This morning’s word is What Moves the Hand.
The anchor verses are Mark 1:41 and Acts 10:38.
Researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute, working with collaborators at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and the Gladstone Institutes, published a paper this week describing a new CRISPR technique that selectively destroys cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched. The technology targets a protein called p53, which scientists call “the guardian of the genome.” A healthy p53 protects against cancer. A mutated p53 allows cancer to grow. The new technique recognizes the mutation specifically and destroys only the cells that carry it.
Those mutations are found in nearly half of all cancer cases and are tied to about half of all cancer deaths. They drive many of the forms that have been hardest to treat. The implication is hard to take in. A precision tool has been shown to recognize and destroy the cells that have been hardest to treat in the cancers that have killed the most people. It is important to be honest about where this stands. The work was done in the laboratory and in mice, not yet in people. It is early research, and years of testing remain before it could ever reach a patient. But the direction is real, and the direction is the thing worth sitting with this morning.
This kind of research takes years. The hands that built this tool spent decades training, working in laboratories, running failed experiments, learning, and trying again. Somebody moved those hands. The question worth sitting with this morning is: what.
This is the rhythm of the daily word here at Grace and Peace Studio. Each morning, readings are gathered and walked until their single thread emerges. Today’s come from three streams.
Day Two of the new sixteen-day plan, “Does God Heal Today?,” takes up a different question. Why does HE heal? Eight times in the Gospels, Jesus was moved with compassion before HE healed.
Day Two sits with Mark 1, where a leper comes to Jesus, kneels, and says, “If You are willing, You can make me clean.” Lepers were untouchable in that culture. To be near one risked contamination and exile. The man is not asking whether Jesus can. He is asking whether Jesus is willing. The text reads: “Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him.” Touched him. Then HE said, “I am willing; be cleansed.” The leprosy left him at once.
Jesus did not heal to grow HIS following. HE told the cleansed man to tell no one. Acts 10:38 sums up the whole ministry: “Jesus healed because God was with Him.” The hand of Jesus was moved by the compassion of Jesus, and that compassion was the compassion of the Father.
What moves the hand of Jesus is the same thing that, two thousand years later, moves the hands of researchers in California to spend their careers programming molecular tools that can recognize a single mutated protein among trillions of healthy ones. They may not name HIM. But they are working in the direction HE has always been working. The compassion that moves their hands is the compassion HE wove into human beings.
Katie Hauck, a Bible teacher who writes on the life of faith, closes her six-day plan “You Are NOT GOD!” today with a teaching titled “Can You Do What You Ask Others to Do?” Hauck writes about the weeks before she first taught this message. They were among the hardest she had walked through. In the middle of it all, she heard the Lord ask, “Can you do what you are asking others to do?” Her first honest answer was no. She did not want to choose joy. She did not want to release the grip. But she chose anyway, “not because I felt like it, not because everything was resolved,” but because she knew whose she was and what HE had placed inside her.
This is the hinge that connects to the research story. The researchers’ hands do not move because the science is easy. They move because something larger than feeling is at work. The Christian who chooses peace in the middle of chaos is doing the same kind of work. The fuel is not feeling. The fuel is the One who placed compassion in us in the first place.
Ignatius of Antioch closes his letter to the Magnesians today with a prayer request. The bishop on his way to martyrdom asks the Magnesian church to pray for him, and to pray for the church he is leaving behind in Syria. The leader who has been doing the teaching becomes the one being held up. United prayer in love holds the church together when its teachers are being led to execution.
So what moves the hand? In Mark 1, compassion moved the hand of Jesus toward an untouchable man. In a California laboratory, compassion moves the hands of researchers toward a disease that has been considered untreatable. In Hauck’s hard season, compassion moved her hand to make a choice she did not feel like making. In Ignatius’s last days, compassion moved his hand to write one more letter asking for prayer.
The compassion is the same compassion. The hand is whichever hand will move with it today.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.