It is Finished

Sometime around 1968, I learned about germs in school. They can be found in dirt and most of all, in the very pinnacle of depravity: poop. So, I began to wash my hands... a lot. I washed and washed, but I am a producer of human excreta, and so is everyone I know. So, it felt as if I was never finished. I was driven to cleanliness and then to the doctor, for my hands were red, raw, cracked and bleeding — open wounds susceptible to germs! I had been better off with no knowledge of “germs” and “not germs.” The doctor looked at my hands and said, “Stop (Shabat in Hebrew)! Stop washing your hands.” They hurt like hell, but it was hard as hell to stop.

I clearly remember the day that I walked out of my parents’ bathroom, looked up at my father, and with a ring of victory in my voice, I said, “Daddy, Daddy, guess what! I went #2... AND I didn’t even wash my hands!” He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Oh buddy, I am so proud of you!”

My hands healed, but I still struggled with lingering “poo-phobia” and neurosis.

Is God neurotic? Read Old Testament law regarding bodily discharges and ritual washings, and you might begin to think so. In Deuteronomy 23, He gives Israel detailed instructions on how to poop outside the camp, for He walks in the camp. Hebrews 9:22, “In fact, the Law requires that nearly everything be cleansed by blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin.”

It’s strange to think of blood as a cleansing agent. But that is exactly what it is... in a body. Did you know that your body, your bag of dust, is almost an entirely different bag of dust than it was 10 years ago. Every time you use the toilet, you’re flushing yourself (your old self) goodbye. That could make a person anal-retentive, or on second thought, it might set them free.

Blood washes the body of death and sin. Sin is evil in us. Knowledge of Good and evil is called the Law. People first gained knowledge of good and evil at a tree in a garden on the Sixth Day of Creation... and immediately became very neurotic. At Mt. Sinai, God wrote the Law in stone and instituted the Sacrificial system to cleanse people of their sin. But even with all that blood (the blood of bulls, sheep, goats, and birds), nobody could get clean. Maybe there’s an even deeper problem in our flesh. No offense, but your body of flesh eats life (which is other bodies of flesh) and excretes death, which is a pretty good description of sin. So of course, the harder we try to clean ourselves with ourselves, the dirtier we get, for the problem is ourselves. We are each alone and unclean in a “body of sin and death.” So maybe I was really onto something in second grade, washing and washing and never finished, as if I (me, myself) was unfinished.

May 2, 1507: A young German priest was officiating at his first communion while dreadfully aware that he was unclean. He got to the portion where he was to say, “We offer unto thee the living, the true eternal God,” and he was terror stricken. For the experience, he had a word: Anfechtung. It describes the sense of anxiety, despair, and shame, which he felt before God. He desperately tried to rid himself of anfechtung, but the harder he tried, the worse it got. His name was Martin Luther.

Many academics think Luther was mentally ill. In college, I had to do a paper on the psycho-historian Erik Erikson and his thesis that Luther was “anal-retentive.” According to Erikson, the Protestant Reformation is the result of bad potty training, Luther’s desire to please his dad, and a quality “anal release” (that’s a poop) in the Wittenburg Tower privy. I mocked his thesis at the time, but potty training is quite stressful.

I once spied on my son talking to his Bambi doll with tears in his eyes. “I can’t go pee-pee in the potty, Bambi. Can you go pee-pee in the potty?” Once after an accident at Wal-Mart, which of course he tried to hide, I kind of blew up at him. He looked up at me with those big, beautiful eyes, now filled with anfec