Healing and Service

Scriptures: I Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:29-39

“As soon as they left the synagogue…..” “…and they told him about her at once.” What a sense of urgency there is to Mark’s version of Jesus’ ministry. There’s no wonder it’s the shortest of the gospels; all of the events that Mark wants to cover move at breakneck speed. Yet, Jesus himself is not hurried. He finds time to go out “to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” We’ll come back to that activity later.

Jesus is definitely on the move. Before he even leaves the synagogue, Jesus is already a sensation because he’s backed up his powerful preaching with an equally powerful act, expelling the demon from a man in the congregation. And now he goes to a private house – the home of Simon and his brother Andrew, taking with him also James and John. This kind of back-and-forth characterizes much of Mark’s gospel: public and private, large crowds and intimate friends, involvement and drawing away for solitude. But then there’s an even more significant tension that Mark presents in Jesus: the tension between proclaiming and healing. Jesus has a message that he wants to get heard. But after the encounter with the man with the unclean spirit in the synagogue the people look to Jesus as a healer. And Jesus does not disappoint them.

As we follow the ministry of Jesus, the lectionary texts in the first chapter of Mark both today and next week emphasize his healing focus. So, these two Sundays provide a kind of arc as we begin to prepare for Lent: a way of looking at how and why Jesus found healing to be so important for his sense of self and his motivation for mission.

So, the five of them come to Simon’s house – Simon who later comes to be called Peter. And there they find Simon’s mother-in-law. What a fascinating piece of information! Simon Peter was married before he became a disciple. However, there’s not a word here about his wife or the possibility of any children. Nor do we learn his mother-in-law’s name. She seems to exist for the purposes of this story solely to be a person whom Jesus heals. She may have been widowed since she is living with her two sons. But any other details about her would be pure speculation. Even so, author Lawrence Wood makes this profound and startling claim for her: “Everyone knows Simon Peter’s name. No one knows hers, even though what happened to her had a profound effect on Simon. She was on the verge of a major moment – for all of us. The Christian church was born with Simon’s mother-in-law.”

What does Wood mean by that claim? I believe he is saying that what happened in that room in that house formed Simon Peter’s allegiance to the one he would call his Master and Messiah, thus leading to that moment when Jesus could say of him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!… And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:17-18) [The Greek word cephas, as you probably know, means both “Peter” and “rock”.]

But for now there was just this really rather sick woman whose fever was keeping her a-bed. She was no doubt dehydrated and quite possibly delusional. Several things to note about this scene: Jesus came into the house even though he didn’t have to; he was risking catching the disease himself. It was a loving and very familiar thing to do; it was as though Jesus himself was a family member. Next, “he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.” It was Jesus’ touch that was healing. [I want to say a whole lot more about healing touch next week.] And then that image of him taking her in his arms and holding her and lifting her into the air. The intimacy – the closeness – of that gesture. What did it do? It brought her from un-wholeness to wholeness once again.

We’ve heard a lot in the past 30 years or so about wholistic medicine – about the fact that medicine needs to be concerned with body, mind, and spirit (or soul) – in a word, with the whole person. It is not simply a virus or germs that cause a fever to be raging inside us, but our attitudes and our sense of peacefulness or at-one-ness. You’ll recall that Norman Cousins discovered and then wrote a book about how laughter became curative for something even as destructive as cancer.

That’s what Jesus did for Simon’s mother-in-law. He held her in his arms and focused his attention on the whole woman who was waiting there. And how does she respond? According to Mark, “she began to serve them.”

At one level this is a somewhat disturbing response, redolent of the place where women typically found themselves in that society (and perhaps it isn’t all that different today). Here’s one more woman who has to get up, no matter how sick she’s been, and wait on those men who just naturally expect that this is the way of things. She was healed – but only to take her proper place again in a patriarchal society. However, there’s another level if we dig a bit deeper. Through her acts of service Simon’s mother-in-law is giving thanks and testifying to what Jesus is all about: healing, wholeness, service, humility. Indeed, many scholars call this woman the first deacon of the church and find in her actions the beginning of what we have come to call the diaconate. Here is also the beginning of Jesus trying to get his disciples to understand what it means to be his disciples – not power but service. Ofelia Ortega develops this line of thought even further, tracing it to the early church, where house churches were the place of Christian community and ministry. “Service,” she writes, “is a key topic in the call and pursuit of Jesus. This woman gets up and turns the Sabbath into a day of service to others. Jesus does not command her. She is the one that assumes the initiative and awaits the consequences, discovering the value of mutual service above the sacredness of the Sabbath.”

Ah. There’s another important point to note: this was the Sabbath. Both the cleansing of the man with an evil spirit and the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law took place on the Sabbath, clearly a violation of Jewish law. From the outset Jesus was going to do it his own way; his concern and compassion for these people took precedent over any restrictions that might prevent him from offering healing and wholeness. There were expectations gathering around Jesus that had to do with finding new ways to deal with restrictiveness in peoples’ lives.

Implicit in this brief story we are already finding new attitudes toward women and toward the purity laws of the time and toward the Sabbath. In such ways Jesus is turning the tables on what normal expectations should be.

Jesus has healed this one woman. Now it is sundown – which means the end of the Sabbath, and so restrictions are lessened – and “they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.” Whoa. Talk about an escalation of expectations! In fact Mark says, “And the whole city was gathered around the door.” Again, Jesus does not disappoint: “And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons…..” Jesus is being responsive to need. There is human suffering to be met and he does so. As Dianne Bergant notes, “Jesus realizes that the crowds are coming because they want miracles. He, on the other hand, wants crowds to come to hear the gospel he will preach, yet he still performs miracles. The demons seem to know who he is and what he is about, while his followers and the crowds he attracts misunderstand him and his mission.”

Both stories of healing, of the one and of the many, point up that healing happens not at Jesus’ initiative, but at Jesus’ response to suffering and need and the initiative that people take. Not only does God move among us, but God is moved by us. As God’s Son Jesus responds to us with care and compassion.

Remember that I said earlier that there is a tension between proclaiming the good news of the gospel (“repent, and believe in the good news”) and this healing ministry. As Frederick C. Grant notes, “It is often thought that he viewed a prospective ministry of healing as interfering with his main task.” But Mark does not indicate that Jesus hesitates or expresses any unwillingness to respond when faced with this throng of people. Indeed, when you read through the whole of Mark’s gospel (which, as a sidebar, I’m going to suggest that we do just that during Lent) you find that healing and casting out demons is the key thread that characterizes Jesus’ ministry – just look at a sampling of some of the passage titles in the NRSV: “Jesus Heals a Paralytic”, “The Man With a Withered Hand”, “Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac”, “A Girl Restored to Life and a Woman Healed”, “Healing the Sick in Gennesaret” – it just goes on and on, and I’m only up to Chapter Six! No, as far as Mark is concerned Jesus’ healing and Jesus’ message go hand-in-hand as part of his over-all mission.

That mission is now about to take him throughout Galilee. It could have been possible to just stay where he is – at that synagogue or at Simon’s house – and establish a healing practice; certainly, the crowds would have been there (“If you heal them they will come,” to paraphrase Field of Dreams). But there’s a more important purpose at work. First, though, Jesus needs some alone time: “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” The implication is that all that healing took a lot out of him, and he needed to get his batteries re-charged. As Hal Luccock says, “There can be no fulfillment without a lonely place.” We can relate to that, can’t we? Especially those of us who are care-givers or are raising children or have those who are dependent on us know that need just to get away for awhile and get refreshed. But invariably interruptions come. A blundering Simon interrupts Jesus’ time alone, like a modern day political handler moving a weary candidate along, telling Jesus that he needs to get back to the healing part of his ministry. Lamar Williamson, Jr. reminds us that Simon’s dismay will continue throughout the Gospel: “When Simon and those with him interrupt Jesus at prayer, their misunderstanding of his priorities introduces a tension which will become a major theme of the Gospel. Those who should know Jesus best seem so often to understand him least. The significance for disciples today is as painful as it is evident.”

That significance is what all of this has to do with us. What Jesus is demonstrating for us by all of his words and actions here is that healing and service go together. It may be that for some of those whom we meet along the way who are hurting in body and mind and soul we – you and I – are all of Jesus that that person will know. We are the ones who must reach out and touch and lift up in our arms. And when we do we are participating in the kind of service Jesus was calling his disciples to perform – the kind of service that they were oh so slow to understand. In offering that kind of service we are proclaiming the Lord’s name until he comes again. As Paul tells the Corinthians, in order to proclaim the gospel he has become a slave to all (“slave” in this context really means “servant”). “I have become all things to all people….. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.”

We have just installed new officers and board members for the coming year, and in that installation we spoke this promise together: “we gather in celebration of the joy that is ours to be partners with you in the service of Jesus Christ.” To be healed – to be made whole – or even to be on the road to wholeness – leads inevitably to being of service to one another and to the whole world that God loves. By the end of the gospel Simon’s mother-in-law’s example of service becomes Jesus’ own: at the Last Supper he takes on the work of a deacon, washing the disciples’ feet and providing a meal. Our service – whether as officers, board members, congregants, Christ’s hands and feet in the world – can be inspired by this healed woman who now sends her sons out to be disciples with our Lord – who is on the move. And we go wherever he will lead us.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

 

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

February 8, 2009