Epiphany 5 B

Even here in this first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has kicked his ministry into high gear. Jesus has already confronted a demon right of the bat in a synagogue. And now he hits closer to home.

In fact, Jesus moves right from the synagogue to a home. The authority that Jesus taught with at church, so to speak, becomes authority at home, as well. The Reign of God that is breaking thru was not just a ‘church’ thing. The Reign of God was good news for all of life.

Jesus finds himself in the home of Simon Peter, one of his brand new disciples. And he learns that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is sick in bed with a fever — this would have been a potentially serious issue in her day. But Jesus takes her by the hand, lifts her up, and immediately she’s back to serving Jesus and the disciples.

That evening, as word of Jesus is spreading throughout the village, all kinds of people who are sick or needing God’s intervention in their lives show up and Jesus heals them. This seems to be going really well… Jesus is making a lot of impact in this town, but when the morning comes, Jesus has disappeared off by himself where he prays.

This little sabbatical of Jesus turns out to be a real problem because apparently there are a bunch more folks who are showing up for him to do his same deal, but they only encounter the disciples of Jesus — who don’t know where their master is.

So the disciples hunt down Jesus to let him know about the line that has formed. They tell Jesus, “everyone is searching for you.” (When the disciples say ‘everyone’ they basically mean all the people from their hometown. But Jesus has a mission broader than they can yet imagine.)

Jesus doesn’t directly address the issue of the line, but tells the disciples that it’s time to move on to the next town to continue proclaiming the message …

“for that is what I came out to do.” — so presumably staying in Capernaum and becoming the center of attention there was not what Jesus came to do. The proclamation of the message is his mission. The proclamation of the Reign of God. — The message, of course, is not just words… it’s a message enacted, that comes with healing and restoration… but it’s also not simply about the actions of Jesus.

Up until this point, it’s probably reasonable that the disciples assumed that Jesus would, having started to heal the sick and cast out demons, set up shop, put his head down, and just keep working until every demon had been cast out and every illness healed in their town.

Before this is accomplished, though, Jesus is ready to move on, ready to live out his mission of proclaiming and enacting the Reign of God in other towns, in other places. So, for what might be the first time, but will certainly not be the last time, the disciples have gotten confused about what Jesus is really up to.

I wonder if, once the disciples realized this, that Jesus was not going to personally address 100% of the issues in their hometown, they thought differently about what Jesus had done in Capernaum.

I wonder if we, hearing this story, might think differently about what Jesus has done?

It could be easy to hear this story of Simon’s mother-in-law being healed as being returned to her stereotypical place of serving the men in her life. It does seem a little sexist that this woman is miraculously healed from a potentially life-threatening condition and within the same sentence she’s bringing sandwiches to the boys.

But Jesus is full of surprises and what’s really going on is much more than that.

First of all, Simon’s mother-in-law receives a type of healing that’s found throughout this Gospel… it’s really a double healing. It’s a physical healing, of course, because her fever goes away, but also a social healing.

[being cut off from family, community…]

[last week’s man with a demon…]

This is an aspect of all of Jesus’ ministry, really. That our healing is not just for our benefit, but to connect us with others around us.

The other thing going on here is that this return to her family; this return to her purpose and value for Simon’s mother-in-law is in doing this word service. Jesus lifted her up, and she served Jesus and the disciples.

You might even know the Greek version of word for service used here: diakonio. The root from which we get the word for deacon. And the same word used by the program Diakonia which I know some of you are familiar with here. [..]

To top it off, it’s a word used by Jesus to describe his own ministry, and the ministry of any disciple that would follow him. In other words, by moving right from healing to serving, Simon’s mother-in-law isn’t being placed behind the male disciples — she’s actually way ahead of them. It will take them much longer to realize what it means to follow Jesus. Even at the end of the Gospel of Mark, while the other disciples have fled in fear, there is a group of women who served him and who followed him all the way to his crucifixion. It doesn’t say, but I imagine that Simon’s mother-in-law was one of those women. After all, she knew what it meant to be lifted up for service to others.

Lifted up to serve.

How have you been lifted up to serve? Freed to follow?

Maybe you’ve heard the story of someone who had been lifted out of trouble and knew it was their purpose to help others. You hear these stories in recovery programs. It’s the story behind the hymn Amazing Grace. Perhaps you’ve lived that kind of story.

Or, most surprisingly, maybe it was in trouble, in that low spot that you found freedom. This is the greatest scandal of the Gospel, that while we are broken, while we are failures, while we are lost, God loves us in a way that has nothing to do with being good, or being right, or being certain.

Have you ever been forgiven when you didn’t deserve it? That is God’s love lifting you up to serve. Not as a way of paying back — Simon’s mother-in-law was not paying Jesus back for her healing by making him lunch…

Simon’s mother-in-law was living in the Reign of God. In the Reign of God, serving is the way of life for every disciple. Man, woman, or child. It’s our freedom:

Serving God and neighbor means no longer serving our need to be good, our need to be right, our need to be certain. Serving those things will make us sick. Trying to be good enough, trying to be right enough will one day, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, leave you on the ground, or unable to get out of bed.

When that happens to us, we are lifted up to serve. We are raised up to follow a new leader, to serve a new master.

This Reign of God that Jesus is proclaiming really is different than we expected… and now we see how. Jesus is not offering a new weapon to overcome every demon in our town. The Reign of God is not a sharper sword for us to fight our way to the gates of heaven. The Reign of God is heaven fighting its way to us and meeting us right where we are. That’s amazing grace! In the midst of suffering, in the presence of evil, even as we make mistakes, God joins us.

As the Reign of God breaks into our lives, we are liberated from our sins, from our shortcomings, from ourselves. We who were lost are found. We who were blind can see. And we are freed to live for something more: to turn to our neighbors in joy. We are lifted up to serve.