Clean Hands at the Altar

If someone asks you

“I have walked in my innocence” is exactly the self-righteousness Christ condemned.

Put it next to Luke 18. The Pharisee stands and prays, "O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men," and Jesus says he went home unjustified. Now read this psalm: *judge me, for I have walked in my innocence; I have not sat with the vain; I have hated the assembly of the malignant; I will not sit with the wicked.* That is the Pharisee's prayer with better meter. And it collides with the rest of the Bible: "there is none righteous, no not one," as his Bible has it at Romans 3:10 — and "all our justices as the rag of a menstruous woman" (Isaias 64:6). A Catholic has the added embarrassment of reciting this psalm inside a rite where he has just beaten his breast and confessed that he has greatly sinned. Pick one.

The objection dies on verse 11, in the psalm's own text: "But as for me, I have walked in my innocence: redeem me, and have mercy on me." One breath, both claims. A man who thought his integrity made him self-sufficient does not ask to be redeemed in the same sentence. Whatever this psalm is doing, it is not the Pharisee's arithmetic — the Pharisee asked for nothing because he thought he needed nothing.

Then the specifics.

(1) Tom means integrity, not sinlessness; the same root is applied to Job and to Noe, men the same Scripture shows in need of mercy.

(2) The genre is judicial: a protestation of innocence regarding a specific accusation before the divine court (3 Kings 8:31–32), not a claim of moral perfection in the abstract. Saying "I did not do this" is not saying "I have never sinned," and no honest reader confuses them.

(3) Note first that the Douay-Rheims renders Romans 3:10 "There is not any man just" — the familiar "none righteous, no not one" is the King James wording. Either way the verse is Saint Paul establishing that no man is justified by his own resources apart from grace, which the Church teaches at least as strongly as the objector does. Whatever integrity a man has is God's gift working in him first (Second Council of Orange, 529; Trent, Session VI; CCC 2001, 2008: man's merit is itself owed to God). Isaias 64:6 describes works done in a state of rebellion, not works done in charity by grace.

(4) And Augustine puts the pieces in the only order that works: "after the mercy which You first showed me, I have some desert of my innocence."

Say it out loud: "I can tell the truth about what I've kept and still need to be redeemed. Verse 11 does both in one line."

The Lavabo is empty theater, and Christ said so.

The priest's hands are already clean. He rinses his fingertips in a few drops of water and dries them on a linen towel while an altar server holds a dish. Nothing is cleaned. It is pure performance. And ritual hand-washing is not a neutral target — it is the one ceremony the Lord Himself went after by name. In Mark 7 the Pharisees challenge Him because His disciples eat with unwashed hands, and He answers by quoting Isaias against them: this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; you make void the word of God by your tradition. Even Rome seems to have conceded the point: the psalm was cut out of the Lavabo in 1970 and replaced with a single functional line.

Read what Christ actually attacks in Mark 7, because it is not washing. He goes after substitution — the man who declares his property corban, dedicated, and then uses the dedication to avoid supporting his mother and father (Mark 7:11–13). The charge is that the tradition was being used to void a commandment. He never says the washing is wrong; He says using it to cancel the fourth commandment is. Elsewhere He states the balance explicitly when He condemns the tithing of mint and cumin: those things ought to have been done, without leaving the weightier matters undone (Matthew 23:23). That is not an abolition of external religion. It is an ordering of it.

And the ordering has a reason: man is body and soul, and God addresses him as such. Saint Thomas defends external acts of religion on exactly that ground (ST II-II, q. 81, a. 7); the Catechism treats sensible signs as intrinsic to how God deals with embodied creatures (CCC 1146–1152). If you want the argument settled by narrative rather than syllogism, go back to the main passage: God cleansed the sin of a prophet by having an angel press a burning coal from the altar against his mouth. A basin of water is not going to scandalize Him.

On the reform: the Lavabo was not abolished. The current Roman Missal retains the washing of hands and prays a single line from Psalm 50 (51 modern), asking God to wash him from his iniquity and cleanse him from his sin. The older form used Psalm 25 (26 modern):6–12. A psalm was shortened, not condemned, and nothing prevents a man from praying the longer text himself.

Say it out loud: "If God cleaned a prophet's mouth with a burning coal, He isn't offended by a basin of water."