The Scent of Clean Living

Soap.

It’s part of our everyday experience, and it’s been around in various forms for centuries. In fact, the earliest evidence of soap production dates to around 2800 B.C. when it was mentioned on Mesopotamian clay tablets. And a formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil was written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 B.C. Soap is even mentioned three times in the Old Testament (Job 9:30; Jeremiah 2:22; Malachi 3:2).

Soap, then, has been important to human existence for a long time, and for good reason. William Osler, one of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital who is sometimes called the “Father of Modern Medicine,” said, “Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.”

But these days, we might ask, “Which soap?”

That’s because when it comes to the soap we use to wash our hands or bodies, we’re faced with many choices. And we’re not talking just about whether to use bar soap or liquid soap. Consumers can get chocolate-flavored soap (not intended to be eaten, however), touch-friendly soap (to give you a pleasant sensory experience by means of its texture), 24-karat gold soap (formulated with small particles of 24-carat gold to promote suppleness and soft skin) and “natural” soap (emphasizing its natural ingredients through scent, color, shape, and texture, all to create a sense of well-being).

According to one report, “Multisensory bar soaps are expanding their roles to add more value to bath time, not only cleansing and skin-conditioning, but improving the user’s mood.”

Me? I’ve been using Irish Spring for the last 40 years. It seems to work.

Getting clean is what the Old Testament reading for today is all about.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God tells the people of Judah that because of their sins, “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” And that’s followed by this instruction, “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil …”

The huge sin to which the prophet Isaiah alludes in this text is the sin of being religious without being righteous. Through Isaiah, God notes that people with power are carefully observing religious festivals and worship of God, but they are also running corrupt court systems that favor those with bribe money. They are oppressing the poor and leaving orphans and widows to fend for themselves. So God says, “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

Then, and only then, will the Lord see any value in their pious acts of worship.

But change is possible, and so the Lord says, “Come now, let us argue it out: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (v. 18).

There is, it seems, a spiritual soap!

We could say that the overall lesson of this text is: “Do the right thing.” This, however, leaves us with a question: Why did they need to be told that? As the people of Israel, they had the laws of Moses and knew of the covenant between God and Israel. They surely knew already that God wanted them to “hate evil and love good” (Amos 5:15), to avoid what is wrong, and embrace what is right and to pursue righteousness and flee wickedness. So why weren’t they doing it?

We could, in fact, ask the same question about ourselves. When we consciously do something wrong, usually it’s not because we don’t know any better. Rather, there seems to be a spiritual duality in us that’s always in conflict. The apostle Paul calls it the old nature and the new nature.

It’s like those cartoons where a man is torn about what to do. A tiny angel stands on one shoulder advising him to do the right thing, and a tiny devil stands on the other shoulder advising him to do the opposite.

And if you think that’s too silly an image, listen to these words of the apostle Paul from Romans 7: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:14-15). Paul was aware of an inner conflict — a struggle in which he was pulled in diametrically opposed directions.

And then there’s Faust, the magician and alchemist in German legend who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge. At one point, when he is wrestling with himself, he says, “Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, / And one is striving to forsake its brother.”

Part of the problem is that often when we deliberately do the wrong thing and nothing bad happens to us, it becomes easier the next time to do it again. That’s when we begin to make up our own rules. We lower our standards. We decide that we’re flawed and that’s okay. We rationalize or make up excuses for our behavior.

The people whom Isaiah was addressing provide an example of that very sequence. They wanted to stay in God’s good graces, but by coming up with their own rules for their behavior, they justified mistreating others while being pious in terms of observing all the religious festivals and other ritualistic practices their religion required. Thus, Isaiah’s message was that God does not value ritual without reformation.

This failure to love God and their neighbors can be expressed with the words “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy” (sometimes written “orthopraxis”).

Orthodoxy means “right belief” and is easily tied to rituals. The people of Isaiah’s day made sure they never missed a holy day observance or a prescribed sacrifice. They were orthodox in their beliefs and rituals that supported or illustrated these beliefs. “Orthodoxy” is a word and a concept with which we are familiar.

But orthopraxy? Is that a thing?

Yes, it is. It’s in the dictionary and it even has a Wikipedia article about it, so it must be a thing.

It means “right conduct,” and unlike orthodoxy, which is all about what we believe, orthopraxy is all about what we do, or practice.

Pleasing God is never a matter of orthodoxy alone; today’s Isaiah text reminds us that orthopraxy is crucial as well.

Isaiah’s theology of clean brings orthodoxy and orthopraxis together. Ancient rites, including the sacrificing of animals, symbolized ritual cleanliness, but could not by themselves make the worshiper clean. For that to happen, the person also needed to do the right things and behave honestly and helpfully. Fundamental to coming into the presence of the Lord is living a life of obedience — a life that advocates for justice, mercy, compassionate acts and the like.

Some interpreters of New Testament theology reduce spiritual cleansing to “Come to Jesus and all is forgiven.” This is true, but it’s not the whole gospel. The Bible also insists that good works must follow faith.

Thus, James wrote, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith” (James 2:17-18).

For us who identify as followers of Jesus, doing our best to do the right thing — the moral thing, the thing that is loving our neighbor as ourselves — is the soap that washes us and makes our worship of God acceptable to him.

Doing what is right, saying what is right, showing kindness and mercy — all of these things are the basic ingredients of spiritual soap that has a highly attractive scent to it.

The apostle Paul alludes to this in his second letter to the Corinthians: “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (vv. 15-16).

We Christians should seek the aroma of clean living and clean thinking.

When we are clean in this way, others will notice and ask us what our secret is.

And we’ll tell them it’s in the soap.