By Canon Chris Palmer
Are you someone who likes getting your hands dirty? Do you do the gardening, and feel the soil between your fingers. Or maybe you make clay pots or you cook; or maybe you’ve got a job that means you get your hands dirty – cleaning or caring for the very young or very old; or maybe you get your hands dirty playing rugby, or digging for treasure. I once saw an advert for a family archaeological dig with the invitation, ‘get your hands dirty’.
We say ‘you get your hands dirty’ when we mean ‘you get stuck in’, when you don’t leave the chores to someone else, but you join in with the mundane tasks. There’s lots of getting hands dirty in that sense around churches at Christmas – arranging flowers, preparing refreshments, moving chairs and so on.
Christmas is about how God gets his hands dirty, about how God doesn’t keep to some sterile heaven, but mucks in with human living and serving. God in Jesus was born in some grotty outbuilding and put in a food trough – hardly a place of modern hygiene. God in Jesus was brought up in a carpenter’s home, learning woodwork, working with his hands, making them rough and sometimes cut or sore. God in Jesus laid his hands on sick people to cure them. Usually they were ritually impure too, so Jesus got his hands ritually dirty also. God in Jesus used his hands to bless children, when his friends wanted to shoo them away. God in Jesus used his hands to scrub the road dirt off his disciples’ feet, to show that he was the servant king. God in Jesus surrendered his hands to the soldiers hammer and nails when they fixed him to the cross. God in the risen Jesus still had the nail holes in his hands when he appeared to his disciples, and he lifted up his hands to bless them as he was taken into heaven.
From the manger to the grave; from the grave to the mountain of the ascension, God got his hands dirty – loving human beings, loving us, in the most engaged and tangible way.
And where are God’s hands now? Did God merely get his hands dirty for a season, and then leave for his clean home again? The vulnerability of God is such that he relies on us to go on getting his hands dirty. When we clean up the mess others have left, care for the friend – or stranger – who cannot do the caring themselves, help shift the furniture or clear up the crumbs others have left on the floor, or one hundred and one other ways of getting stuck in – then God still gets his hands dirty.
This is attributed – probably falsely – to St Teresa of Avila, but it still has weight:
Christ has no body on earth but ours,
no hands but ours,
no feet but ours.
Ours are the eyes
through which the compassion of Christ
looks out upon the world,
ours are the feet
with which he goes about doing good,
ours are the hands
with which he blesses his people.