Clean hands
- Steve Richards
- Apr 5, 2020
- 3 min read
I would have been about 9 or 10 years old at the time. We were on a visit to the Clent Hills. My parents were there, my best mate Paul and his mom Peggy. Stretched out before us was a steepish grass slope heading down to a few buildings, amongst which was a shack selling cups of tea.
We boys decided to have a gambolling race down the hill. A few tumbles into the race and my head squelched into something soft and warm. Dog mess! I stood up confused by all of the flies buzzing around my head and face, being conscious of the awful smell. Peggy gave in to laughter – she waved a handkerchief around my head to discourage the flies, but Paul dissolved into tears. We went down to the tea shack where my mother persuaded the owner to sell us a bar of her own Knights Castile soap and, with my head under a nearby, freestanding water tap, Mum proceeded with her bare hands to wash my hair, and a thorough job she did too. I don’t recall ever thanking her for getting her hands filthy for me.
We are hearing a lot about having clean hands in the light of the Coronavirus. In the Bible, God uses the idea of a person having clean hands, or not, as a picture of their inner, moral state before him. An Old Testament verse reads, ‘who may ascend the mountain of the Lord...?’, i.e. who may safely come into the presence of God? The answer given is, ‘He who has clean hands...’, meaning a person who has a clean heart, having had it purified or cleansed.
We are of course familiar with this sort of language. Someone who gets another to do his dirty work is said to want to keep his hands clean. Someone else, wanting to justify themselves, will say that, ‘My hands are clean in this matter.’ Another may say, ‘I wash my hands of it’, meaning I now choose to disassociate and distance myself from this or that.
When Jesus was condemned to death on that first Good Friday, Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor who might have stopped the execution. He took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man's blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’
As Jesus went to the cross of crucifixion to be killed, he did have clean hands. Unlike all other people, he could have ‘ascended to the mountain of the Lord’ but instead he elected to ascend a hill outside Jerusalem, called Calvary, and be killed. What was going on?
When Jesus submitted himself to the nails which pinned him to the cross, it was as if he was plunging his clean hands into the mess and filth which is really ours, and which was keeping us at arms length from God.
The New Testament describes how the death of Jesus, in effect, took the mess from the hands of people like you and me, so soiling his own hands to make others clean. An unfamiliar concept maybe but many people have experienced for themselves the reality of the new, clean life that springs from it.
As far as I can recall, when I approached that cold water tap at Clent, I was submissive to my mother’s instructions, believing that she would sort things out and get me clean. The Christian gospel delights to tell that when we submit the part of us, which we call the ‘real me’, to Jesus, and are willing to follow his lead, we will be cleansed; no longer messy but a people ready to experience a father-child relationship with the one true God.
The term ‘Good Friday’ is indeed appropriate.