to every cell of the body in this most nourishing of beverages. At last count scientists have discovered more than 4,651 unique metabolites present in the liquid part of human blood. This is why when your doctor needs to make a diagnosis, they order blood tests. There is so much information present in your blood.
Blood Heals
But unlike milk, blood also is medicine. The antibodies in the blood constantly function to prevent illness and death from infectious causes. Blood stops bleeding through complex steps designed to be sure that clotting only happens when needed, and not to cause heart attacks or strokes. It can change instantly from a liquid to a gel and then a solid clot through 12 clotting factors (1 to 13, with 6 dropped) and a few other substances necessary for coagulation—Vitamin K, von Willebrand factor, Prekallikrein, Kallikrein, Fitzgerald factor, Fibronectin, Antithrombin III, Heparin, Protein C, Protein S, Protein Z, Plasminogen, Alpha-2 Antiplasmin, Alpha2 Macroglobulin, Tissue plasminogen activator, Urokinase—OK, do you get my point?—the healing power of blood is not simple, not random; it is delicately and complexly designed to save your life with a clot when you need it and only when you need it. Oh, have I mentioned the platelets…?
Blood Cleanses
“Washed in the blood” is more than a religious metaphor. Urea, lactic acid, and carbon dioxide are all removed from tissues to kidneys or liver by the cleansing power of blood. There, some are selectively excreted by the kidneys, and others can be used or “recycled” as a fuel in brain or heart muscle. Efficient, selective, cooperative, organized—designed.
Blood Warms
And blood cools. The regulation of core body temperature is managed by the constant circulation of the blood. We flush to put the blood close to the surface. We get goose bumps to keep the warmth inside when facing hypothermia. As far as the body is concerned there is very little that the blood cannot do. The Biblical pre-scientific assignation of “life is in the blood” finds no contradiction from science.
There is one thing blood can’t do.
There is one thing that I am suggesting that blood can’t do—it can’t “just have happened.” Blood appears to be an almost magical juice, with a highly complex and unimaginable nuanced dance of chemicals and relationships. For this magic juice to have come together at the right time and right place and in balanced cooperation by mutations or survival alone, without intention and design, seems more than implausible. It seems to me to be a scandal to require by materialist dogma that any of this is a “fortuitous accident,” as I recently read.
We are not claiming that the Jesus who in religious language “shed his precious blood” is proven the creator and designer and engineer of blood by the science of hematology.
But I will now finish my story when long ago I was standing in an African mission hospital, late at night, feeling for the first time in my young medical career that no one else in that room, that hospital, or anywhere within hours’ journey was as responsible for the life of that young mother as I was. And watching that beyond textbooks, beyond tutoring, beyond surgery, beyond gauze packing, beyond supervision by my betters—there was as if magical medicinal life-giving power in blood.
Essential, irreplaceable—spilt blood took life with it. Gifted blood—a mother returns to suckle her newborn babe.
Documenting the Spiritual
But that isn’t all—in this story I am documenting another power of the blood: I am documenting a spiritual power. And although I cannot weigh this, I can describe it, report it, review it, and determine if this report is true or false.
And this is the power that took a South African white girl raised in a society of racial superiority, color discrimination, political domination, and constantly enforced social separation out of her comfortable dominant culture into a small African mission hospital late at night. This is the power that willingly laid that young white woman down on an uncomfortable trolley with a needle in her vein sharing her red blood with a young black woman lying on the operating table beside her.
This is the moral and spiritual power symbolized by grape juice that is something completely real and true that Christians and others experience. It is beyond medicine, more than blood pressure, more than coagulation, more than complex specified information, more than survival of the superior, more than science. And yet the spiritual power that changes behaviors in humans is fully observable, reportable, analyzable.
We worship in our body temples and marvel at the science. But what changes bias and discrimination and put those two different young women together, black and white, patient and nurse, oppressor and oppressed, privileged and underprivileged, is a fact as scientific and documentable as Alpha 2-macroglobulin.
Blood is indeed in many senses a most magical juice.[1]
This is #13 in series on worship guided by science (#1 is here). Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD (Loma Linda University), CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London).
Jack’s book Adventist Tomorrow: Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus in its second edition continues to be the most popular book Adventist Today has published. Chapters include: Jesus Alone, Procreation: Chance or Choice?, Big Issues Over a Small Cup, What Remains of the Remnant? DNA–Reading God’s Alphabet, and many more.
Jack’s wife Deanne has a delightful new book called Loving You—I Went to Africa, about their 13 years as medical missionaries.
Readers say: “What a beautiful story. Completely drew me in and I read every word. The pacing, the way the events unfold feels like hearing a friend talking about an exotic life of service…” “Great storytelling, great read, hard to put down.”
These books and others are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page. All sales go to support Adventist Today.
