Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.
Matthew 23:26 (KJV)
“Cleanliness is next to godliness” is not in the Bible. It is an old saying, in print by 1773, that John Wesley, the eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, quoted in a sermon. When Jesus talks about clean cups, he starts with the inside.
The cup Jesus picks up
The line before it is the charge.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
Matthew 23:25 (KJV)
Everybody who has washed dishes knows the problem. You do the outside, because the outside is what shows. A cup can be spotless where the light hits it and filthy where the coffee sat. Earlier in the same chapter Jesus says of the same men that “all their works they do for to be seen of men.”
Luke has a smaller version of it at a dinner table. A Pharisee invites Jesus to eat, and “marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner.” Jesus answers with the same cup, and says the inside is full of “ravening,” which is grabbing what is not yours, “and wickedness.” Then he names the cure, and it is to give to the poor what you have: “But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you.” Generosity cleans what grasping dirtied.
Already a saying
Wesley’s sermon “On Dress” has the line inside quotation marks, “Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” which means he was passing on something already said. An annotated Bible printed in London in 1773 has it in a footnote to Leviticus, as a thing “rightly said.”
A clean kitchen is a kindness to the people who eat in it, and nobody needs a verse for that. Like moderation in all things, it is a saying from outside the Bible that has come to sound like a verse. Wesley quoted it, and more than two centuries of repeating did the rest.
The cleanest hands in the Gospels
When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
Matthew 27:24 (KJV)
The most famous hand-washing in the Bible, done in public, with witnesses, and it signs off on a killing. He was cleaner at the end of that sentence than at the beginning, and a man was still going to die.
Isaiah goes after the same thing from the other side. God tells people who are keeping the sacrifices, the new moons, the sabbaths and the feasts that he will not listen to their prayers, because “your hands are full of blood.” Then the command: “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.” The washing Isaiah means is a way of living. And the next verse turns from command to offer: “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” The Lord himself makes the offer.
Doesn’t the Bible wash with water?
Water is real in Scripture. The law tells someone cleansed of an unclean issue to “bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.” Naaman dips himself seven times in the Jordan, “and he was clean.” Jesus sends a blind man to “wash in the pool of Siloam,” and he comes back seeing.
What Jesus will not do is let the water stand in for the inside. When the Pharisees complained that his disciples ate with unwashed hands, Jesus later told the disciples, “to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.” Hebrews says the law’s washings were for a time, and that the blood of Christ does what washing the body never could: “purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.” The water was real, and it pointed past itself.
Wash me
On the night before the cross, Jesus took a towel and a basin and washed his disciples’ feet. Peter refused: “Thou shalt never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” The washing that counts is the one you let him do.
Psalm 51 is headed, in the King James, “A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bath-sheba.” David had covered adultery with a death, and he has nothing left to scrub with. He asks.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Psalm 51:7 (KJV)
Both commands, purge and wash, are spoken to God. A few lines later: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” Centuries later God promised the same washing to Israel through Ezekiel: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean… A new heart also will I give you.”
A house can be lived in and the heart in it clean, or spotless and the heart in it dirty. The inside is God’s to wash. Ask him for it, in David’s words, tonight if you like: create in me a clean heart, O God.