2024.2.4 | Lifted Up
“Lifted Up”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany,
February 4, 2024
Mark 1:29-39
Our scripture text this morning, from the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, happens immediately after the passage that we heard last week, when Pastor Arlene preached about Jesus casting out demons while he preached at the synagogue. And that text happened immediately after the text from Chapter 1 two weeks ago when Pastor Marvin preached about Jesus calling his disciples. In fact, if you had to pick a word that characterizes Chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel, it may very well be the word “immediately.” As Pastor Marvin pointed out, the word “immediately” or the phrases “at once” or “without delay” are used at least 12 times in Chapter 1 alone and at least 40 times in the entire Gospel According to Mark.
Mark is, most scholars agree, the earliest of the four canonical gospels, and it’s also the shortest. As I’ve been pondering Mark’s gospel this week in preparation for this sermon, I came to think of it as the gospel answer to the other TL;DR gospels. For those of you not hip to texting lingo, TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.” If you want to get through the gospel story quickly, read the Gospel of Mark. If you want more meat on the bones, read John, the second shortest gospel, or Matthew, the third shortest gospel, or Luke, who, in 24 chapters has the highest word count of any of the gospels and is in the top twelve of all the biblical books for length.
As we near the end of Chapter 1 in Mark’s gospel, we have already had Jesus’s baptism, his 40 days in the desert, which takes only two sentences to cover, his calling of the disciples, his preaching in the synagogue for the first time, and the casting out of demons and healing of many people, and the beginnings of his ministry throughout the area of Galilee. All in one chapter. It takes Luke five chapters to get to the calling of the disciples, and it takes Matthew eight chapters to tell us about the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.
As with the first 28 verses of Chapter 1 in Mark’s gospel, there is a lot going on in just these 10 verses that we read this morning. We have Jesus coming to visit Peter’s house and healing Peter’s mother-in-law, we have the whole city gathered around the house bringing all of their folks who were in need of healing, and Jesus responding by healing them. We have Jesus going off to a deserted place by himself to pray, we have Peter finding Jesus in that deserted place and asking him to return to the healing work he had been doing. And finally at the very end of the chapter, Jesus clarifies what his work is all about: “Let us go to the neighboring towns,” he says, “so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” And then, he does just that—proclaiming the message and casting out demons throughout the towns of Galilee.
All this is to say that Mark compresses the gospel narrative so much that it leaves a lot to the imagination. On the one hand, this is frustrating, because it feels like Mark leaves out so many important—or at least interesting—details. On the other hand, it gives us an opportunity to actually use our imagination, to enter the story, and to discover something new about it. This way of interpreting biblical text is called “midrash,” and it’s the method of textual interpretation that was used by both ancient and modern Jewish scholars of the Bible. Capital-M Midrash refers to the body of work of those ancient Jewish scholars. Little-m midrash is the technique of interpretation. When we employ midrash when interpreting a text, we have a conversation with the text. We dig into the words and look for the meaning behind them. We read between the lines.We tell a story about the characters in the text to find out more about them. We wonder about what's not being told in the story. Jesus himself used midrash when he interpreted scripture for his disciples. In Matthew’s gospel, he says, “You have heard it said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you . . . turn the other cheek.” He questions the text, reads behind and between the words, and discovers a fresh interpretation.
So, in the spirit of midrash, I wonder about Peter‘s mother-in-law. We don’t know her name, and there are only three sentences about her here in Mark’s gospel. Yet she was considered important enough that both Luke and Matthew also include her story in their gospels as well, although they don’t elaborate on the story anymore than Mark does—and none of them mention Peter’s wife; if he had a mother-in-law, it meant that he also had a wife.
I wonder about this mother-in-law’s circumstances, and if she was widowed. As a woman in the first century she would have lived with her husband‘s family not her daughter’s, and so it makes me think that perhaps her husband is dead and maybe, having no other family, she lived in the household of her son-in-law. I wonder about her daily activities. Did she help salt the fish that Peter and Andrew brought home from their nets? Did she care for and instruct the children that surely must have been in the household? Did she chop wood and mend clothing? Did she laugh at Peter’s jokes, or did she roll her eyes?
Speaking of rolling our eyes, some of you might have rolled your eyes when the text tells us that “the fever left her, and she began to serve them.” Eye-roll! Really? I can imagine Peter saying, “Well, Jesus, you can come to my house, but my mother-in-law is sick, so if you want any supper you’re gonna have to heal her.” The text raises my feminist hackles and causes me to get out the saddle and bridle and get on my high horse, ready to rail against the subservient position in which the gospel places her. But the midrash approach urges me to put my high horse back in the barn.
As Pastor Marvin spoke about two weeks ago, in between all of these short compressed sentences in Mark’s first chapter, there must have been a lot of relationship building. There must have been a lot of one-to-one happening for Jesus to build such a compelling ministry that it would cause Simon and Andrew to leave their work and follow him. And so I wonder: what were the conversations that Jesus has already had with Peter‘s mother-in-law? What was the conversation that they had as he was healing her?
Peter‘s mother-in-law was important to Jesus. He came at once to her, lifted her up, and the fever left her. And the word that Mark uses here for “lifted up” is the same word that Mark uses in Chapter 16 at the end of the gospel, when the women come to the empty tomb, and they see a young man robed in white who says to them, “He has been raised; he is not here.” Jesus lifted her up. She has been raised. She has been lifted up out of death, resurrected into a new life. And she turns around and begins to serve. And the Greek word translated here as “serve” is diakoneo, which is the same word used to describe the angels ministering to Jesus, and is the Greek root from which we get the word “deacon.”
This “service” of Peter’s mother-in-law is not subservience; it’s service born out of reciprocal love. “He lifted her up, and she began to serve” is a summary of the whole gospel. It’s a summary of the Christian life. Because of our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, we have been lifted up. We have been given new life and new hope and in turn, we serve others out of reciprocal love.
As biblical scholar Victoria Lynn Garvey notes, “Though the phrase ‘and immediately’ does not appear in the description of the woman’s actions, it is clearly in the air. Before Mark talks about the ideal of radical service or even models it consistently, she serves—and does so, it seems, with the same vigor and alacrity that [Jesus] demonstrated at the outset of his own ministry earlier in this chapter.” (1) And, as is the case for so many of the characters in the gospels who are healed by Jesus, we don’t know anything else about this woman’s life of ministry. We don’t even know her name. Garvey goes on to say, “What we do know is that, having been touched by Jesus, she is raised to the new, high calling of serving others, even before his so-called inner circle learns about it. She gets up, newly healed, and she serves. I would bet she doesn’t stop at verse 31.” (2)
One of the best ways that midrash happens is through poetry. And so I leave you with this poem that imagines that healing conversation between Jesus and Peter’s mother-in-law:
The Miracle (Peter’s Mother-in-Law Speaks)
by Emily Rose Proctor
It wasn’t just his aloe hand, spreading
on my burn-crackling brow, his clean breath
breezing sunshine through my thinking hole,
his gaze honeying my piggy joints.
Rest here, he whispered
a velvet tabernacle of time
unfolding in the crawl space
between the bones of only my
ear drum beating, beating.
As long as you like, he said,
his voice making room quietly
like rising bread. Everyone—
and I think he meant me too—
everyone will be fed.
I don’t know how long I lay there,
coming to all my familiar senses
in the warm dark, letting the pallet
hold me. They say I came right down
to serve them, but, I swear,
it felt like blessed forever. (3)
______
(1) Victoria Lynn Garvey, “February 7, Epiphany 5B (Mark 1:29-39)” The Christian Century, Vol. 138, No. 2, January 27, 2021. <https://www.christiancentury.org/lectionary/february-7-epiphany-5b-mark-1-29-39> Accessed on January 25, 2024
(2) Ibid.
(3) Emily Rose Proctor, “The Miracle (Peter’s Mother-in-Law Speaks)” The Christian Century, Vol. 140, No. 6, June 2023. <https://www.christiancentury.org/miracle-peters-mother> Accessed on January 25, 2024.