A Bloodless Bullfight -- FPC sermon excerpt

I almost lost my life to a bull.

Or, to be more accurate, a bull almost prevented me from having a life.

When my father was a boy, he and a friend were walking through a field outside of town. They came across a bull, and started to tease him.

Researchers say that the brains of boys don’t fully develop until age 25.

The bull began to chase them, and they ran for a fence. My father and his friend just made it through the fence before the bull was able to mow them down.

If my father had fallen, I might not be here.

When faced with that charging bull, my father had a classic “fight or flight reaction.” He chose to run, and his flight saved his life. But in other situations, we know that we want to fight. When confronted by an evildoer, we feel an intense desire to lash out, draw first blood, put the offender down. We want nothing more than to save ourselves, save our spouse, save our children, save our friends.

When the danger is more emotional than physical, I’d argue that the response is still the same — you want the offender to bleed. The guy who broke your heart. The boss who fired you. The woman who betrayed you.

Pow! First blood. Down they go.

This dance with danger has been going on for centuries in the bullrings of the Latin world. Bullfighting is a spectacle in which a picador on a horse begins the fight by spearing the bull’s neck, then bandilleros place darts in the bull’s back, and finally the matador enters the ring and uses his cape to dance with the bull before he kills it with a sword.

It’s not a sport. It’s a blood-soaked spectacle.

Fans say that “bullfighting is an intricate brush with death for both the bull and the bullfighter.” So writes Edward Lewine in Hemispheres Magazine (February 2010). It is a crucible that reveals the fearlessness of an animal and the bravery of a man.

Whether the bull gores the matador or the matador stabs the bull, one thing is certain: There will be blood.

Unless, of course, the event is a bloodless bullfight.

When I was in Las Vegas a year ago, a discovered a new attraction, one in which men face bulls without the spears, darts, and swords of traditional bullfighting. The natural fight or flight reaction is still present, as is the very real danger of a pair of horns on top of a thousand-pound bull. But there is no “death in the afternoon,” as Ernest Hemingway described it.

In place of stabbing the bull with a sword, the matador kills the bull symbolically, by hitting Velcro patches glued to the bull’s back.

Call it a kinder, gentler, brush with death.

No one knows if bloodless bullfighting has a future, but everyone sees it as a radical departure from the gory spectacle of the past. In much the same way, Jesus reinvented the blood sports of his day when he looked at the tradition of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and issued a new set of guidelines, “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” (Matthew 5:38-41).

In a world accustomed to an eye for an eye, this is a whole new way of responding to attack. To the natural reactions of fight and flight, Jesus adds a third response: Love.

Yes, love. A truly courageous love.