TEXT: Mark 1: 29-39
We’ve been reading through the first chapter of Mark these past few weeks. The shortest and the oldest of the Gospels, Mark’s spare biography of Jesus starts with the launching of Jesus’s ministry. After Jesus has taught in the synagogue and exorcised a demon, he heals the first in a long succession of people who will be healed in a ministry that Mark defines largely as a healing one.
Later Gospel writers added their own details to Mark’s account, shaping the story in ways to emphasize their theological concerns. But an important key to understanding Mark’s Jesus is to notice Mark’s emphasis on Jesus as a healer. Because healing is so important to Mark’s gospel, and because the New Testament concept of healing differs greatly from our own, I’m going to take some time to share what anthropologists and biblical scholars understand about the concepts of sickness and health in the ancient Near East culture.
Sickness, in Jesus’s day, was thought to be caused by a “who,” not a “what.” Jesus knew nothing of germs and genes. His contemporaries didn’t know a virus could make you ill; they thought demons did that. [i] Many in Jesus’s day also believed infirmity could be a result of God’s punishment for evil done by you or even your parents. Interestingly, Jesus rejected that last idea. But he saw sin as at least analogous to sickness when he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician . . . . I came not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2: 17). Certainly his Jewish tradition appreciated the body-spirit connection, viewing the body and soul as indivisible. “No wonder the Greek verb sozo in Jesus’ day meant both to save and to heal, and so-ter meant both savior and physician”. [ii] Appreciation for the body-mind-spirit connection has not always been important to Western medical practice, but that may be changing.
So how were people healed in Jesus’ day—prior to antibiotics and chemotherapy? They were healed, not by a “what” (a pill or surgery), but by a “who” (a miracle worker—and there were many such miracle workers or healers in that culture).[iii]
Even the concept of health itself meant something different to Jesus’s contemporaries. Health was “a state of complete well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (Pilch 72).Someone was “healed” when she or he returned to a state of well-being. That’s because the ancient Mediterranean culture emphasized “the value of simply living or being rather than of achieving or doing” (Pilch 72). You had health if you could live with a sense wholeness and connection and meaning in your life. We in our culture do not claim to be “healed” as long as some injury or disease prevents us from going back to work and being a productive member of society.
But in the New Testament, “Jesus heal[ed] people by restoring them to a proper state”--by restoring their relationships, not their level of productivity. Being healed is different from being cured. People whom Jesus healed regained their place in their community and their relatedness in their families. You and I tend to think about the problem Jesus the healer addressed as medical; but his peers saw it as communal. Being healed is when people are restored to the community and ultimately find meaning in life, whether they are “cured” of a disease or not. Jesus “restored meaning and joy to the lives of individuals” (Pilch 78).
If you think I’m trying to downgrade Jesus’s healing powers, I promise I am not. No serious biblical scholar minimizes Jesus’s role as a healer. Healing was central to his ministry. Even today the healing done in the name of Jesus can and should be life-changing. But let us not impose our cultural understandings of healing onto another culture.
So with an awareness of those cultural differences, we’re ready to look at Mark’s scant story of Jesus’s first healing. In the sparse details of this 3-verse narrative (Mark 1:29-31) we might discover something about the circumstances in which healing takes place—and the purposes and effects of healing in the Jesus community.
Let’s begin with the story’s setting. Jesus and his disciples have just left a Sabbath service in the local synagogue and have walked to Simon’s house. It is significant that the writer sets this first healing story on the Sabbath, and it will not be the last time Jesus violates Jewish law to heal someone on a day in which all work is forbidden. In fact, the next time he’ll heal on the Sabbath, he will be IN the synagogue itself (Mark 3: 1-6), an infraction so flagrant that some start plotting against him. Jesus’s propensity for Sabbath healings, attested to in the other synoptic gospels, is not aimed at disrespecting religious law but in exposing religion’s ills. Yes, religion can be sick. All religions. Perhaps it’s a more impressive miracle to reconnect the work of the Sabbath with its healing aims than it is to heal a sick woman.
Jesus did not simply heal ON the Sabbath. He healed the Sabbath. If our worship anesthetizes us to the pain of others, if our prayers drown out the cries of those who are hurting, if our theology paralyzes people with guilt for being who God created them to be or prevents them from using the minds God gave them-- our religion is sick. If our worship does not bring us rest and rejuvenation and restoration, then we are not genuinely engaged in the aims of Sabbath. Sabbath, Jesus says through his enacted sermons, is for healing. If you don’t leave here this evening having experienced at least some small measure of healing in your life—and some renewed commitment to join in God’s healing of the world –then you need to ask for a refund!
And whom does Jesus heal first as he launches his healing ministry? Significantly, it’s someone of little significance: the unnamed mother-in-law of Simon. As one who has become a mother-in-law fairly recently, I am a little touchier than I used to be about the bad rap given women whose daughters have married. Simon’s mother-in-law is in an especially vulnerable state. We can assume the sick woman is widowed since she’s not living with her husband. Widows and orphans were, in that culture, the most vulnerable of all in that society since women, like children, depended upon a male member of their family. This sick woman is also apparently without sons, or she’d have been living with a son in her widowhood. And because Simon’s wife is never mentioned, some speculate that she, too, has died. So this widow, connected to society only by the thin thread of her dead daughter’s husband, faces another indignity and diminishment: her illness prevents her from performing the household duties that would give her an acceptable role in society. Jesus, at the outset of his ministry, singles out someone on the farthest margins of society. And he heals her.
How? He took her by the hand—though it was a taboo in his culture for a male to touch an unrelated female. He took her by the hand. As Frederick Buechner says, “Sometimes just the touch of another human being is enough to save the day.” We, too, need a deep sense of belonging and worth.
You and I heal one another by touch: just the ordinary magic of human kindness we all carry within us and transmit with a hand extended in friendship, with an arm around a shoulder bowed in grief, with a connecting gaze that says, “We’re in this together.”
Jesus demonstrated by his touch that this sick woman was worthy of being connected again to others. She deserved—not by dint of her efforts nor by degree of blood relationship but simply by her humanness—to be reintegrated into community. He touched her. And he lifted her up. I wonder if those strong hands supporting her reminded her of the passage we read earlier from Isaiah, where those who are tired and weary feel the Spirit of God raising them up as if on eagle’s wings.
Mark tells the story as if the healing happened instantly. But Mark telescopes every event. Deep healing takes a long time. So I wonder if Jesus had been staying in Simon’s house for awhile. I wonder if he’d had many talks with her. I wonder if he’d learned she’d taken to her bed because she was grieving the death of her spouse or child. Grief or stress or hurt or exhaustion will do that, you know. I wonder if Jesus listened to her heartache, finally shared in feverish bursts. I wonder if one day, when Jesus held out his hand, she found the will to live again, and so she took his hand, and her spirit lifted.
Unfortunately, the final detail of an otherwise poignant story is ripe for spoofing. Verse 31 ends the story this way: “Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.” No sooner is the fever gone than this poor woman leaves her sickbed to wait on the men her son-in-law brought home! It’s Sunday night, and she’s probably rustling up supper for her son-in-law and the guys he’s brought over to watch the Super Bowl. Simon calls into the kitchen, “Hey, can we get some more buffalo wings out here?” as Andrew spills his beer on her new sofa.
But in that Ancient Near East culture, this woman’s restoration was tied not to her productivity but to her role, her place in that household.
You and I are healed in order to find our place of service because by serving, the healing continues.
I’ve accompanied a friend as he moved from alcoholism to sobriety. One way he continues his healthy sobriety now is by sharing his story with others. If the hurts of your life are being healed, if your spiritual journey is being deepened, if places in your life are being transformed, you can lift up others.
And anyone can serve. People with less energy or fewer resources are not less valued or less needed in the Christian community. Those who are differently abled might serve in different ways. Sometimes those whose abilities are diminished by disease or age serve us by allowing us to learn to serve them. There are many ways we serve. But serve we must. For our own sake. For the sake of others. Sometimes even while we’re healing, we serve as wounded healers.
Today’s story doesn’t help us to know how Simon’s mother-in-law felt about serving. But I hope she did not drag herself from her sickbed to make nachos for the boys. I hope Mark’s gospel instead emphasizes her immediate serving in order to signal that the proof of her healing is found in her service to others. If we’ve been healed, strengthened, in some way touched by the love of Jesus, the evidence will be in our service to others.
And now we turn our attention to the epilogue, which is far longer than the story itself. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Jesus soon is inundated with other sick people wanting to be healed. The whole city is at Simon’s front door clamoring to see the new miracle worker. Jesus keeps at it until night comes on, and in the wee hours of the morning, he slips away in the darkness to a deserted place for prayer. Soon the disciples hunt him down and draw him back into serving others. But a rhythm continues for Jesus: he serves—and then retreats in prayer—and serves and then finds time to be alone and in prayer. The healer heals through connection. But the healer also needs quiet reflection.
I hope we at Open Table can find that healthy rhythm. I hope we can attend to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I hope we as a community can realize that we affect one another’s habits and so we can together practice healthier ways of eating and exercising, of meditating and praying, of sharpening our minds, of reducing the stress in our lives, of restoring others to a supportive, grace-filled community.
I hope we can also work together to heal our planet. We have a role to play in tending the garden God gave us. We can’t be healthy if our home isn’t.
Perhaps the best way to begin tending our spirit is by cultivating a heart of gratitude. Gratitude teaches us to pay attention to the beautiful and the good. Paying attention opens us to the God who comes to us disguised as our own lives, says Paula D’arcy. God takes it from there.
PRAYER: In gratitude, O God, we open ourselves to your healing touch. Amen
[i] Pilch, John J. The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999 (72). See also the Handbook of Biblical Social Values, John Pilch and Bruce Malina, editors, as well as The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology by Bruce Malina.
[ii] Buechner, Frederick. “Healing” in Wishful Thinking. Harper One, 1993.
[iii] Pilch 72.
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