Blood in your water?
On a 12-day scientific trip to Antarctica about the year 2000 I stayed at Scott Base, the New Zealand Antarctic base.
A 20 minute walk away over a low saddle, is the American base called McMurdo with its Chapel of the Snows, the most southern non-denominational chapel in the world. While I was there, an independent scientific party as part of their research, drilled through deep ice in another place and counted the annual snow layers to find their age. From their surplus research ice they presented each person in the chapel with a slightly late Christmas gift: a little sealed sample vial just like a communion cup, containing a little water, and they told us “This is melted ice from the time of Christ. We thought you might like it.”
That got me thinking. From other research in oceanology, I knew water in the world gets evaporated, rains into the ocean and gets thoroughly mixed via the slow-moving currents. I knew that complete and thorough mixing takes 2000 years, so that any liquid water from the time of Jesus is now everywhere, in any water, from any place. It is in the Pacific Ocean, and has finally reached my country New Zealand. It is in my supermarket vegetables, it is in my water supply, it is part of the water in my body.
Jesus shed his blood for us on the cross. The water in that blood evaporated and became thoroughly mixed with all the water of the world. But that is only complete right now, after 2000 years. This feels like some kind of fulfilment of a prophetic era. In some sense we are in the last days.
Of course the water from the blood of many other people in later history is here too. But this blood of Jesus exceeds in significance all the blood ever shed in history. With this blood in my veins it doesn’t matter if there might be traces of other people’s blood in my vegetables!
How much of the blood of Jesus is in you? Very little of course! But we know the volume of blood in a man, and the volume of all the mixed water in the world. I calculate you have roughly half a million of the molecules of Christ’s blood in your body. A teaspoon has 600. What will that do to you? Well that depends on your faith.
It may cleanse you. It may reconcile you to God. It may well give you literal life and healing. But be careful. Everybody on the planet has also got half a million molecules. Do we need to treat ourselves and others with a little more reverence?