The Stains of His Blood are Everywhere

A Reflection on Nietzsche's Declaration

We are a people obsessed with stains. We scrub countertops, delete browser histories, and curate online selves with filters and polish. We are expert launderers of guilt, but some stains don’t come out.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, in perhaps his most famous quotes, hurled one of the boldest indictments of the modern age: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” He didn’t whisper it. He shouted it like a prophet in reverse. It was less a triumph than a trembling eulogy. “Who will wipe this blood from us?” he asked.¹ The question, though rhetorical, rings truer than he knew.

Nietzsche thought he was announcing the obituary of the divine, but he was, in fact, smearing his fingers across a crime scene he could not clean. He was right to notice the blood. He just misjudged what it meant. What he called “the decomposition of God” was not the stench of decay; rather, it was the scent of a sacrifice still lingering in the air.²

Christ really did die. He really did bleed, and his blood has gotten everywhere. It has soaked into the soil of history and the fibers of civilization. We tried to bury Him. Rome tried. The Pharisees tried. Every era since has tried, whether it be under marble tombs and modern philosophies, behind satire, or under silence. But like every other grave that tried to hold Him, our attempts have cracked open.

This essay is about that blood, not in horror but in wonder. It is about how the very thing we tried to wipe away has instead become the mark that defines us. It is about how the blood that Nietzsche thought condemned us as weak is the blood that actually gives us strength. The stains of Christ’s blood are everywhere upon us, and they are glorious.

Nietzsche’s Lament and Its Irony

Nietzsche deserves better than a quick dismissal. Among all the philosophers to take a hammer to the cathedral walls of Western belief, he may have been the most honest in doing so. There’s a certain integrity in the way he refused to keep the fruits of Christianity once he had uprooted its tree. Unlike many of his Enlightenment predecessors who were content to enjoy Christian ethics without Christ, Nietzsche insisted on following the implications of a godless universe to the bitter end. And what an end it was.

His famous cry is often misunderstood as gleeful blasphemy, but if read carefully, I don’t believe we find celebration in it. It sounds more like grief. It is the wail of someone who recognizes what has been lost and who understands that, without God, the entire scaffolding of meaning collapses. He doesn’t ask if we will feel the consequences. He asks who will wipe the blood from our hands.

This is where Nietzsche's genius burns most brightly and most tragically. He knew that when the absolute is removed, the only thing left to guide human behavior is the raw will. Morality becomes preference. Goodness becomes instinct. And truth becomes whatever survives the shouting match. He called it the “will to power,” a new ethic, if one can call it that, in which the highest aim of humanity is no longer virtue or holiness or love (aspects of slave morality), but dominance. In that way, he didn't just critique the Christian moral order. He tried to bury it with a stone too heavy for most to lift.

And maybe that weight is what finally crushed him.

Nietzsche went mad, not in some poetic sense but in a literal, clinical, tragic one. Some say it was syphilis, others speculate about manic-depressive illness, or the sheer psychological strain of staring too long into the abyss. But perhaps there’s another possibility. Maybe he took his vision seriously, more seriously than most of us dare. He gazed into the void of a world without God, without eternal justice, without objective beauty or truth, and he didn’t blink. It was not enough for him to tear down the temple. He tried to build a throne in its ruins, and that throne, stripped of heaven, became a padded cell.

But there’s a haunting question in Nietzsche’s vision that we must not miss: Why would anyone want this power? If men conspired to kill the highest being in existence, why would anyone want to climb that high? Why become a god when men only ever seem to desire the death of gods?

There’s something deeply human, disturbingly primal, about this. The moment we kill transcendence, we don’t just eliminate a competitor; we eliminate the very idea of being seen, being judged, and being accountable. And so we ascend, only to find that the throne is a sniper’s perch. The will to power invites the will to crucify. Jesus wasn’t the first person we tried to kill for being too high, too holy, too radiant with divine light. He just happened to be the one who rose again.

Nietzsche saw the murder. He felt the blood. He even tasted the void. But he missed the voice in the garden calling his name. He knew that God had been struck down. He just didn’t believe that God would rise.

The Divine Refusal to Stay Buried

The world, in all its declarations of progress and autonomy, cannot seem to shake the presence of the one man who was supposed to stay dead. Jesus was executed with all the precision and brutality that empire and religion could muster. The cross was not a metaphor. It was splinters and nails, spit and suffocation. And when they buried Him, they did so with finality. Rome knew how to end things. The tomb was sealed, the guard was posted, and the world exhaled.

But the body would not stay put.

The resurrection is the stubborn scandal of history. It is not a metaphor for springtime or spiritual renewal. It is the wild, irreducible claim that the crucified one stood up, walked out, and never looked back. It is the claim that death blinked first. And if that is true, then the blood spilled on Calvary was not lost to the soil, rather, it was planted. It grew roots. It sent shoots through time and culture and conscience, and every effort to suppress it has only fertilized the ground.

This is the divine refusal to stay buried. Every age has tried. The first attempt was by soldiers and politicians. Earthly power attempting to seal heavenly power behind a stone. The second was by skeptics and cynics, Greek philosophy and Roman pragmatism scoffing at the idea of a crucified god. Later came the sophisticated dissection by modern thinkers, and now the passive suffocation by apathy and irony. Yet here He is, still risen, still reigning, still making Himself known in bread and wine, in jail cells and sanctuaries, in whispered prayers and shouted hallelujahs.

There is something unnerving about a Savior who won’t stay dead. It means our world is not as closed as we pretend. It means that underneath the systems and screens, underneath all our managed lives and curated certainties, something eternal is moving. The resurrection is not a comforting tale. It is a cosmic disruption. It breaks the pattern of death being the last word. It interrupts every eulogy, including Nietzsche’s.

That is the deeper irony. The resurrection is not just an answer to Nietzsche’s lament. It is a refusal to participate in it. Christ does not argue with the death of God. He undoes it. The resurrection is not a rebuttal. It is a resurrection.

If Christ is risen, then His blood is not a stain to be scrubbed out. It is a living sign, a trail of presence, and a mark of mercy. And the same world that cried out for His execution now finds that every denial of Him only deepens His imprint. You can lock the tomb. You can silence the witnesses. But sooner or later, the stone rolls, the ground shakes, and the dead man walks again.

The Blood that Still Speaks

If Jesus truly rose, then His blood didn’t just spill; it spoke. And it still speaks. That’s what the writer of Hebrews insists: “You have come... to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24). Abel’s blood cried out for justice; Christ’s cries out for mercy. It doesn’t coagulate or fade with time. It resonates, and the echoes are everywhere.

We live in a world still trembling with the aftershocks of the cross. Even as culture scrubs at the name of Christ with a secular rag, the fingerprints remain. You cannot get rid of Him. You cannot un-invent the Sermon on the Mount. You cannot erase the compassion of the Good Samaritan, or the call to forgive seventy times seven. You cannot understand human rights, orphan care, hospital systems, or the value of the poor without tracing back to a bleeding man lifted up between two thieves who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).

And this is not rhetorical flourish. It is historical fact.

Hospitals as we know them were born from Christian mercy. In the early centuries of the church, while pagans fled from plagues, Christians stayed to nurse the dying. Basil of Caesarea founded what some consider the first true hospital in the fourth century: free, open to all, grounded in the belief that every person bore the image of God. That was no coincidence. It was Christ’s blood, His suffering and His healing, that inspired such action. Where do you think the modern hospice movement came from? It didn’t emerge from the cold rationality of power or progress. It was born of a crucified King who touched lepers and wept beside tombs.

The very notion of universal human dignity owes more to Golgotha than to Greece. The Stoics believed in self-sufficiency. The Romans admired strength. But the early Christians proclaimed something altogether disruptive: that the weak are precious, that children are sacred, that women are equals, and that slaves are brothers. Why? Because the blood of Christ had erased the old distinctions. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). That was not a pious sentiment; it was and is an absolute revolution.

You hear the blood’s voice even in protest movements, in cries for justice, in the moral language of those who claim to have outgrown religion. When people cry out against oppression, when they insist that every person has worth, they are borrowing currency minted at Calvary. They are echoing the ethic of a Savior they may not even believe in. But belief is not required for blood to speak.

This is what makes the modern secular conscience so strange: it still wants the Kingdom, but not the King. It wants compassion without Christ, morality without resurrection, peace without repentance. But sadly for them, the architecture won’t hold. Pull out the cornerstone, and the cathedral crumbles. Christ’s blood is not decorative, it is foundational. His death redefined greatness as servanthood, power as sacrifice, and glory as love.

And the blood still speaks. It speaks in the Church’s quiet resilience under persecution. It speaks in the tears of martyrs and the songs of redeemed addicts. It speaks in meals shared across racial lines, in forgiveness extended where hatred should reign, in the trembling voice of a dying man who whispers “Jesus” and feels no fear.

Nietzsche asked, “Who will wipe this blood from us?” Scripture answers: no one, and thank God for that. Because this blood does not accuse. It cleanses. It does not demand vengeance. It offers pardon. “The blood of Jesus... cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). It does not remain on our hands as guilt, but over our hearts as grace.

So the blood that once marked our crime now marks our salvation. The stain has become the seal. We could not wash it off if we tried. Nor should we, because it is the sign that death has been conquered, justice has been satisfied, and mercy is now flowing. His blood is everywhere, and it is still alive.

Their Cry, Our Redemption

Two thousand years ago, a crowd stood before Pontius Pilate, publicly condemning one Jesus of Nazareth, and declaring, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt. 27:25). They meant it as a curse. It was the howl of a mob convinced it was doing the righteous thing: purging a blasphemer, upholding the law, silencing a man who had the audacity to forgive sins, heal on the Sabbath, and call Himself God.

While they were calling for punishment, Heaven heard it as a prayer.

There may be no more chilling line in all of Scripture. It drips with irony, a tragic and prophetic utterance spoken by those who saw the blood of Jesus not as salvation but as scandal. They wanted it off their hands and onto their heads. And God, in a strange act of mercy, said “Amen.”

Because this is the gospel: the blood that cries out from the ground does not call down wrath but redemption. The same blood they demanded upon themselves became the blood that would save Peter when he wept, save Paul when he fell, save Thomas when he doubted, save the thief who asked to be remembered, save the church birthed on Pentecost. “This Jesus, whom you crucified,” Peter preached to the same crowd, “God has made both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). And three thousand cried out, not in guilt, but in repentance.

Their curse became our blessing. Their rebellion became our rescue. The blood they begged to fall upon them is the same blood that covers us now, not in condemnation, but in covenant. The sacrifice they scorned became the sacrifice we sing about. And that is the terrifying and beautiful reversal at the center of the cross: the murder of the Son of God becomes the means by which murderers are forgiven.

This is not theological poetry. It is the pulse of Christian hope. The mob’s cry has become the church’s song. Let His blood be on us, we pray now, not to justify our violence, but to cleanse our sin. Not to excuse our rebellion, but to heal our wounds. Not to gloat in power, but to rest in grace.

And so we are left with a strange truth. The ones who called for His death unwittingly invited their salvation. The ones who wielded the knives found themselves staring into the eyes of the Lamb who said, “Father, forgive them.” What Nietzsche saw as divine decomposition was, in fact, divine transfiguration. The bleeding God did not stay dead. And the ones who spilled His blood are now invited to be washed in it.

This is the outrageous power of the gospel. The blood stains we cannot scrub away have become the very sign that we are loved. That which the world meant as an execution has become an invitation. The cry for blood has become a call to grace.

Let His blood be on us. Let it mark us. Let it cover us. Let it change us.

For it is the only blood that doesn’t cry out for vengeance. It’s cry forever remains: “Forgiven.”

The Blood That Won’t Wash Away

"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" cries Lady Macbeth, scrubbing invisible blood from her hands, haunted by guilt no water could cleanse.³ Shakespeare understood something deep about the human condition. We are all stained, and we all try to hide it. We wash. We forget. We distract. We philosophize. Yet, the blood remains.

Nietzsche saw the blood too. That is what makes his cry so compelling. He knew, in some mysterious way, that the death of God left a mark we couldn’t escape. What he did not know, or could not believe, is that the blood was never meant to be wiped away. It was meant to remain.

Because this blood is not a curse, it is a covering. The blood of Christ, once spilled, did not evaporate into history or dissolve beneath Roman stones. It seeped into the foundation of the world, and it is actively remaking it. It is still there, in every quiet act of mercy, every movement for justice, every repentant heart, every forgiven enemy, every martyr’s joy, every hospital bed, every trembling prayer whispered in the dark. It is still there, not to condemn, but to redeem.

The world cannot escape the blood of Jesus. It has tried. It has buried it under centuries of rebellion, intellectual pride, secular confidence, and sheer distraction. But the blood has a voice, and it still speaks a better word.

You can try to wipe it off your hands, but all you'll find is grace because the blood that stains us is the same blood that saves us.

It is not the decomposition of a murdered God; it is the declaration of a risen King.

1. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120.

2. Ibid.

3. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1, ll. 37.