After the community dinner a woman named Grace works the sink end of the church kitchen, and she does the steel counters twice, once with soap and once with a dry towel, because she says a wet counter is not a clean counter. I have dried plates next to her and thought the thing everybody thinks in a kitchen like that: this is somehow close to a virtue.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness” is not in the Bible. The sentence reaches us through a sermon of John Wesley’s, and Wesley was passing on something he had heard.
Wesley was passing it along
His line is “Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” and in the printed sermon it sits inside quotation marks, with the indeed doing the same work. A Bible commentary had printed it before him, in a footnote on Leviticus in 1773, marked the same way, as a thing rightly said. Francis Bacon had written a near neighbor of it back in 1605, that cleanliness of body was held to come from reverence toward God.
It is old, it is decent advice, and it sits on the same shelf as early to bed and a penny saved. Nobody has ever needed a verse for it.
Jesus arrives at dinner unwashed
Now as he spoke, a certain Pharisee asked him to dine with him. He went in and sat at the table. When the Pharisee saw it, he marveled that he had not first washed himself before dinner.
Luke 11:37-38 (WEB)
He answers on the spot, in Luke, by turning the cup over. Matthew records the same charge at its sharpest, in the last week, aimed at the men who did the washing best.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and unrighteousness. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the platter, that its outside may become clean also.
Matthew 23:25-26 (WEB)
He leaves the washing where it is and flips the order: clean the inside first, and the outside is clean too. Say the proverb after reading that and you are putting the outside first.
The cup is the image he keeps returning to, and it works because everybody has washed one. You do the outside. The outside is what shows, the outside is what guests see, and a cup can be spotless where the light hits it and filthy where the coffee sat. Earlier in the same chapter he puts the whole problem in one line, that everything they do is done to be seen. He had already made the domestic version of it, with a beam and a speck and a man offering to help.
Nobody washed more carefully than Pilate
So when Pilate saw that nothing was being gained, but rather that a disturbance was starting, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person. You see to it.”
Matthew 27:24 (WEB)
The most famous hand-washing in the book, performed in public, with witnesses, and it certifies a killing. You see to it, he says, with clean hands, to the people he is handing the job to. Nothing about the water was wrong. He was cleaner at the end of that sentence than at the beginning, and a man was still going to die.
When it does say wash, no water follows
Scripture gives the command, in a voice you would not want aimed at you.
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Isaiah 1:16-17 (KJV)
Read what comes just before it and the address gets sharper. Isaiah is talking to people whose ritual washing was impeccable, who kept the feasts and the new moons and the assemblies, and God tells them he is weary of the lot of it and will not look at their raised hands, because those hands are full of blood.
There is the answer to the obvious objection: the law is full of washing. Leviticus runs on it. And the prophets spent their careers telling people who were performing it correctly that it was not the thing.
Wash you, make you clean. Then the instructions for how, and not one of them involves water. Stop doing the harm. Take up the case of whoever has nobody to take it up. That is what the prophet means by getting clean, and you could keep a spotless house for forty years and never do it.
Other people’s kitchens
I notice kitchens. I have sat in a hundred of them over the years and I could tell you which ones were kept, and somewhere under that noticing is an assumption I would be embarrassed to defend out loud, which is that whoever keeps a tidy house is probably keeping the rest of it too.
The assumption is false and I know it is false. I have sat in immaculate rooms with people doing real harm to the people they live with, and in rooms with the dishes stacked up where a woman was carrying a load nobody else would have carried. The assumption survives anyway. Sorting people from the doorway is restful, and that is the whole appeal of it.
The washing you cannot do yourself
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Psalm 51:7 (KJV)
Both commands in it are addressed to God. The man praying had arranged a death to cover an adultery, and all he does here is ask to be washed by somebody else, which is how Paul puts it to Titus as well, the washing of regeneration, and how the rest of that psalm goes on asking. James Nicholson wrote whiter than snow into a hymn in 1872, and the refrain is still a request: now wash me.
Grace was right about the counters. A wet counter is not a clean counter, and I have thought about that sentence more than she knows. The cup Jesus keeps picking up is the one that has been done properly on the side you can see.