Is it the blood of Christ or His death that redeems us?

Catholics often get confused on this, and that is because they think of physical objects as relics, and they are. Something can be very holy, a physical object can hold God's grace, and we call it a relic. Because of that thinking mode we have as Catholics, where an object can hold grace, we tend to treat the blood like a relic. If you had a Eucharistic miracle and the blood of Jesus was in front of you, we would treat it like a special relic, gather up every drop, put it in a chapel and adore it, just as we hold the blood of other saints as superior relics. In that sense the blood is special. But when the Bible talks about Jesus giving us his blood, it is not talking about his blood as a relic; it is talking about his death and his death only. In English and in Greek, blood is a metonymy: a word that stands for another concept, and it stands for death. This probably started with the Jewish culture, where the animal was killed and its blood drained out, and God wants to see it dead, burnt as a holocaust, and to smell the sweet savor that rises to heaven, and he really does smell it. If they had drained a little blood from the calf and patched it up so it kept living, that sacrifice would not count, because it is the death of the calf that God is looking for. So you have to be careful theologically: you cannot say it would take just one drop of the blood of Jesus to forgive my sins. The only reason my sins are forgiven is that Jesus died on the cross. He shed blood, but strictly speaking he did not have to shed blood; a man can die of asphyxiation on a cross without shedding blood. With Jesus there was blood everywhere, from the nails, the spear, and the scourging, so the blood is the metonymy for the fact that he is going to die a vicious death, and that death is what redeems us.