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In the Gospel of Mark, a man with leprosy does something that isn’t just shocking, it's straight up illegal. He breaks quarantine and crosses every single social and religious line to get to Jesus. All for one last chance to be whole again. It can be challenging to understand the sheer desperation here. You see, being a leper in that time wasn't just about being sick. It was a public sentence of solitary confinement. It’s basically a targeted Covid shutdown for the rest of your life. Take a deep breath and imagine for a moment: never being able to hug your spouse or your kids, never allowed to sit down with your friends for a meal, or to feel any kind of human touch at all as all your loved ones go on with their lives. It's a deep and terrible double pain. Your body is falling apart and your soul is just starving for connection. And this isolation, it wasn’t people being mean but reflected the religious system and laws that aimed to keep people safe.
These six rules right out of Leviticus 13:45-46 turned a human being into a walking biohazard sign. You were legally required to perform your own exclusion, to shout your own shame wherever you went. No wonder this guy asks the question that he does. He never questions if Jesus has the power to heal him. He's sure he can. The real question, the one that hangs in the air is about Jesus's willingness. “I know you have the power,” he says, “but do you have the heart?” Do you actually want to help someone like me, particularly since I broke the law to get here? And Jesus' response challenges every social, legal, and religious rule, and introduces a new kind of logic through an upside-down reordering of how love and healing work. Jesus doesn't shout a healing from a safe six-foot distance. He doesn’t stand back and say, “First you must follow the law.” No, first, he closes the gap. He leans in and reaches out his hand and touches the untouchable man. And only then, after that physical connection is made, does he speak the words, “I am willing, be clean.”
Did you see it? Did you see the law-breaking happen? And I’m not talking about the guy with leprosy. According to the law in Leviticus, chapter 5, by touching an unclean person, Jesus broke the law and voluntarily took on that man's status. He became legally unclean himself. He didn't just fix the man's problem. He stepped right into it with him and in doing so heals him twice – both from his isolation as well as his illness. A theologian named Miroslav Volf has this great phrase for what Jesus does, “the will to embrace.” It's this idea that Jesus and his kingdom movement affirm a person's worth, their dignity, their basic humanity as being worthy of love without conditions. Jesus didn't see a disease walking towards him or a law-breaker. He saw a person in need, which of course forces us to look in the mirror, doesn't it? If that's Jesus's order, embrace first without conditions, cleanse second, how does that stack up with our own response? Because, let's be honest, we so often do it completely opposite. I mean, just imagine for a second, what if Jesus had seen the man coming and yelled, "Whoa, whoa, stay back. Follow the law! Get yourself cleaned up. Wait a minute! You stay there. Hold on! Wait for it! Be clean! Okay – now you can come and I’ll give you knuckles.” It sounds awful and yet is how we often operate. So, here's the contrast, side by side. Jesus's order starts with leaning in, an embrace, an unconditional “yes.” He sees a human being first. He leads with acceptance before healing. Our common order, often starts with a “Wait a minute!” It starts with a label or an issue: Democrat, Republican, gay, straight, immigrant, whatever. And it demands that people change before we'll offer them a seat at the table. And the main way we often dangerously justify this approach in the church is by using one of the more damaging phrases: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” We mean well, it sounds balanced, righteous and loving, but in practice, it almost always creates distance and moves away from the will to embrace of Jesus.
It becomes a rationale for standing apart from someone, not for standing with them. Let's just be real about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that phrase. What people hear isn't love and embrace. They hear the condition, the qualification. They hear, “We’ll love you BUT…” or “We’ll touch you WHEN…” or most explicitly, “We don’t love you as you are. We love our idea of who you should be.” “Welcome to our game. We love you! But no, you can’t play. We’ve identified the truly noxious sins and sorry, we love you!, just stay over there.” So really, the message we end up sending is this: our love isn't for the actual person standing in front of us. It's for some future cleaned up version of them that we have in our heads. “Love the sinner. Hate the sin” prioritizes our holiness over their humanity, our rule following over there inclusion. So what's the alternative? If that phrase is broken, what do we replace it with? Well, perhaps a much more direct way forward is to listen to Jesus’ own commands directly: love your neighbor, love your enemy, love your brother and sister, love yourself. You know, in short, love everyone. No sorting, no labeling, no conditions, just love and embrace. Period. And friends, one of the most important loves in that list is learning to love and embrace ourselves, our own inner leper. If we’re going to truly exercise the will to embrace we must be like Jesus to ourselves, attending to our own inner suffering, listening to it, and cradling it. And I imagine that you never answer to the word “sinner” for that is not all that you are and not your name. If we don’t attend to our own suffering and allow Jesus to transform it we will project that suffering on everyone else. If we cannot believe that we are embraceable we won’t embrace anyone else.
Okay. Okay. But what about that second part – the sin part? Are we just supposed to ignore stuff that's harmful and hurtful? Not at all. But maybe we need to reframe our whole posture toward it. When I’m fighting with my wife and I’m upset, she often reminds me of how my raised voice makes it hard to lean in and hurts our ability to have a conversation and express our love amidst disagreement. She’ll often gently ask me, “Can you say that a little softer?” Hatred doesn’t allow for softness and embrace. It doesn’t create a context for listening to someone and attending to their suffering. Hating sin, even if it’s at a person’s actions, is like trying to have a conversation with a radio that’s too loud. It only leads to shouting and misunderstanding which fuels more blame and more isolation. We must find a way to turn the volume down and say it softer, to address the harm without all the anger and the judgment. And here's the key shift: God doesn't hate sin in some abstract cosmic way. God hates sin because it hurts real people that God loves. The focus moves from judging the action to having compassion for the person being harmed by it. Tell me if you can hear a difference: God hates divorce. God loves divorced people. We hate addiction. We love addicts. We hate poverty. We seek to understand and help those who struggle with poverty. We love those who are poor.
The response to people struggling with sin, isolated by sin, harmed by sin, isn’t to hate sin but to listen to people, to forgive people, to embrace people. It isn’t to separate from sin but to lean into people with touchable compassion. When Jesus confronts sin and suffering he does so through embrace, forgiveness, and solidarity. He does so through the cross – suffering love and HE is the one who suffers not through some separate holiness but by fully identifying in love with all those who sin (2 Cor. 5:21). Think about it. Jesus didn't stand there on the street corner yelling about how much he hated leprosy. He leaned in and he loved the leper. And the story ends with this powerful ironic, upside-down twist. After the man is healed and gets to go back into society, Jesus can no longer enter towns openly. Mark tells us in 1:45, he's the one who has to stay outside in “lonely places.”
In a very real sense, he switches places with the outcast. And that leaves us with a really challenging question. What if Jesus’ will to embrace isn't just a nice cozy sentiment? What if it actually costs us something? What if standing with people forced out on the margins means we might just end up on the margins with them – unclean ourselves with questionable reputations. Let me say it softer. What if it means transgressing the law and standing with the immigrant with the will to embrace in the lonely places? What if it means breaking the rules and standing with the trans-kid with the will to embrace in the lonely places? What if it means battling partisanship and standing with someone from the “other” political party with the will to embrace in the lonely places? What if it means venturing out into the lonely places in order to follow Jesus? Are we willing to pay that price? Are we courageous enough to be like Jesus – to embrace whomever is in front of us and say, “I am willing”? Amen.
