When it comes to handwashing, the CDC has nothing on my mother.

As a child, I probably washed my hands at least 10 times a day as a matter of course. Routine handwashings included before and after meals, before reading books, (magazines were exempt), after playing with the cat or doing daily chores.

Then there were seasonal handwashings: after digging trenches in the sandbox in which to race small pet store turtles, after any game played in the street, after poking any critter—dead or alive—and after eating grape popsicles in the summer or caramel apples in the fall. My mom's one-size-fits-all advice for anything that ailed us summed up her philosophy: Wash your hands and face and you'll feel better. (She was right.)

My mother came from a long line of handwashers that began with the tabernacle priests who washed their hands at the basin before and after entering the holy place. A symbol of the need to present oneself clean in God's presence.

Over and over in the Old Testament, that simple act of handwashing and clean hands is a picture of righteousness and a pure heart. And when David sinned, he pleaded with God to "wash me throughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!" (Psalm 51:2) No amount of soap and water would do the trick. David needed to be totally disinfected from sin. As much as we are into handwashing, it takes more than these good habits to get rid of sin's infection.

People say that cleanliness is next to godliness, and maybe there is some basis for that thought in traditions like these. But what do we do with Jesus, who seemed sometimes to go out of his way to get his hands dirty in the filth of human everything.

Ironically, the One who came to cleanse us from sin didn't always remember to wash his hands. Or, if he started off with clean hands, he was always getting them dirty. Like when his writing in the dirt made accusers fall away. Think of him touching the man with leprosy or making mud from his saliva and—gasp—touching the blind man's eyes.

In a display of love so amazing, so divine, Jesus' bloody, dirty, wounded hands embraced our sins, gathered our filthy rags and washed us thoroughly from the inside out. Jesus beckoned Thomas, the one with doubts, to touch, to reach, to feel where the nails pierced into the divinely human flesh, yes, to touch his side, torn and scarred for all eternity by our self-actualized dirt that no soap but the sinless blood of our dying God would or could ever wash away. But wash it did, and does and will forevermore.

“My Lord and my God!”