When the leper came to Jesus, saying, "Lord, if You will, You can make me clean, Jesus put forth His hand and touched him." (Luke 5:12-13)
The leper was an unclean being, and great was the fear of contagion; yet Jesus was not afraid to touch him, and He suffered no injury from the touch. This is a likeness of Christ's connection with sin. "[He] bore our sins in His own body on the tree." (1 Peter 2:24) "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53:6)
Yet although He was made to be sin for us, "[He] knew no sin." (2 Corinthians 5:21) "[He] did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth." (1 Peter 2:22)
He could come into the closest contact with sin and not be defiled by it. He received sinners, and was their friend, associating freely with the worst of them, yet He was "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens." (Hebrews 7:26)
So may it be with us, if Christ dwells in us. We may work for the degraded, coming in contact with them, and giving them the sympathetic touch, as He did, and not be defiled. We may be "unspotted from the world," while coming close to it as Christ did. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." (James 1:27)
It is possible that we may not be in high repute with the world for so doing; but that matters nothing if we have the mind that was in Christ, who "made himself of no reputation." (Philippians 2:7) "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might be rich.--Present Truth, November 17, 1892--Timeline: IV-8 (The First Leper)--Luke 5:12-13.