Mark 1:29-39
“Seeking a Cure”
February 7, 2021
How did your day begin? Did you wake to an alarm going off or maybe to the sound of a dog or cat whose idea of time is very different from yours? As your feet touched the ground, you began yet another day with perhaps anticipation or anxiety or hope or confusion or, in this era of COVID, the realization that this day would probably be pretty similar to yesterday with home the refuge from the world’s troubles and illness.
In today’s passage, Mark the Gospel writer is affording us a front row seat of a day in the life of Jesus. We get to follow him around to see him in action, hear what he has to say and witness the priorities that he sets for himself.
In this one day he has gone from the boisterous public setting of the synagogue to the relative quiet of a private home. Jesus is showing us that healing doesn’t just happen in a so-called sacred space. It happens in the place where people live. Holiness happens in homes.
Jesus does some of his most remarkable and memorable work from homes:
The water into wine wedding miracle happened in a home.
Jairus’ daughter was raised back to life from her home.
In Bethany, Mary anoints Jesus with oil at her home.
The disciples traveling to Emmaus finally recognize Jesus at their dinner table in their home.
We are all spending so much time in our homes during this pandemic. It is indeed Good News that the sacred happens here also – like the Communion meal we will share in a few minutes – each from our own home.
While we anxiously await an end to the spread and risk of COVID from our homes let us remember that the healing Jesus does of Simon’s mother-in-law in her home was more than just getting rid of the fever that sickened her.
There was true healing happening. She comes out of it on the other side and she is restored to her place within her family and her community.
Jesus’ identity is now stamped as that of healer. His team of disciples recognize this as do the growing crowds outside of Simon mother-in-law’s door.
It can be hard sometimes to live in a world where miracle cures can be witnessed by neighbors on your front lawn.
Barbara Brown Taylor described it this way:
“The problem with miracles is that they are hard to witness without wanting one of your own. Everyone of us knows someone who could use a miracle, but miracles are hard to come by.”
With COVID we have become desperate for a cure, but novel coronaviruses don’t end that way.
They just become less of a threat with treatments like vaccines.
The healing we will need to do as a culture will last long after we’re vaccinated, and we get to return to the activities that take place when we’re in each other’s face-to-face company.
Thirteen of the 18 miracles in Mark’s Gospel are stories of healing. Out of the hundreds of verses in Mark, one-third of them are about healing. Jesus does not assume that illnesses and possession by evil spirits are God’s way of punishing people.
Instead, he continuously wanted all who heard and saw him to know that they are loved. There are some ills that can be cured with love. We all yearn to be made whole.
What can we do, in these strange and often hard times we find ourselves in, to help in the healing of our world?
As healers, we don’t have to possess superpowers.
Maybe compassion and grace will ease the journey for those we know.
We can make sure that people we care about know they are loved.
This has been driven home during COVID by so many loved ones who couldn’t be with their dying mother or brother or grandfather and wished more than anything that they could have told them how much they were loved as they left this world.
When we are tempted to think that our small acts of love and mercy are negligible in the big scheme of life, let us recognize that here in this very story after the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, it says that “they brought all who were sick or possessed by demons…and he cured many.” But he had love for them all.
Spreading God’s love is what Jesus came to do by proclaiming the Good news of God’s kingdom, by healing the sick and by resisting the powers of evil.
Let your love show, spread it around extravagantly.
That is your superpower today and every day.
Amen.