HANDWASHING

 

Medical science linked the connections among handwashing, community health, and hygiene in the 19th century by observing discrepancies in mortality rates between two hospital wards. Of course, handwashing has always been part of diverse peoples' minimum community health protocols. Who among us remember our childhood when our elders repeatedly told us to wash our hands before meals, after using the toilet, when we come home from work?

The ritual described in Sunday's lection requires using a cup to wash each hand three times. It is a ritual that is founded on God's commandment--being each other's keepers-- that has become something else by Jesus's time: a sign of division.

When handwashing becomes nothing more than a sign that defines who are insiders and who are outsiders, who are pure and who are impure, who are clean and who are defiled, then we have a problem. Jesus calls it hypocrisy.

It is especially hypocritical and heartless, given that the people in Jesus's time who had access to clean water to begin with were also the ones who defined who was unclean, denied honor to the defiled, shut their doors to outsiders, and never lifted a finger to help them be clean.

Handwashing is a concrete expression of being each other's keepers. Every time we wash our hands, we protect not only ourselves but everyone around us.

But let us never forget that handwashing requires water. There are 2.2 billion people on earth who have no access to water. And children, mostly girls worldwide, spend 200 million hours each day collecting water.

*photograph from Medium's Epidemiology and Infectious Diseases.