English translation of Kan…, from the author’s Miras archive. An archival reflection from Miras issue 9, written in June 2014. Events, contemporary reports, and the Soma figure of 302 are retained as stated in the original article. Scripture passages are rendered from the Turkish source.
Blood matters in Christian life and tradition. Having received divine forgiveness through the blood Christ Jesus shed on the cross, we receive that blood at the Lord’s Table in remembrance of this holy atonement. Some understand this symbolically, others physically, but what we share is “that blood.” Throughout our lives of faith, we speak of its power to transform life and bring reconciliation. It is the blood of a price that brings joy: the perfect sacrifice and our redemption.
But what about blood associated with sorrow and pain, bringing only sin and oppression? That blood is now flowing violently in the streets.
A man lies shot, stretched out in a pool of his own blood. The asphalt is red. Those trying to help are stained dark red. Within seconds, the photograph spreads across social media. We saw similar things on the anniversary of the Gezi Park protests: bloody images of people injured by tear-gas canisters, rubber bullets, or batons confront us everywhere.
There is blood in Lice, in Sudan, in the Central African Republic, in Ukraine. It would not be wrong to describe 2013 and 2014 through “images of blood.” We did not see the blood of the workers killed at Soma through their employer’s negligence. In the blackness of coal and the suffocating gas, we lost 302 lives. We now have a frightening familiarity with human blood.
That warm fluid carries life within it and takes life away with it. We watch it pass by within the normality of “the news” and the supposedly ordinary violence of daily life, but it changes us. The more accustomed to it we become, the more something human within us breaks. Flowing blood triggers anger, grief, trauma, and social anguish. What you are seeing is people’s blood.
A man sets out to go home in the evening and stops in a square for two hours to join a public protest. A tear-gas canister explodes against his head. Along with his blood, it takes away the normality of his life. Its effects reach far beyond one man or one family: everyone watching is drawn into its current. In the governing anger and political imbalance of those “distinguished” statesmen who brought the accusation of loving the dead into politics, it is social reconciliation and morality that suffer.
We form an honorable bond with the blood Christ Jesus shed. There is no further blood that needs to be shed. As we plead with God to stop the rage drowning society irreversibly in its own blood, those who maintain their authority or political power through such violence must first stop themselves.
A year has passed since lives were lost in the Gezi protests. On 1 June, eleven of our brothers and sisters were reportedly murdered at an episcopal center in Sudan. Through the blood flowing in Syria, a country and a society are disappearing. Police violence in Türkiye’s streets is not being prevented, and a baton waits to strike every head the people raise.
There is massacre in Rojava. Kurdish people are being ethnically uprooted from Syria, while the same gangs conduct a major campaign of terror to destroy Syrian Christians. Armenians who fled Kesab have been left without a homeland, and many could not even find refuge in Türkiye. All these events are engraved in our minds together with the blood.
Who feeds on blood? Who has grown accustomed to so much bloodshed and made its terrible images ordinary?
Through Christ Jesus’ blood, we enjoy the blessing of an irreversible victory—a power that conquers death and enters our lives with the joy of resurrection, beyond the sorrow of blood alone. Let the political morality that disciplines God’s creatures through their own blood come to an end.
And please, remain shocked. Find those bloody images disturbing. Do not accept them. When blood leaves, it takes life with it.