Go Back In · Week 1 · Sunday

There is a law in Leviticus that most people have never read, and it explains the loneliest verse in the first chapter of Mark.

If you had a skin disease in Israel, the law was specific about what you owed everyone else. It was not vague and it was not private.

A diseased person must wear torn clothes and let his hair hang loose, and he must cover his mouth and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ As long as he has the infection, he remains unclean. He must live alone in a place outside the camp.Leviticus 13:45–46 (BSB)

Torn clothes so you could be identified at a distance. Loose hair so you could be identified closer. A covered mouth. And your own voice announcing the thing about you that you would least want announced, every time another human being came within earshot.

Then: alone, outside the camp, for as long as it lasted.

What the man actually did

So when Mark opens this story, understand what has already happened before the first word of dialogue.

Then a leper came to Jesus, begging on his knees: “If You are willing, You can make me clean.”Mark 1:40 (BSB)

He came. He crossed a line he was legally required not to cross, in front of a crowd, while he was still exactly as unclean as he had been that morning. Nothing about him had improved. He had not gotten a handle on it. He had not put together a stretch of good days.

He did not get clean and then approach. He approached, and then he got clean.

The order is the whole thing.

The detail most people miss

Go one chapter further into Leviticus, into the law about a man being restored after the disease has passed, and read who moves first.

The priest is to go outside the camp to examine him, and if the skin disease of the afflicted person has healed,Leviticus 14:3 (BSB)

The priest goes out.

The man on the outside does not get to walk in and present himself. The one with the authority to declare him clean walks out to where he is standing, in the place where the unclean live, and meets him there.

Why this week

I had a friend go quiet on me this year. Not dramatically. He stopped answering, stopped showing up, and every reply came back a little shorter than the one before it.

I told myself I was giving him space. What I was actually doing was waiting for him to be ready, which is a polite way of saying I was waiting for him to be presentable.

He was never going to be. That is what the thing he was carrying does to a man. It convinces him he has to be worth coming back to before he comes back, and the waiting is the entire trap.

Eventually I stopped waiting and drove over. That is the whole story, and it is not much of one. But it cost me something to do it, and I will tell you what it cost on Saturday.

This week is about the room you left. Five days, five men, five reasons to stay out of it — money, an apology, a mistake at work, a habit nobody knows about, and a neighbor you stopped waving at.

Somebody has to move first. It is almost never the man standing outside.