Blood Donation:
A Healing Mission
by Dr. John Armitage
Christ incarnate was not just a spiritual teacher. He healed. He healed bodies, minds, and souls. He came so that we might have life and have it “more abundantly.” This is as true for physical life as it is for spiritual life. Christ’s earthy ministry, and in particular His healing ministry, reveals the life-affirming and life-saving power of God’s glorious and redeeming kingdom.
As Christians, members of His mystical body, we have been called to further this kingdom ministry. In Matthew, we read that Jesus gave his disciples the gift of healing all manner of sickness and disease. After commanding His disciples to preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, Jesus directs them to heal the sick—almost as though healing were the natural consequence of His kingdom drawing near.
More than a thousand years later, the church invented hospitals to deliver on this God-given task in an organized and efficient way. So important was this instruction that even in our secularized present “ministering to the sick” is synonymous with providing more general care and therapy to patients.
Today, blood donors act as healers whenever they give. Without any medical training, they can provide an essential treatment for a huge range of potentially life-threatening conditions—from heart surgery to cancer treatment to severe injury and blood loss.
And just as Christ called for more laborers for His harvest, today more blood donors are needed than ever before. In most places around the world low supplies routinely result in the loss of lives that could have been saved. Even in America and other previously well-stocked countries, blood supplies have fallen to bare minimum transfusion coverage. The kingdom may be near, but are we manifesting it in the way Christ has commanded? The call for Christian disciples to engage in healing work is loud and getting louder.
Matthew 9:35- 10:1
And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest. And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.