By Jon Chalmers
As we begin to celebrate the Eucharist, the priest prepares the altar, receives the gifts, offers the gifts, and then, right as everyone is standing up, the priest washes his hands at a moment called the Lavabo. Lavabo is the first word in the Latin of the words that the priest prays, quietly: “Wash from my sins, O Lord; and cleanse me from all iniquity.”
I spend an amazing amount of time washing my hands. I used to work in a hospital and learned the value of washing my hands. I now know that one of the two best ways of stopping the transmission of a disease is being attentive to hand washing. Trust me when I tell you that working in a high school only increases my interest in hand washing! Between the desire to have clean hands in workplaces and the desire to have a clean heart in the mass, I’m washing my hands quite a bit. And it is interesting that there is resonance between these two distinct moments even beyond the coincidence of water and hands.
The ceremonial washing of the hands is part of our ritual but it speaks to a broader sacramental principle alive in our common life. We all know, because we know and value the sacraments, that the providential presence of God is made available to us through material things; things like bread and wine, oil and water, that are set aside in prayer and ritual as sure and certain means of receiving God’s graces. The sacramental principle establishes a resonance between our social lives and the ways God acts in the world. And this should not surprise us because both the word and the world are revelation of the same God. So the act of washing hands is itself more meaningful than simply physical cleanliness.
The other effective means to prevent disease transmission is through vaccination. And because I grew up in a town close to where Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine worked, I have pondered the connection between how we are protected from disease and how we are protected from evil. In the Book of Numbers there is a story of how the Jews in the desert were afflicted with serpents and complained to God. Moses was instructed to kill a serpent and put it on a pole. When the serpents afflicted the Israelites, they were to look to this pole and be saved. John in the Gospel uses this same story again today to explain why Jesus, the Son of Man, will be lifted up on a cross. In both cases, that which initially caused the pain and distress becomes the mark of how we are saved from those vary things.
The resonance of these stories with the science of vaccines is striking to me. Vaccinations work by introducing a deactivated virus into the immune system so that the bodies own immune system develops a way to fend off the attack.
This should make sense to us even as it is a paradox. Christian faith is replete with paradox. We celebrate a body broken for our wholeness. We find victory through surrender. We boast of our weakness. We find God’s blessing through service to others. We find eternal life through death with and in Christ. And in this faith we embrace the cross of Christ as a sign that has power in our lives. It hangs, literally, over the altar. It adorns our bodies and our buildings. And it is not longer simply the sign of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. It has been altered, like the snake upon the pole or, I suggest, the virus in the vaccine, to become that which saves us from the very death that it used to denote.
I think of this resonance between the physical and the spiritual world often, especially when we celebrate the Exaltation of the Cross and Sundays like today.
But it occurs to me that I have done a disservice to those who listen to me and to myself by focusing on how cool the theological and biological connections are. I have neglected to talk about why these moments are so necessary, what led us to these places at first.
We use and value vaccinations because there are things invisible to the eye that will kill, hurt or maim us. We live in a world replete with viruses and bacteria whose biological success comes at substantive risk to us. And we have a personal interest and a moral duty to ensure that human life is protected from them. This is why we wash our hands incessantly. This is why we take vaccines. And in a time when there is a growing debate about the morality of choices, even as diseases long though extinct are reemerging, it is good to recall that we live in community, we live in an environment, and we share responsibility for ourselves with others.
We don’t wash our hands so often because we like the feel of the water or the alcohol gel. We wash our hands because we don’t want to get sick and we don’t want others to get sick. We don’t get vaccines because we enjoy getting stuck by a needle. We get vaccinated because there are very real threats in the world and vaccines are the most effective way to deal with them.
What I want to be clear in saying is that from an infectious disease perspective, the world is not a value neutral environment where my choice does not affect your choice. We act in accord not only with our own better interests but also in accord with our grave responsibilities for the common good.
The same is true with the spiritual world that is referred to in the Gospel. God did not send his only Son into the world because he thought it would be a nice place for him to visit. He did not send him into the world because it was such a blessed and wonderful place. The world as understood in the Gospel of John was a dangerous place; filled with invisible threats to health and wholeness.
We hear in the Gospel that the people loved darkness rather than light. The world was at odds with Jesus and with his Spirit. It hates him and those who believe in him. The Gospel will reference the inhabitants of this world as children of darkness and Jesus will say 13 chapters later that he is not here to pray with the world, he is here to conquer it. The world that Jesus was sent to is not a value neutral environment. It is not patiently awaiting the good news, idling its time away in peace and solidarity.
And yet we learn this the hard way time and again. For ages before the birth of Jesus, the people of Israel learned that the world was not a neutral place, nor was the deck stacked in their favor. From Chronicles we hear that despite the warnings of the prophets, they continued with their lack of concern and their lack of physical as well as spiritual defense. And they paid that price. The temple was destroyed and their walls torn down. Some were killed and the rest taken at sword point to a foreign land. The world is not a value neutral place.
But is the place that God’s love entered fully and completely in the person of Jesus; that those who believe will not perish. The world is at odds with his message. And just as we wash our hands and use vaccines to protect ourselves from biological threats; so, too, do we prepare ourselves for spiritual threats. So, we are attentive to our spiritual lives, we say our prayers, we participate in the sacraments, we push back against the incessant and immoral demands of the world because we know that Jesus came to bring life, and to bring life abundantly.
