Food for Thought

In Good Hands

September 24, 2018

Back in the 1960s there was a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs named Bill Hands. I suppose there was never a baseball player with a more suitable name. With those hands he won 20 games and struck out a career-high 181 batters in that horrible year of 1969 when the Cubs let a sure-thing go down the tubes to the Mets. It was a great season and all because of his hands.

Obviously, though, it’s not just pitchers who need good hands. Nor is it just other professionals like piano players, surgeons, car mechanics or carpenters who need good hands. We all need them and we use them all the time. Using our hands is so automatic that, more often than not, we don’t even realize when we’re using them. Like when I write this column.

The best use of hands is doing God’s work. The ELCA even has a day designated God’s Work; Our Hands. Recently our congregation joined a group of 11 Lutheran churches and 88 people to package food for over 23,000 people in Haiti. Most of us grew up singing, “Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love,” and it’s rewarding to see how our congregation uses its hands for God’s work in many different ways.

Ultimately, though, it’s not about our hands but God’s hands. Our hands certainly do God’s work, but without God’s providential hands on our lives and on this world, there would be nothing. While it is true that we could do very little without our hands—we couldn’t drive, couldn’t build, couldn’t drive, couldn’t hold a golf club, couldn’t garden, couldn’t aim a firehose, couldn’t eat—we can only do these things because of God’s hands on our lives. If we think our hands do a lot, think of God’s hands that direct and guide everything.

Interestingly, although we think of hands in terms of the activities we do with them, the Bible tends to use the word hand as a metaphor for power, majesty, and authority. To speak of God’s hand is to speak of God’s power and authority. To deliver our bodies or souls into God’s hand is to turn ourselves completely over to his authority. To be delivered by God’s hand is to be rescued and set free by His power. When Paul says that because of Christ’s resurrection he now sits at the right hand of God, Paul means that on Easter God destroyed the power of sin, death, and the devil. It is Christ’s power over his enemies that allows him to sit at God’s right hand.

That puts an interesting spin on how we think of our hands. One way to think of our hands as Christians is that we use them as an extension of God’s authority here on earth. When we do good with our hands, we are extending God’s authority and power here on earth. When our hands bring healing, when our hands bring love and joy, when our hands do to others as God would have us do, then we are acting by God’s authority and we are bringing his power to bear on the ills of this world. Our hands are therefore extensions of His hands. Which means we really are in good hands.

Food for thought, indeed.

Pastor Wes