The Gospel Reaches

This post is part of a series looking at moments where Jesus shows us what the gospel is actually about.

For most Western students, Threshold, a week spent on our beautiful Portland campus, is the highlight of their seminary experience.

In February of 2024, mine looked the part. Four days of class. One chapel service. A week in a city I'd never been to, with a food and coffee scene worth the hype. A free Trailblazers game. A hotel room all to myself, no kids to wrangle, nothing but my own schedule for a week.

But inside, I was unraveling.

I sat in class surrounded by pastors and ministry leaders, professors who'd given their whole lives to the church, and classmates already serving in roles I could only now watch from the outside of. Any other time, that would have felt like home. But that week, it felt like sitting in a room full of people who spoke a language I was quietly forgetting how to speak.

In seven days, I was no longer going to be in my pastoral role, and no one there knew it. Not my professors. Not my classmates.

I told myself it was to protect them. Why make people deal with something heavy in the middle of their Threshold week? In my mind, I didn’t want to ruin their week on campus.

But if I'm honest, it wasn't really about them. I didn't want to be looked at differently. I didn't want to become the guy people worried about or worse, pitied. So I kept it in. Four days of class, sitting a few feet from people who would have understood exactly the pressures of ministry and the ache of leaving. And I never said a word.

I've thought about that week a lot since. Not just what I was going through, but the decision to go through it alone in a room full of people who could have helped process my circumstances.

It turns out that I’m not alone. Most of us have a version of that room. A place surrounded by people who love us, who are equipped for the kind of weight we're carrying, and we still choose to sit in it silently.

We tell ourselves it's for their protection. We're simply sparing them the burden, the moment its awkwardness, or the relationship the discomfort of not knowing what to say. But underneath the protection is usually something harder to admit: we don't want to be looked at differently. We don't want to become someone people worry about, manage, or handle with extra care. We don’t want to be pitied.

So we isolate ourselves. We carry the burden alone. And we call it consideration.

In Mark 1, we meet a man who didn’t have a choice.

He was forced to isolate. In fact, it was the law. The man had leprosy, and in the first century, that wasn’t just a diagnosis. It was a sentence. Anyone with leprosy was required by law to live outside the city in isolation. Their condition was made very public, and if someone happened to come close, they had to make their presence public, shouting “Unclean, unclean” to scare off the people who accidentally came close.

Theirs was not protection born out of consideration, but protection enforced by law (Leviticus 13:45-46). The cost of getting it wrong wasn't just social, it was contagious.

So when this man comes to Jesus, he's breaking every rule his condition required of him.

“A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’.” (Mark 1:40)

This act was not just unlawful, but dangerous. By coming near Jesus, he wasn't just breaking the law. He was endangering Jesus and everyone around him. I imagine that the people with Jesus immediately recognized the man’s condition and put some distance between themselves and the infected. But Jesus doesn’t.

“Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’” (Mark 1:41)

Jesus touched him before he healed him.

That detail is easy to miss if you already know how the story ends. But think about it. Jesus didn't need to touch him. He'd already healed people with a word, from a distance, without ever closing the gap. He even healed people in different towns that He would never meet. He could have spoken from a distance and remained clean, in every sense of the law. Instead, he reached out first. The healing happened after. The touch wasn't required. It was chosen.

Here's what's easy to miss about that touch: Jesus wasn't waiting for the man to prove he was worth the risk. He wasn't standing by, ready to reach out once the situation became desperate enough to justify it. The leper hedges his ask with “if you are willing,” but Jesus was willing before the man ever opened his mouth.

The truth is that Jesus wants to be present with us. There are many verses about Jesus being close, but one that has always comforted me is Psalm 145:18:

“The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”

We often try to carry the burdens of our lives in isolation, even from Jesus. We wait until we are desperate to pray. And while He is faithful to show up, Jesus wants to be present with us always, not just in our worst moments. He doesn't wait outside the door until we're finally desperate enough to ask him in. He's already reaching, long before we're brave enough to say what we're carrying.

Four days of class, sitting a few feet from people who understood exactly what I was carrying, and I white-knuckled it alone instead. The anxiety didn't stay contained to the parts of me I was hiding. It spread into everything. I could barely focus in class. I barely slept. I had one of the worst weeks of my life in the place that should have been the highlight of my seminary experience.

Really, I was just keeping everyone, including Jesus, at arm's length, certain that closeness wasn't safe until I had something less heavy to bring to it.

I didn't need a law to make me isolate. No one told me to shout "unclean" and clear a path. I did it myself, quietly, one unshared moment at a time. And the whole week, Jesus wasn't waiting on the other side of that distance for me to get brave enough to close it.

He was already reaching. He already was present with me.

Here's what I'm learning: life is too hard to carry alone. And I don't have to. Not with people who would understand, and not with a God who was already reaching before I said a word.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.

Philip