Epiphany V
Isaiah
40:21-31
1
Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark
1:29-39
+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
LAST SUNDAY as I listened to the comments of people who had just returned from the parish’s mission trip to Nicaragua, I recalled how the trip down there had brought me closer to the world of Jesus in many ways. I have been to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, Bethlehem, but going to Nicaragua last year I think gave me a more accurate glimpse of what day to day life and living conditions for Jesus and the disciples would have been. It impressed upon me how differently we live from most people in the world today and throughout history.1
We are far more insulated from nature, and the basics of our domestic existence are much easier than they have been for most of humanity. When we want to make a meal, we turn on the stove. We don’t have to chop wood and build a fire. When we need water, we open the faucet. We don’t have to go to the well to draw water. We don’t have to collect rainfall carefully. We open the refrigerator to get chilled, preserved food. We don’t have to raise it, butcher it, and then smoke it or salt it.
For most societies, this has tended to be regarded as ‘women’s work,’ and often not very well regarded work. It was the work of Peter’s mother-in-law. We can imagine that when she became sick with a fever, her household had to endure more chaos and uncertainty, and there was more work to do – not only nursing her, but also having to do her work. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ first healing restores order and stability to Peter’s household.
Some have interpreted Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law as being less than liberating, but rather returning her to the toils and burdens of everyday life in an oppressive, patriarchal society. Some say that Jesus’ healing kept her captive, enslaved to serving others, that Mark does not mention her faith or suggest anything heroic about her. It’s not an argument to be dismissed out of hand because women in the ancient world were often regarded as chattel, and there were vigorous debates in Judaism about what the Law required in the treatment of women.
We can choose to complement that interpretation. We can see Peter’s household as being the Church. We can see the story as suggesting how inviting Jesus presence into our lives heals, how he cures us from the fever of life. John Henry Newman wrote a great prayer for those seeking God’s assistance: “May He support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.”
We may regard Peter’s mother-in-law as a nameless, anonymous hero because she embodies the proper response to God’s presence: service. She shows us the model of Christian discipleship, what we are to be, the humble service Jesus repeatedly directed his disciples to manifest, the kind of service Jesus incarnated in his life. My bet is that Jesus learned from Peter’s mother-in-law, that her example encouraged him and inspired him. Jesus would later say, “If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” (Mk 9:35) At the Last Supper, Jesus was doing for his disciples what Peter’s mother-in-law had done for him. “I am among you as one who serves.”
Peter’s mother-in-law gets Jesus’ teaching, the gospel, better than his disciples. James and John plotted and schemed to get status, to have greater honor than the other disciples, and Jesus rebuked them, saying that he came “not to be served but to serve and to give his life for others.” (Mk 10:45) One of the themes of Mark’s gospel is what a bunch of bunglers and bumblers the disciples are – a theme I find reassuring, but one I embody rather more than I’d care to admit. In Mark’s gospel, the disciples aren’t the heroes, rather the heroes are usually those convention wouldn’t expect, the people we typically overlook. On several occasions in Mark’s gospel, Jesus holds up women as making the right response to God: think of the poor widow who gives all of her meager savings to the Temple or of the women who are at the cross while the disciples have fled.
Peter is one of my favorite saints. I identify with him. He frequently gets it wrong and botches things up, but he keeps trying, he’s enthusiastic, he learns. In today’s gospel, he shows his confusion about Jesus’ priorities. Having spent the previous day healing the sick, Jesus sought solitude to pray. Repeatedly, we see the pattern in Jesus life of work, rest, prayer. Especially when dealing with stress or a big decision, a turning point in his ministry, Jesus goes off to be alone and to find direction and renewal in his Father. He offers up “loud cries and tears” as well as sitting quietly, alone in God’s presence where he finds “grace to help in time of need.” (Heb 5:7, 4:16)
Peter pursues Jesus and disrupts his prayer and solitude. “Everyone is looking for you, Jesus.” The crowd is raising a ruckus searching for Jesus, and Peter doesn’t respond to the need of the crowd, he doesn’t try to hold their anxiety, he doesn’t assume any responsibility, he doesn’t serve them. Instead, flustered, panicky, he runs off to get daddy. “Take care of us, take care of us, take care of us.” Peter is a disciple, but he doesn’t minister. He will learn... gradually.
Do you notice how Jesus responds to Peter and the crowd seeking him? Unlike Peter, he doesn’t worry about satisfying them. He ignores them. He says, “It’s time to go to the next town and preach the good news there. I’m here to preach good news. Let’s move on.” This tells us a couple of things.
First, it tells us something about Jesus’ healing miracles. He’s not here to be a magician, or a personal genie, or chaplain to take care of people. On a few occasions, moved by compassion, Jesus heals, but usually his healing miracles are to demonstrate the power of God, to bear witness to his true identity as Son of God, and to illustrate the good news he is preaching. That’s the purpose of miracles.
Second, Jesus’ refusal to deal with the crowd chasing him suggests something about ministry and pastoral care. Jesus is not a customer service representative. He’s not there to make people happy and to make their problems go away. He’s not there to give people everything they want. He’s there to serve, but serve on God’s terms... not ours! Serving God and serving people often overlap, but not always; they’re not the same thing.
John Updike’s death has saddened me more than I would’ve expected. In Updike’s first Rabbit book – Rabbit, Run, Rabbit leaves his family, and Rev. Eccles, an Episcopalian priest, tries to convince Rabbit to return to his wife. Eccles visits his friend Rev. Kruppenbach, a Lutheran pastor, to chat about it, but Kruppenbach won’t have anything of it and presents a rather subversive view of pastoral care:
Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.... When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must wake up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that…. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.2
Kruppenbach makes Eccles angry.3 We often get angry when confronted with the truth, especially the truth about ourselves and our faults. Jesus was doing that to people all of time and look what it got him.
As I read this passage, I thought that Kruppenbach may have something to tell me, and not just me, about priorities in life. If our faith is going to be powerful, if we’re going to be hot with Christ, the beginning of this is almost certainly going off alone to pray, just as Jesus did, again and again and again. When we go alone to God, we can pour out our hearts, cry out with thanks, well up with tears, but the most profound, most meaningful prayer may simply be to say nothing. To sit in silence. To be still. To focus on nothing. Even to be bored.
The wonderful, delightful, wise Sister Wendy Beckett puts it this way:
Most of us can manage a ten-minute silence.... Take these times, poor crumbs of minutes though they be, and give yourself to God in them. You will not be able to feel prayerful in them, but that is beside the point. You pray for God’s sake, you are there for Him to look on you, to love you, to take His holy pleasure in you. What can it matter whether you feel any of this or get any comfort from it? ... You will make this and any other sacrifice if you hunger and thirst for God to possess you, and this is my whole point. There is time enough for what matters supremely to us, and there always will be.4
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1 I have relied heavily upon Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark, Interpretation,
John Knox Press (1983), pp. 54-58.
2 Quoted by Ben Myers, ‘John Updike, 1932-2009: a glance at his theology,’ faith-theology.blogspot.com, January 28, 2009.
3 Rabbit did return to his wife. In a later Rabbit book, Eccles left his wife.
4 Sister Wendy Beckett, Sister Wendy on Prayer, Continuum (2006), pp. 17-18.
©2009 Lane John Davenport
