Touched

Enjoy a guest blog post from friend and fellow pastor Christopher Furr.

Mark 1:40-45: A man with a skin disease approached Jesus, fell to his knees, and begged, “If you want, you can make me clean.”Incensed,^[a] Jesus reached out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do want to. Be clean.” ⁴² Instantly, the skin disease left him, and he was clean. ⁴³ Sternly, Jesus sent him away, ⁴⁴ saying, “Don’t say anything to anyone. Instead, go and show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifice for your cleansing that Moses commanded. This will be a testimony to them.” ⁴⁵ Instead, he went out and started talking freely and spreading the news so that Jesus wasn’t able to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, but people came to him from everywhere.

There are certain kinds of sicknesses that take more than a physical or emotional toll. Some carry a social cost. A cancer patient gets more sympathy than, say, the schizophrenic dropout panhandling on the street corner, though neither asked for the illness that consumes them. A woman on the faculty of a prestigious university gets a rare and serious cancer diagnosis and she receives top of the line care at the internationally-known hospital on campus and resumes her career; but a man in rural Georgia’s cancer goes undetected and he is dead within a year. One person’s pancreas fails to regulate the insulin in their body, no one bats an eye when they adjust their insulin pump as the food comes; another person’s brain has faulty neurotransmitters and everyone wonders why they’re so depressed and can’t pull themselves together. Two illnesses, both caused by faulty organs, with drastically different social consequences. 

         By touching the leper in the story—and many others throughout his ministry–Jesus makes the untouchable touchable again. Their physical restoration is bound up in their restoration to the community. He heals them, yes, but he also heals them of the social consequences of their illness. He makes a statement about them when he does this, for the rest of the community to see–these people are worthy of your love and friendship, they are worthy of listening to and being influenced by; their ideas and their gifts and contributions to this community are worthy. Every one of us has doubted our worthiness at some point or another in this life. We have wondered if we are worthy of love, worthy of belonging, worthy of friendship, worthy of justice. If you have felt the pain of having to wonder about that worthiness, then I hope you hear the power of what Jesus does for those in this passage, what he does for all of us by drawing this kind of community to himself, where no one has to–or should have to–sacrifice their dignity in order to belong.

Prayer: Dear God, thank you for the love and grace of your Son Jesus, who reminds us all that we are worthy of your love, and worthy of belonging in our communities. Amen.