I adjusted my head scarf and shrugged my coat closer to my body. Farther ahead on this frozen street in Kabul, drifts of men in traditional shalwar kameez and western suits broke right and left to dodge an obstacle.
The gap between hurrying feet soon revealed an old man sitting on the frigid sidewalk. Only a scrap of fabric around his waist separated his body from the concrete. We don’t see poverty like this in the West and I observed him with growing discomfort.
His body was a needle driving through the fabric of humanity, dividing those of us who walked by on the sidewalk from those who sat on it.
He lifted his skeletal arms to the crowd. My children would later use this same pose to ask, “Mommy, pick me up?”
This was a shell of a man.
And we could all walk by without guilt because his egg-white pupils confirmed he was also blind.
Should I reach out to him? A moment longer and I might have slipped off my coat and draped it around his shoulders. But my feet carried me forward, the moment passed, and I, too, slipped into the crowd. The divide was too great. Don’t touch.
Walking away is a natural response. It’s easier to pass by.
We pull our hand away from the steaming kettle, we guard our heart when a friend speaks insensitively, and we draw back from those who suffering stuns us into confused inaction.
Human wisdom says, “Don’t touch.”
But for Jesus, an uncomfortable encounter wasn’t an offense, it was an opportunity.
In another country, on a road not unlike the streets of Kabul, another crowd pressed around another Man. Before this Man knelt an outcast. A reject. The leprosy on his skin was the visible mark of God’s judgment, his culture believed. In a religious society split between clean and unclean, he was on the losing side.
“If you are willing,” implored the man, “you can make me clean.”
In response, Jesus did something so amazing – yet so common – that it’s easy to miss in the aftermath of the miracle that followed:
Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” He said. “Be clean.” Matthew 8:3 NKJV
Jesus touched the man. An observant Jew in Jesus’s day would never touch a ceremonially unclean man with a contagious disease. With such an awkward division between the embraced and the ostracized, moving on would’ve been easier.
Don’t touch, they said. Move along with the crowd. Pass by. But just as He bridged the separation between God and man, Jesus bridged this divide with a simple gesture. Jesus touched.
Others’ pain didn’t make Jesus uneasy – it touched His heart, so He reached out His hand.
Jesus showed us how to brush aside human wisdom to touch hearts. Human wisdom says, “It’s not my responsibility.” Jesus compels us to be His hands to the hurting.
Human wisdom says, “She made poor choices and now she has to live with the consequences.” Jesus prompts us to invite her to meet the God of new beginnings.
Human wisdom says, “Someone else will help.” Jesus entreats us to offer “the least of these” a cup of comfort – or a coat – in His name.
Jesus demonstrated that a touch can transform a life. A hand becomes a bridge by the power of the Holy Spirit when we pass along the love of Jesus instead of passing by.
The world says, “Don’t touch.”
But Jesus calls us to turn pain into possibility, bitterness into blessing, and offense into opportunity.