What Can Wash Away My Sins?

According to this story from ABC News, researchers have done some research that points to the fact that physical cleanliness and a sense of moral cleanliness or purity are “psychologically intertwined.”

The researchers first asked a group of 60 college students to concentrate on either something ethical or unethical that they had done in the past.Students who remembered their own unethical behavior were more likely to act as if they felt unclean.

For example, the “unethical memory” students were more likely to say that the unfinished word “W _ _ H” was “WASH” instead of “WISH.”

And they were more likely to see “S _ _ P” as “SOAP” instead of “SOUP” or “STEP.”

In another similar experiment, 32 other students also were asked to remember some ethical or unethical action from their past.

Each student then got a choice of two free gifts: a pencil or an antiseptic wipe.

Sixty-six percent of the students who said they had recalled an unethical memory took the antiseptic wipe, as if they wanted to wipe their hands—and perhaps their conscience—clean.

My doctoral dissertation was on the ritual symbolism in the book of Hebrews. A major theme is that, for the author of Hebrews, sin is perceived as an almost physical contagion. It is something that must be “washed away” through the blood of a sacrificial victim.

That idea is completely foreign to most of us (whose places of worship do not feature animal sacrifice as a common observance!), but it was part and parcel of all ancient religious systems, whether Jewish or pagan. But this study‚Äîand a couple millennia of human history‚Äîsuggest that there is still a strong connection between feelings of moral guilt and feelings of physical dirtiness. Don’t we, in fact, still talk about “dirty movies” or “filthy language”? When Shakespeare described Lady Macbeth compulsively making washing motions with her hands after conspiring to kill King Duncan, he was tapping into feelings of impurity with which all of us can identify:

Yet here’s a spot.
Out, damned spot! out, I say! …
What will these hands ne’er be clean?
Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the
perfume of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Ancient cultures proposed a great number of cleansing agents to remove moral defilement through ritual means: water, salt, smoke, oil, etc. The preeminent cleanser of sin, however, was blood. That, I think, is the mental picture the author of Hebrews would have his audience form. The blood of Jesus surpasses the cleansing power of any other, so that we may enter the presence of God undefiled, not by the blood of bulls and goats, but by the blood of Christ.

The problem, of course, is that without the cultural background, all this talk about being “washed in the blood” that some Christians like to throw around so casually makes very little sense to outsiders or even, I would strenuously argue, to Christians themselves. This is not language that should be imported into discussions about justification, for example; that is an entirely different word picture for the atonement. It defines the human problem and its solution in the language of the law court.

Hebrews, by contrast, defines the problem and its solution in the language of the tabernacle. It is a very primal kind of language. Your average preliterate hunter-gatherer could grasp it: transgressing against a taboo produces spiritual defilement; a ritual of cleansing is necessary for purgation. Now we know scientifically that this mode of thinking is not entirely alien to the likes of us.