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 Jesus Was Opposed
to All Forms of Bloodshed...
Jesus would never have shed blood or condoned bloodshed. The sentence All who take the sword will perish by the sword (Mt. 26:52) also refers to transgressions against the animal world and all of nature, and is not confined to killing with a sword. There are many gradations to the lack of love. Animals have very fine sensations, while the emotions of humans are often crude and dull
Nothing and no one can “absolve us of a transgression” except our Redeemer, Christ, whose power and light of redemption dwells in each of us. The prerequisite for Him to redeem our soul from a guilt is the following: With all our heart, we must feel remorseful for our unloving feeling, sensing, thinking, speaking and acting. In our inner being, we must ask our neighbor and second neighbor, against whom we have sinned, for forgiveness and, for our part, forgive what he might have done to us. To the best of our ability, we must make amends for the wrong we have done, if still possible. And what we have recognized as not good in us we must not do again. Only then will God forgive us, as we have been praying for the last 2000 years in the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors …
Not only an animal sacrifice, but everything that emanates from us, visibly or invisibly – be it malice, disdain or disrespect, be it cruelty or even lack of understanding, inconsiderateness or callousness – adds more to our existing debt. This applies to humanity and to each individual.
Christ is opposed to all forms of bloodshed. When Christ, who again reveals Himself to humanity through the prophetic word, speaks about animal sacrifice, but also about animal experiments and other transgressions of science against God’s all-wise creation, He often uses the word “abomination.”
We human beings should regard the animals, our second neighbors, as our little animal brothers and sisters. Although, unlike Fall-beings, they did not become guilty before God, the law, they went along into the depths so that we human beings could rejoice in the life of nature and be linked with it in love. Nature wants to serve man. It does not want to be tormented, tortured and murdered and then served up for cannibalistic meals.
The human being, in his inner being, a being from God, often proves to be a creature of cruelty.
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