| Mark 1:29-39 "When God Takes Us By The Hand" |
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| Written by Rev. Don Lee | |
| Saturday, 04 February 2006 | |
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29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. 32 That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ 38He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ 39And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons Prayer: Open our eyes, Lord, and let us see Jesus. Help us to see his face in that of our neighbor; reveal his hand in the workings of the medical community; make his voice clear in the proclamation of the gospel. Bend our wills toward your will, O God, and help us to know the presence of Christ even when he seems most distant from us; even when he seems silent to our prayers; even when he says no, though we desperately need him to say yes. Amen. Every once in a while I read something in the Bible that totally, completely UNDER-WHELMS ME. And that’s incredibly odd for me because I am so often overwhelmed by the power of scripture and its ability to form and transform our lives. The healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is of the under-whelming variety! True, it is the 1st healing miracle recorded in Mark. So maybe Jesus was just doing a little pre-game warm up. Surely Jesus had more important things to do: -causing the lame to walk, -the blind to see, -feeding the hungry, -raising the dead, -hastening the apocalypse! Fever seems too common, too incidental. And yet, here it is, not only in Mark but in all three Synoptic Gospels! That’s a lot of airtime for a healing that’s pretty “over-the-counter.” On the other hand, as far as miracles go it’s certainly more believable then some! Church folk often tell me they read the miracle stories in the Gospels with a certain degree of skepticism. Even if you “buy into” the miracles themselves, they say, “That was then, this is now.” We may even know of someone who claims to have experienced a miracle, but we tend to treat these people suspiciously; like the person who claims they’ve been abducted by aliens! After all, when’s the last time you experienced a miracle of “biblical proportions?” What are we suppose to do with this healing story from Mark? First, a little context: This miracle takes place in Capernaum not long after the call of the 1st disciple. In other words, they have yet to leave home base. Capernaum was built along the edge of the Sea of Galilee and during the 1st century, had up to 1500 residents. Just prior to our reading, Mark’s gospel tells us that Jesus had been teaching in the synagogue where he exorcised a man described as demon possessed. Sort of makes you wonder what a demon possessed person was doing in church in the first place but that’s another sermon. Jesus and his disciples retire to the home of Simon Peter and Andrew where Peter’s mother-in-law is running a fever. Sick in bed, she is unable (as is the custom) to tend to her 4 houseguests. Jesus takes the woman by the hand, and “raises” her up. The Greek verb is (eg-i-ro) egeiro. Mark’s Gospel uses this verb two other times. In 5:41-42 to describe Jesus’ raising of the little girl from the dead, and in 14:28 and 16:6, to describe Jesus' own resurrection. Thus egerio is more then just a hand-up, its resurrection language. Verse 31, “Then the fever left her, and she began to “diekonei,” that is “serve them.” This woman’s healing doesn’t upgrade her life. It transforms it! From sick, miserable, bedridden, unable to live her life to her fullest potential; Jesus’ healing frees here to live out her God created identity. And what does she do with it? She cooks dinner! One might be tempted to write off this woman’s response as symptomatic of a patriarchal system that devalues women and relegates them to subservient roles. But you’d be missing the point. The truth is, this woman gets it! Jesus had an elevated view of the role of the servant and modeled true hospitality by washing his followers feet, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and ultimately surrendering his life in an act of extreme love. What the male disciples consistently fail to understand is that Jesus comes in a servant role − "not to be served but to serve" (10:45), and he calls his disciples to do the same! Mark’s gospel portrays the female disciples in a better light. Writes one commentator, "This is the first of a series of incidents in which a woman represents a right response (the poor widow, …the woman with the ointment, …the women at the cross, …the women at the tomb" (Williamson, 55). The Gospel contradicts the contemporary Christian mindset that claims “Posterity and prosperity are tangible signs of our faithfulness and God’s blessings,” and “that moral character shaped by “biblical values” is the highest ideal for Christian believers.” Feldmeir p.8 Circuit Rider January/February 2006 Jesus is not offering to improve us so we can have successful lives in this world. Rather, Jesus is calling us to a transformed life in the kingdom of God. We don’t need God to bless our materialism, competition, and greed. We need God’s grace (in the words of writer Mark Feldmeir) to see our brokenness and disease as sacramental, as a means of grace through which we can experience the presence of God and an enduring solidarity with Jesus.” P.8 Feldmeir You may not have noticed this but I have scaring on one of my hands. When I was 2 years old I received third degree burns on my left hand. The family story is my mother left an iron unattended and I yanked on the cord and the iron fell on my hand. Personally, I think I was trying to get the wrinkles out! Thank God for shock! I’ve only ever seen one family picture with the burn revealed. My dad is tickling me and the hand whipped out of its hiding place in self-defense. All other family photos, the hand is carefully placed out of view. As I grew up, I remember how embarrassed I was when other children noticed my scar. It was just something else that made me different. While the black has faded, the scar remains. Somewhere along the way in my faith journey, God convinced me that my scar did not diminish my humanity, nor who I am in God’s eyes. I think Christ looks at us through our suffering and brokenness and says, “I’m sorry things turned out this way, but you are whole in my eyes.” In my scars, suffering and failures, I sense the presence of God and I experience solidarity with Jesus, the wounded healer. There’s a wonderful story in Anne Lamott’s book “Plan B” about a member of her church who she describes as a brilliant, passionate Christian activist with breast cancer and one hand. Lamott writes: “Anne sometimes sounded like a mad OT prophet, beseeching us to tend to the starving people of the world, to save the rain forests. She was so unabashed in her faithfulness and need that it made some people nervous. …We’d be having a politely rousing service, until this emaciated, freckled figure with sparse baby-bird blond hair would start to rage [against Bush]. She’d cry out about the suffering in the Third World, and the evils of the military-industrial complex. She waved her stump for emphasis, or testimony. She waved it when she sang. She was like your craziest aunt, the religious one with funny eyes who drinks. Her mother had been a chemist for the military in WWII, helping develop chemical weapons. Several of her colleagues had also given birth to children with defects; her mother couldn’t cope with Anne’s. She was disgusted by the stump, and always positioned Anne so that it didn’t show in family pictures. Anne called it her paw. Lamott invited Anne to speak to her children’s Sunday School class about her faith. She writes, “They all knew she was very sick. She asked each of them their names, and then whether they had noticed anything unusual about her. There was a polite silence. The children shook their heads with puzzled looks, until one kid all but smote his forehead, and said, “Oh! You mean the hand!” She nodded. She let them examine her stump, up close. “Wow,” said another kid. “Whatcha got there?” She showed them the scar tissue where there should have been fingers. The kids studied it with the fearless attention with which they might have examined a huge potato bug. She told them her story, of her mother’s job as a military chemist, of the family pictures where other people’s bodies hid her hand. How she learned to pass as normal, as whole, to do so many amazing things that it took the attention off her body. “I was a good student, a terrific pianist. And such a good girl. But I was very lonely. My mother found me disgusting. And only a few people over the years wanted to hold my hand. The children couldn’t take their eyes off her, the weightless body, the strange paw. “The offer was that if I shared my mother’s opinion of me, I got her. Otherwise I was totally alone. Until one day, Jesus came into the great emptiness.” It happened when Anne was six or so. She was sitting on her rocking chair in her bedroom, when she suddenly noticed a baby’s face in the scar tissue. She wrapped the end of her arm in a scarf, swaddling it, so only the features in the scar tissue showed. “It looked like a doll,” she told the children. “And it was looking at me very, very gently.” She invited the children to come close again, and see the baby, which they all could make out, once they knew what to look for. “It was me,” she said. “Both children were me. The six year old who was doing the mothering and the baby were both me. And I felt Jesus looking up at me, from inside the baby. And he was saying, “I’m sorry it turned out this way, but you are whole in my eyes. “ So I got me back, and in Jesus, I found a real mother.” Did you mind having only one hand? A girl asked. “I didn’t like it at all. It’s been harrowing. And there are many things I love to do that I can’t do well….[But] having this paw made me notice how much suffering there is in the world. It makes me ask, “What’s the suffering about? What’s the answer?’ The suffering itself means nothing. But the answer is also that I can’t look away from it. I saw that God wanted me to help relieve the suffering. And that work has given me peace.” Pp. 205-211 God calls us to live transformed lives in the kingdom of God. And by patiently exploring our suffering and probing our failure, we can experience them as sacramental. They become a means of grace through which we can experience the presence of God and solidarity with Jesus, who gives us greater compassion for those whose wounds run much deeper then our own. On 2nd thought, maybe the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a lot more profound then at first appears. For it gives us a glimpse of Christ’s redemptive love: love that reaches out to touch us, love that (egeiro) raises us up to a transformed life, love that commissions us to diakoneo (serve others). This is no pre-game warm up. It’s the game- plan of the Gospel. It’s why were are here. Hear our prayer, O Lord, As we prepare to come to your table, We come wounded, scar’d, broken, Needing your grace in the worst sort of way. We come, openhanded, desperate for touch of Jesus, (the wounded healer) And ready to respond to your call to Kingdom living. Amen. |
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