He Touched Him First

You are standing on a doorstep you have not stood on in two years, and you are holding the door open with your hand so that it cannot swing wide.

About a foot. That is the gap. You came to drop something off and you have practiced this in the car: hand it over, say the thing, go. Fourteen seconds and out.

And the man who opened it says come in, the kettle is on, and you say you are fine here, thanks, it is only a minute.

Because you know the order.

You have known the order since you were about seven, and nobody sat you down and taught it to you, which is exactly why it has never been examined. The order is: get yourself right, and then come. Sort the thing out, and then be near people. Clean up, and then be touched. You do not walk into a warm hallway carrying what you are currently carrying. Everybody knows that. It is not even cruel, it is just the order, the way you do not put muddy boots on a good floor.

So you have been living on doorsteps for two years. Not because anybody shut a door on you. Because you keep them at a foot yourself, which is a much harder thing to notice and a much harder thing to say out loud.

And the man in the doorway does not argue with you.

He puts his hand out first.

Not a handshake. He reaches past the gap and puts his hand on your arm, the way you would steady somebody on ice, and he says come on, and somehow the bag is out of your hands and inside on the table and so are you, and the whole thing took under three seconds and you did not agree to any of it.

You are standing in a hallway you had decided you did not qualify for. Your coat is still on. Nothing about you has changed since the step.

And in a very old account there is a man kneeling in the dust at a careful distance, shouting the word he is required by law to shout, and there is a hand going out toward him before one single thing about him has been dealt with.

Watch Which Way the Contact Runs

You are not standing outside a rule you failed. Mark 1:41 has Jesus putting His hand out before one thing about that man had changed, and the Holy Spirit kept that detail in the account because somebody was going to need the order settled in writing.

A man with leprosy comes to Him, kneels down at the distance the law requires, and says that if He is willing, He is able to make him clean. What happens next is one sentence long.

Then Jesus, moved with compassion, put out His hand and touched him, and said to him, I am willing; be cleansed.Mark 1:41

Understand what the kneeling man knew, because he knew it far better than most people reading this.

You have carried a rule you picked up early and never once questioned, and here is the thing: it is a real rule, and it is in the book. Leviticus 13:46 says the man with that disease lives alone, outside the camp, all the days the plague is in him. His word does not pretend that law was not there, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to pretend it away.

The man in the dust was under it. He had torn clothes and an uncovered head and a covering over his lip and an obligation to call out unclean, unclean, so that nobody came near him by accident. Every part of his day was organized around not being touched.

And here is the part that changes the whole scene. Under that law, contact ran in one direction. If you touched him, you did not make him clean. He made you unclean. That was the physics of the thing, and everybody in that crowd knew it, and he knew it best of all, which is why he is kneeling at a distance and not reaching.

So the hand going out is not a kind gesture. It is a reversal of the direction of the current.

You were never the stronger force in that contact, and it took nothing at all from Him. Mark 1:42 says the leprosy left him immediately, and the same Spirit who moved on that road is the reason the cleanness travels the way it travels.

Now watch the order in the account, because it is four moves and not one of them comes in the sequence somebody taught you at seven.

He put out His hand. He touched him. He said be cleansed. And then, in verse 44, He sent the man to the priest to offer for his cleansing the things that Moses commanded.

You have the second half of it as well, and it is not optional. Mark 1:44 sends that man straight off to do the whole Levitical procedure, every step of it, and the Holy Spirit did not leave that sentence out of the account for the sake of a tidier story.

So both halves stand and neither one cancels the other. Nobody here is saying the mess does not matter, and nobody is saying the cleaning up is a nice extra you can skip. The cleaning happened. What is being said is where in the line it sits.

It sits after. It has always sat after. The whole account is arranged to put it after.

And plainly, before we go further, because this page gets read by people at the bottom of real things. If tonight includes wanting to be gone, tell one living human being before you sleep, in your own voice, tonight. In the United States, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line. Saying it out loud is not a failure of faith, and the person who picks up is not being burdened by you. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and using those hands is obedience rather than defeat.

You are not being asked to arrive presentable. His word puts the hand out first in every account where a hand goes out at all, and the Holy Spirit has been standing on the other side of your door the entire time you have been holding it at a foot.