playing with a metaphor

I've been singing this hymn all morning, which used to scare the bejeebers out of me in church:

There is a fountain filled with blood
drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
and sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty stains.

When I tried to change it in for a more agreeable song, Are You Washed was all that came to mind, making me think that I might want to write about it:

Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

This is not my favorite genre of hymnwriting. It was pointed out to me, by an astute friend, that this 'washed in the blood' idea is not a metaphor that a laundry worker would have constructed. No one pours blood in their washing machine to get their clothes clean, or at least no one that I know. Hopefully none of us often have reason to clean large amounts of blood out of our clothing, much less purposefully putting it there in the first place.

This angry friend, though, points out that the 'washing in the blood' occurs only in the King James, and all the newer versions (Per-Versions!) refer to the blood has having a loosing or freeing effect. S/he seems, well, angry about this... I haven't done a Bible Gateway check to see if this is true, but you can take it for what it's worth. Perhaps not much- it makes me think of the Tide commercials with the closeup animations of dirt and grime being freed from cloth fibers.

Sure, it doesn't make any sense to wash something in blood in order to make it white,* but I think that's just the fun of it. It doesn't make concrete sense, any more than any other mystical statement of faith does. Jesus 'living in my heart'” is another example of this nonconcrete expression of evangelical faith; Jesus doesn't literally sit crosslegged in a Valentine shaped heart inside my chest cavity, but Jesus really is in my heart nonetheless.

I've heard the saving power of Jesus compared to soap that scrubs out our sins, in an attempt to concretize this metaphor more simply, and it struck me at the time as hokey. Soap would take stains out of garments better than blood, certainly, but it almost makes too much sense. There's something so fully bizarre about thinking of blood as a cleansing agent that provokes reflection and wonder in a way that Soapy Jesus doesn't.**


*Personally, I think the equation between white and purity is more problematic, given that we use that word to classify a major power-holding group in our culture. I try to refer to myself as Caucasian, given how entrenched the black=evil/white=good dichotomy is in all our archetypes, but I'm not sure what else to do about it.
**Yes, I do think that idol-Jesus soap-on-a-rope is an appropriate cultural counterpoint to 'There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood.'