February 4, 2024
Isaiah 40:21-31
Mark 1:29-39
Jesus had already had a busy day. He went to Simon’s house from the synagogue service we heard about last week. He’d taught there, then he’d healed a man beset by a demon or a mental illness there. His friend Simon, whom Jesus would later nickname Peter, seems to have thought it was time to give Jesus a break, get him out of the public eye, and have a nice sabbath dinner.
Or… maybe not. When Simon left his house that morning, did he know his mother-in-law was sick? I grant you that illness can come on pretty quickly – when I get a stomach virus I get about five minutes warning – but it would not surprise me in the least if he left her in the care of his wife and maybe a neighbor when he headed off to the synagogue.
On the way back, do you suppose he thought, “He cast out a demon? What could he do with a fever?”
I think he thought it.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he mentioned it. “Say, Jesus, could you perhaps come to my house? We can have dinner there. And, perhaps, you can take a look at my mother-in-law. She’s got a fever.”
For those of you not accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ first disciples as men with families, at least not more than James’ and John’s disappointed father Zebedee left in the boat, or their mother advocating for their promotion, where there’s a mother-in-law, there’s generally a spouse. Some suggest that by the time Simon Peter began following Jesus his wife had died, but curiously in First Corinthians the Apostle Paul mentioned that some of the other apostles, including Jesus’ brothers and Simon Peter, were accompanied on their travels by “a believing wife.” The group of women that accompanied Jesus on his journeys probably included the spouses of his male disciples.
Having endured a lengthy bout of illness and recovery, I feel rather ambivalent about this healing. He took her hand, he lifted her up, and did she get any recovery time? No. Off she went to serve the meal. I’m afraid that some of this is the pure sexism of the first century Mediterranean cultures. Women served in the house, and that was that. But having sat out a couple Sunday services last month, I can tell you this, too: Where I wanted to be during the illness and during the convalescence was right here in this pulpit, even when I wasn’t sure I had the energy to stand. This is my role. This is my calling. This is my place.
Simon’s mother-in-law may have felt much the same. As the senior woman in the house, she was in charge, and failure to serve a distinguished guest – the speaker at the synagogue that day! – may have galled her terribly. As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “But, what if the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law was bringing her back to be the mother she always was and that she always wanted to be? And in being brought back to who she was, she became a disciple, called to minister, to serve, like the angels did for Jesus in the wilderness and like the Son of Man, who did not come to be served but to serve?”
Mark used the same word “lifted up” to describe Jesus’ resurrection later in the book. Mark used the same word “to serve” that he used of angels, of the women (not the men!) who traveled with Jesus, and of the Son of Man himself. Debie Thomas asks at JourneyWithJesus.net, “What if Simon’s mother-in-law is not an undervalued woman in a patriarchal system, but the church’s first deacon? The first person Jesus liberates and commissions into service for God?”
Well. If she is, I think she still might have needed some rest. Jesus did.
“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
We haven’t reached the end of chapter one in Mark, and this is the second time Jesus found a deserted place to pray. The first took place after his baptism. It’s a model for us to remember and to emulate. As Osvaldo Vena writes at Working Preacher, “We need to find our ‘deserted place’ in order to re-energize and charge our spiritual batteries. It is a vital part of our ministry and a good antidote for the cult of personality.” Jesus didn’t stop taking those times away. He went up a mountain to appoint his twelve closest disciples. He was trying to get away from the crowds who followed him such that he fed five thousand people. A trip to a mountain top led to the Transfiguration, which is next week’s Gospel story. And on the night he was betrayed, he left the city to find a garden in which to weep and pray.
Jesus kept making time to restore himself in the presence of God. Jesus kept stepping away from the pressures and the requests to renew himself once again.
Simon and Andrew, James and John, set out on Jesus’ trail to summon him back into Capernaum and resume the work he’d been doing through the evening. I’m pretty sure that when they said, “Everyone is looking for you,” that they expected Jesus to say, “I’ll be right there.”
Unlike John the Baptist, though, Jesus chose to set his ministry in motion. He could have set himself up in Capernaum and waited there for people to show up. They’d have come from miles around, I’d guess. Instead, Jesus said, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns.” He wouldn’t ask people to seek him. He chose to seek them.
As we consider our own calls from God, how do we set our ministries in motion? Once we’ve been revived to our calling like Simon’s mother-in-law, once we’ve been restored by deep time with God, what do we do so that we offer the news of God’s grace and love, rather than simply holding up a sign that says, “God’s love here.” How do reach out rather than demanding that others reach to us? How do we become the one whose hand lifts up, so that someone else regains their strength and, in their own time and with their own call, begins to serve?
We don’t have to look far. There’s a lot of people around us who need that helping hand, and who need that reassurance of spirit.
Let us go on, and lift them up.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes to his sermon text while he’s preaching. It might even be a good thing.
The image is Christ Healing Peter’s Mother-in-Law by Rembrandt – http://www.zeno.org : Home : Info : Pic, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5187227.
