Facebook, blood type and Jesus

I have a Twitter account but can't remember my "hashtag," whatever that is. For me, Facebook is easier to access and I check it a couple of times each day. It keeps me connected, quickly, with other people -- and given my role as a pastor, this social network helps me in my work.

It seems if some folks place every thought, examined or unexamined, on their page. Too much information! Yet quite often, what is read there is relevant and timely. Someone shares a sadness in a post, which is to say an entry on Facebook, and it enables me to respond quickly.

Facebook can also bring moments of joy. A former parishioner posted this week that she has been cancer-free for 10 years. I remember the day she got the news in 2002 and how she feared her life was over. She is thankful her diagnosis did not turn out to be a death sentence; her thankfulness was posted in big bold capital letters.

Social networking also sometimes yields useful information -- and what I read on Facebook just the other day got me thinking of the season of Lent, which begins this coming Wednesday.

Lent is a sober season of reflection, observed by many churches but not all, that prepares a person for Good Friday and for Easter. On Good Friday, the church teaches, the crucified Jesus shed his blood on the cross and in so doing, paid the price for human sin.

The Southeast Missuori chapter of the Red Cross put a poster on Facebook of all the different blood types. I have A negative blood (6 percent of the U.S. population is the same) and I can give to folks with A+, A-, AB+ or AB- blood. I can receive from A- and O- types.

I had a bit of an epiphany in looking over the poster. Scanning all the various letters on the poster, I wondered what blood type the Savior of the world had. Impossible to say, of course. The technology to discover this did not exist in first-century Palestine.

If, as Christians believe, Jesus' blood covered the sins of all people -- past present and future, then wouldn't that suggest that the Lord had O negative blood? (O negative is the only blood type that can give to every other blood type.) You might be reading the aforementioned and thinking, "Jeff, you're giving this way too much thought!"

Knowing the blood type of the Master is an insignificant pursuit. It is true, though, that there is much about the historical Jesus that cannot be gleaned by reading the New Testament. The Gospels are not biographies. They leave out a great deal.

They do tell us "the good news of Jesus Christ," and in them we get the snapshots of his life, his teaching and his ministry that prepare us to hear the plan of salvation. Knowing more than that will have to wait.

We do see, as 1 Corinthians 13:12 says, "through a glass dimly but then we shall see face to face." The Apostle Paul's words suggest that we'll know more about the One who saved us after we pass through the veil between this life and the next. The venerable Charles Tindley hymn put it even more succinctly: "We'll understand it better by and by."

I look forward to knowing then what I have no need to know now.

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Long is senior pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau.