Good News on Foot

In 1987, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard medical student named Paul Farmer made a choice that baffled his peers. Rather than chase a lucrative career in Boston, he co-founded Partners in Health — known locally as Zanmi Lasante — in Cange, a community in Haiti's Central Plateau whose residents had been displaced decades earlier by the Péligre Dam. The region had no paved roads, no reliable electricity, and almost no access to modern medicine. Farmer, alongside co-founders Ophelia Dahl and Jim Yong Kim, began building a clinic where none had existed.

What set Farmer apart was not just the clinic he built but the miles he walked. He routinely hiked for hours through mountainous terrain to reach a single patient too sick to travel. Colleagues questioned the efficiency. Farmer's answer was direct: "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world."

When Jesus stood in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from Isaiah — "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor... to set the oppressed free" — He was not offering an abstract theology. He was announcing a way of living. Good news, in the Kingdom of God, has always had feet. It walks toward the forgotten. It climbs the mountain to reach the one.

The question Luke 4:18 puts before every congregation is not whether we believe in justice, but whether we are willing to carry it into the places no one else will go.