By the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow
This sermon is based on Mark 1:29-39
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Our Gospel reading this morning begins exactly where last week’s Gospel left off, picking up the story of Jesus’ first acts of mission right after he taught in the synagogue for the first time, with an authority that could command even the unclean spirits. In today’s reading we hear about more firsts: Jesus’ first healing, and the first time a crowd gathers around him, and the first time he goes off by himself to renew his mission in prayer, and the first time he leaves one town in order to share the good news in many places. All these “firsts” set the stage for the rest of the gospel, giving us the keys to understand what all of Jesus’ acts of mission are all about. That’s especially true of the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law: this first healing shows us the heart of all of Jesus’ healings, including the way Jesus heals us today.
So here's the story: After Sabbath service in the synagogue, Simon takes his new teacher Jesus home to the house he shares with his wife, and his brother Andrew, and his wife’s mother — remember that in those days the “nuclear family” as we think of it was virtually unheard of — so that they can all partake of the Sabbath meal. That was an important custom for them, as indeed it still is today. Over the years I’ve been invited to a few synagogue services on Shabbas, and the spreads they put on after service have been a wonder to behold. It wasn’t that different in Simon’s time — except perhaps that it was more common to have the meal at home than at the synagogue itself. And in the home, it was the pride and joy of the mother of the house to serve the feast. Her principal role was to provide hospitality, to create the atmosphere and the openness where the whole household could relax and enjoy and rest in God and know their blessings — which was, after all, the whole purpose of the Sabbath day. Now creating an occasion like that may sound like a lot of work, like a big burden; but remember this was the Sabbath, no work was allowed on the Sabbath, all the work had been done the day before, and all the mother of the house had to do for the feast was gather the household, set out the food, and open the space for joy. That was what Simon invited Jesus to come to his house to share.
There was just one problem: Simon’s wife’s mother, the mother of the house, was sick in bed with a fever. She couldn’t provide the hospitality. All the work was done, all the food was prepared, the feast could go on — but without the mother of the house it just wouldn’t be the same. Her fever was not just a physical ailment threatening her own bodily well-being; her fever was a disruption in the whole household, a break in the web of relationships that held them all together, a diminishment of all their lives. Their Sabbath day to relax and enjoy and rest in God and know their blessings couldn’t be the fullness it was meant to be, because Mother’s fever got in the way of their enjoying God’s gift of abundant life.
So Jesus gets the fever out of the way. He goes in to where Mother is lying in weakness and pain, and he takes her by the hand, and he helps her get out of bed, and the fever leaves her, and he brings her into the main room where everyone is waiting, and she begins to dish up the food and pass around the plates and make sure that everybody’s happy. Jesus physically cures her of the fever — but more importantly, Jesus restores her to her place in the household, he gives her back her role as the provider of hospitality, the one whose joy it is to open up the space where all may know joy. So when Jesus heals her, he heals the entire household, he restores their entire web of relationships, he brings them all to a greater joy, he helps them all to know a more abundant life.
And the way Mark tells the story, there are two key words in his narrative that really reveal the heart of what this healing is about. Mark says Jesus “lifted her up,” which on the face of it looks as simple as “he helped her to stand.” But the word Mark uses here is the same word he uses for what God does for Jesus on the third day after the Crucifixion. In the Resurrection God lifted up Jesus to new life — and I think Mark wants us to hear the echo of that in the way Jesus lifted up Mother to more healthy abundant life in her context. And when she was raised up, she began to “serve” — and that’s the other key word, the same word Mark uses when Jesus says about himself, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” Serving is a specific characteristic of Jesus. So Mark is making here a pointed word-connection between the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law and Jesus’ own life and mission, in effect saying that Jesus heals Mother by helping her to be more like him. More than just a physical cure, the essence of Jesus’ healing is to share with others some of his own abundant life, so that they may be raised up to service, lifted to a new degree of vitality in order to show forth God’s gift of wholeness and peace and hospitality and right-relationships and joy with everyone around them, just like Jesus himself. This healing of Simon’s mother-in-law prepares us to see that the heart of all of Jesus’ healings is to help people become more like him, to help people share in Jesus’ own abundant life.
And that is how we are meant to understand Jesus’ healing presence among us as well. Jesus shares his abundant life with us, so that we may be more like him, to carry on his mission of service and hospitality and justice and mutual well-being and joy in our world all around us. When Jesus heals us it may or may not involve physical cure — but it always involves us being lifted up to a greater abundance of life, so that we may help others to greater life too.
And I saw some wonderful examples of being lifted up to greater life at our Diocesan Council last week. Delegates and clergy from all over our diocese came together to approve a plan to transform how we organize the leadership and resources of our diocese to do Christ’s mission in our time and place — and we began to take counsel on how we will seek out a new bishop when Bishop Powell retires, to lead us in this new direction. Council guests from the Presiding Bishop’s office, and our link diocese of Bradford, and the violence-torn region of Kadugli in Sudan, and the Diocese of Western Tanganyika, all helped us to see and feel how our diocese is connected to the greater life of the church in many places and conditions. Former child soldier turned rapper Emmanuel Jal lifted up the Youth@Council to an abundant energy to pray for peace. Youth and adults at Council packed 175,000 simple, nutritious meals to be sent to South Sudan. And through it all I sensed an abundant vitality, a wonderful liveliness, from the people of the diocese themselves, a sense of the powerful things God is doing among us, and a real eagerness to join God in that mission of service and joy. The healing of Jesus, the wholeness of Christ, was evident among us at Diocesan Council the whole entire time.
That was one kind of experience of the healing presence of Jesus among us, in a very large-scale, public way — kind of like the public healing in front of Simon’s house in today’s gospel. But of course Jesus’ healing is with us in smaller, more personal, more intimate ways, too, as it was with Simon’s mother-in-law. Jesus lifts us up to serve abundant life in the midst of cancer, or depression, or sorrow, or surgery, or stomach flu, or even the common cold — or any way our distress is taken up and transformed by compassion and caring and right-relationship, so that the wholeness of Christ’s love can shine through even our broken places. Sometimes with physical cure, sometimes without, Jesus heals us by raising us up to greater communion in serving, so that we together can share in more abundant life.
Our Gospel today tells us about the first healing of Jesus, and in doing so it reveals that the heart of all of Jesus’ healing is to lift us up so that we may be like him, and, like him, we may serve for peace and life and right-relationship and joy. May the Spirit of Jesus fill us with this healing, now and always. Amen.
This sermon is based on Mark 1:29-39
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Our Gospel reading this morning begins exactly where last week’s Gospel left off, picking up the story of Jesus’ first acts of mission right after he taught in the synagogue for the first time, with an authority that could command even the unclean spirits. In today’s reading we hear about more firsts: Jesus’ first healing, and the first time a crowd gathers around him, and the first time he goes off by himself to renew his mission in prayer, and the first time he leaves one town in order to share the good news in many places. All these “firsts” set the stage for the rest of the gospel, giving us the keys to understand what all of Jesus’ acts of mission are all about. That’s especially true of the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law: this first healing shows us the heart of all of Jesus’ healings, including the way Jesus heals us today.
So here's the story: After Sabbath service in the synagogue, Simon takes his new teacher Jesus home to the house he shares with his wife, and his brother Andrew, and his wife’s mother — remember that in those days the “nuclear family” as we think of it was virtually unheard of — so that they can all partake of the Sabbath meal. That was an important custom for them, as indeed it still is today. Over the years I’ve been invited to a few synagogue services on Shabbas, and the spreads they put on after service have been a wonder to behold. It wasn’t that different in Simon’s time — except perhaps that it was more common to have the meal at home than at the synagogue itself. And in the home, it was the pride and joy of the mother of the house to serve the feast. Her principal role was to provide hospitality, to create the atmosphere and the openness where the whole household could relax and enjoy and rest in God and know their blessings — which was, after all, the whole purpose of the Sabbath day. Now creating an occasion like that may sound like a lot of work, like a big burden; but remember this was the Sabbath, no work was allowed on the Sabbath, all the work had been done the day before, and all the mother of the house had to do for the feast was gather the household, set out the food, and open the space for joy. That was what Simon invited Jesus to come to his house to share.
There was just one problem: Simon’s wife’s mother, the mother of the house, was sick in bed with a fever. She couldn’t provide the hospitality. All the work was done, all the food was prepared, the feast could go on — but without the mother of the house it just wouldn’t be the same. Her fever was not just a physical ailment threatening her own bodily well-being; her fever was a disruption in the whole household, a break in the web of relationships that held them all together, a diminishment of all their lives. Their Sabbath day to relax and enjoy and rest in God and know their blessings couldn’t be the fullness it was meant to be, because Mother’s fever got in the way of their enjoying God’s gift of abundant life.
So Jesus gets the fever out of the way. He goes in to where Mother is lying in weakness and pain, and he takes her by the hand, and he helps her get out of bed, and the fever leaves her, and he brings her into the main room where everyone is waiting, and she begins to dish up the food and pass around the plates and make sure that everybody’s happy. Jesus physically cures her of the fever — but more importantly, Jesus restores her to her place in the household, he gives her back her role as the provider of hospitality, the one whose joy it is to open up the space where all may know joy. So when Jesus heals her, he heals the entire household, he restores their entire web of relationships, he brings them all to a greater joy, he helps them all to know a more abundant life.
And the way Mark tells the story, there are two key words in his narrative that really reveal the heart of what this healing is about. Mark says Jesus “lifted her up,” which on the face of it looks as simple as “he helped her to stand.” But the word Mark uses here is the same word he uses for what God does for Jesus on the third day after the Crucifixion. In the Resurrection God lifted up Jesus to new life — and I think Mark wants us to hear the echo of that in the way Jesus lifted up Mother to more healthy abundant life in her context. And when she was raised up, she began to “serve” — and that’s the other key word, the same word Mark uses when Jesus says about himself, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” Serving is a specific characteristic of Jesus. So Mark is making here a pointed word-connection between the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law and Jesus’ own life and mission, in effect saying that Jesus heals Mother by helping her to be more like him. More than just a physical cure, the essence of Jesus’ healing is to share with others some of his own abundant life, so that they may be raised up to service, lifted to a new degree of vitality in order to show forth God’s gift of wholeness and peace and hospitality and right-relationships and joy with everyone around them, just like Jesus himself. This healing of Simon’s mother-in-law prepares us to see that the heart of all of Jesus’ healings is to help people become more like him, to help people share in Jesus’ own abundant life.
And that is how we are meant to understand Jesus’ healing presence among us as well. Jesus shares his abundant life with us, so that we may be more like him, to carry on his mission of service and hospitality and justice and mutual well-being and joy in our world all around us. When Jesus heals us it may or may not involve physical cure — but it always involves us being lifted up to a greater abundance of life, so that we may help others to greater life too.
And I saw some wonderful examples of being lifted up to greater life at our Diocesan Council last week. Delegates and clergy from all over our diocese came together to approve a plan to transform how we organize the leadership and resources of our diocese to do Christ’s mission in our time and place — and we began to take counsel on how we will seek out a new bishop when Bishop Powell retires, to lead us in this new direction. Council guests from the Presiding Bishop’s office, and our link diocese of Bradford, and the violence-torn region of Kadugli in Sudan, and the Diocese of Western Tanganyika, all helped us to see and feel how our diocese is connected to the greater life of the church in many places and conditions. Former child soldier turned rapper Emmanuel Jal lifted up the Youth@Council to an abundant energy to pray for peace. Youth and adults at Council packed 175,000 simple, nutritious meals to be sent to South Sudan. And through it all I sensed an abundant vitality, a wonderful liveliness, from the people of the diocese themselves, a sense of the powerful things God is doing among us, and a real eagerness to join God in that mission of service and joy. The healing of Jesus, the wholeness of Christ, was evident among us at Diocesan Council the whole entire time.
That was one kind of experience of the healing presence of Jesus among us, in a very large-scale, public way — kind of like the public healing in front of Simon’s house in today’s gospel. But of course Jesus’ healing is with us in smaller, more personal, more intimate ways, too, as it was with Simon’s mother-in-law. Jesus lifts us up to serve abundant life in the midst of cancer, or depression, or sorrow, or surgery, or stomach flu, or even the common cold — or any way our distress is taken up and transformed by compassion and caring and right-relationship, so that the wholeness of Christ’s love can shine through even our broken places. Sometimes with physical cure, sometimes without, Jesus heals us by raising us up to greater communion in serving, so that we together can share in more abundant life.
Our Gospel today tells us about the first healing of Jesus, and in doing so it reveals that the heart of all of Jesus’ healing is to lift us up so that we may be like him, and, like him, we may serve for peace and life and right-relationship and joy. May the Spirit of Jesus fill us with this healing, now and always. Amen.
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