February 7, 2021 “Raised” – Mark 1:29-39

Mark 1:29-39
“Raised”
February 7, 2021 – Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

My cinnamon rolls flopped on Friday morning. I knew something was wrong when I peeled the label off the cardboard tube and it did not immediately pop apart, not even with a tap on the counter edge. When I pried it open, I found the dough shriveled and dry. I put them in the oven anyway. Twenty minutes later they were hot but just as flat as when I started. Moisture and yeast were missing. They did not rise.

Of course, cinnamon rolls are probably not very good for me. The slice of multi-grain toast I had instead was healthier. Perhaps it was a sign that if I really want to keep rising up myself each morning, I need less sugar and more whole grains. Much of our current thinking about health is like that.

If you want to be well, you pay a price, do some work. If cholesterol is too high, give up red meat, eggs, bacon, sour cream, cheese, butter, and all sorts of rich and delicious food. To lose weight, do just the opposite. Choose a ketogenic diet: give up bread and potatoes, sugar and fruit, cereal and pasta, and eat all the beef, bacon, cheese and eggs you like. If your heart is weak, then you may need to exercise. If your iron is low, eat more leafy green vegetables. If your feet or back hurt, get new shoes. On and on.

We are used to the idea that being well requires something of us. People of Jesus’ time thought the same. Jews brought sacrifices and offerings to God hoping for healing. They were also familiar with the demands of medicine. In chapter 5, Mark records that one woman who came to Jesus had been to many doctors and spent everything she had trying to be healed.

Gentile culture surrounding the Jews had its own formulas for healing. The largest cult centered on the Greek god Asclepius. His sanctuaries functioned like health resorts. People went to be given regimens of diet and exercise. They slept inside the temple, so the god would come to them in a dream and offer a prescription to cure them. If they got well, they brought an offering, a molded image the body part which was healed.

So sick people seeking out Jesus would not have been surprised at all if He had asked something of them before being healed. Whether an act of devotion, some deed of service, or even a gift or an offering, it probably would have seemed quite reasonable. Like our American understanding of medical care, you pay a price for it. Without that price, like my cinnamon rolls without moisture and yeast, you won’t get well and rise.

Yet Jesus did not require anything like that. Beginning here in Mark with Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, He healed person after person, not requesting them to do anything nor asking for any payment. Verse 33 says that the whole town of Capernaum assembled at the door of Peter and Andrew’s house that evening. Jesus healed many of them of all sorts of diseases and cast out demons to boot, asking nothing of anyone.

Jesus especially did not ask anything of the mother of Peter’s wife. She did not even need to come to Him. When Luke, who was a physician, relates this story in chapter 4 of his gospel he adds that she had a high fever. In medical terminology of the time, that distinguished it from something less serious. One Bible scholar suggests it may have been malaria. In any case this woman was in no condition to offer Jesus anything. She could have been unconscious. Verses 30 and 31 say that when He went to Peter’s home the disciples told Him about her fever. He went straight to her room.

There was no preparation, no ritual, no medication, no regimen of therapy which needed to be undertaken for the woman. Jesus simply took her by the hand and, literally, “raised her up.” Instead of merely saying that Jesus healed her, Mark chose to express what Jesus did using the very same word he used at the end of his gospel. The angel explained to the disciples that Christ Himself had been raised.

Perhaps the choice of words is only an accident, but Mark seems to want to communicate something stronger. Peter’s mother-in-law raised invites us to consider her healing as a representation of what Jesus came to do for everyone, to raise us all into a new life in Him, like He Himself was raised from death. Jesus came to her bedside to gently lift her out of her illness. Jesus is the needed ingredient to lift you and me out of darkness and sin.

Our physical education teacher in college gave us a thought experiment regarding bodily strength. He asked us to imagine ourselves trapped underground in a room with smooth walls that cannot be climbed. The only exit is a circular opening located overhead. The pit is not very deep, just enough so that the lip of the opening cannot be reached except by jumping. The opening is far enough from the walls that there is absolutely no purchase for your feet once you jump. “Now,” he asked, “if you were in that situation, would you be able to jump up, grab the edge of the opening and pull yourself up and through it?” If not, he implied, you ought to be in better physical condition.

Jesus came because, no matter our physical fitness, all of us fail would fail a spiritual test like that. We don’t have the moral and spiritual stamina to raise our spirits out of the pit of sin completely on our own. You can start lifting weights, or do sit-ups, push-ups and pull-ups. Eventually you might be able to pass my college instructor’s test. But no amount of moral exertion is going to build up your soul enough that you can escape the pits of error and sin you dig for yourself.

So the hand of Jesus is extended. Mark wants us to know that Christ reached out and took hold of the woman’s hand. He touched her. In the halakah of their time, the rabbis’ code of conduct based on Old Testament Law, there were warnings against touching a person sick with a fever. It would make you unclean. Jesus ignored those warnings. He stood by her bed, took her hand, and lifted her up into complete strength and health.

Following the healing of Peter’s relative in his home, there are many more healings that evening in verses 32-34, as “they brought to him all who were sick or demon-possessed.” The whole city gathered at the door. That plethora of healing was a sign that Jesus came to do for all people what would be done for Him after His death on the Cross. He was raising them up to new life.

Jesus’ actions in the final section of the text, verses 35 to 39, are a clue both to the deeper import of His mission and to its universality. Mark only shows us Jesus praying three times. This is the first time. He retreated to be alone and gather spiritual strength for a spiritual mission. When the disciples come looking, complaining that “Everyone is searching for you,” He made it clear that healing physical ailments is not the whole of what He came to do. He says in verse 38, “Let us go on to neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” Jesus came not just with short-term solutions to physical distress. He came with a message that will raise up forever those who believe it.

Notice how Jesus keeps together two aspects of the Gospel that Christians managed to split apart early in the twentieth century. Liberal Christians pushed for social ministry, for healing and ministering to people’s physical needs in the present world. Fundamentalist Christians pushed back, making the Gospel only and all about a spiritual salvation, about believing in Jesus for eternal life in the world to come. But Jesus Himself was always all about both. He preached the Good News of the everlasting Kingdom of God and how to enter it, while at the very same time healing and raising up the sick and the poor and the forgotten people of society to show the Kingdom has already begun.

Jesus extends His hand to everyone. He reaches down to touch us and pull us out of whatever hopeless pit we find ourselves in. It does not matter how unclean and untouchable we feel. He will grasp us with a firm and gentle grip and lift us up. The healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a beautiful picture of the Lord’s gift of salvation to us.

Yet Mark adds one more detail to the story. After she was healed, we’re told at the end of verse 31, this woman got up and waited on them. It’s pretty clear that she arose and served Jesus and the other men a meal.

Why was the woman’s service after being healed important enough to record? It may be that it was Mark’s way of showing us how complete her healing was. She did not gradually come out of her fever bit by bit. She got up entirely well, with strength enough to take on the task of serving a bunch of hungry men. Jesus’ restoration of her health was full and instantaneous, obviously a miracle and not just some natural coincidence.

There may be more to it, though. If this woman’s rising into health is a picture of our being raised into new life by Jesus, perhaps what she did afterward also shows us something about our own situation. She was healed and then began to serve. We are raised into the abundant life of Jesus with the expectation we will do the same. We are saved to serve.

Note the order of events, though, as we apply its truth to us. The healing, like all Jesus’ healings, was not a reward. Peter’s mother-in-law was not healed because she first served Jesus. He healed her and then, out of gratitude, she served Him. What she did for the Lord was a response to being made well. It was not what gave her back her health.

You and I get frustrated and depressed with our faith and spiritual life when we get the order of these events mixed up. When we imagine that the way to be spiritually healthy is to get busy serving or to make some sacrifice, then we’ve fallen into the pit of thinking we need to pay a price for our salvation. We have forgotten that Jesus asked nothing of those He healed. He asks nothing of those He saves. He pays all the price of making our spirits well and whole.

Yes, the service and the sacrifice do appear, but they follow our experience of the Lord’s touch to raise us up. We do not have to make ourselves well and clean before Christ will reach out His hand. He takes hold of us from the beginning, as soon as we realize we are in a situation out of which we cannot climb on our own.

What, then, is the purpose of the serving? If our salvation comes first and comes free, then why even worry about offering anything to Jesus? Wouldn’t it be better if we really did need to pay some price for what we receive? Wouldn’t we value it more? Isn’t God’s whole arrangement, as some critics feel, awfully cheap and easy?

No, our service to Christ has an important role in His plan for us. We cannot be saved by offering service. But when He saves us, and then we turn and serve Him out of thanks and love, it shows, like that meal which Peter’s mother-in-law made, just how completely He has made us well. By serving, we begin to experience the reality of our salvation.

Twenty years ago I broke both my elbows. How I did that is another story, but I was helpless. There was nothing I could do for myself. In particular, my left elbow was so badly fractured that it was in a cast for several weeks. It was not going to be healed by exercise. It would have been foolish to try. All I could do was wait for the bone to knit back together.

However, when the time came for first the cast, then later a brace, to be removed from my left arm, the dynamic had changed. The bone was healed. Now I had work to do. The healed area, I was told, would be stronger than the bone around it. But it felt tender and stiff to me. I was, honestly, a bit scared to bend that elbow, to pick anything up in that hand, to bump it against a wall. I had horrible images of cracking it all over again.

But the doctor encouraged me to move my arm. I needed to get that elbow moving again. The bone was healed, but I needed to exercise it enough to loosen the joint. Hold a light weight and lift it up and down. Take a hammer in my hand and turn it back and forth. After the bone was whole, my part was to do what was needed so I could experience and enjoy the healing. I needed to move my arm so I would know my arm was well.

Service to and for Jesus has that kind of purpose. Serving will not save you. Rising to wait on Him did not heal that woman. Jesus heals and raises us without asking us to pay for it. His grace is just that, grace, a gift given freely because He loves us like He loved the mother of a fisherman’s wife long ago. You do not need to serve in order to earn that love. It’s already yours. He will raise you if you only want Him to.

When Jesus has raised you, though, serving Him reminds you that it’s real. When you get up to wait on His will for you, to bring Him what He asks of you, that is when you realize the fullness of your salvation. He heals us so we can rise and serve Him, but even in our service He is still serving us. By giving us the health and strength to be His servants, He lets us know that we are already His, already raised, before we ever did anything for Him.

Let’s remember how we were raised to new life. We did not deserve or earn it by serving Jesus. But once raised, we have that same dual ministry Jesus Himself performed, caring for physical and social needs while sharing Good News about the Kingdom of God that is still so near.

Please consider what service you were raised to do. It might be preparing a meal for someone like Peter’s mother-in-law. It may be prayer like Jesus Himself. It may be whatever human need you see right in front of you or feel on your heart in this moment. It may be sharing the Good News by phone or e-mail. In these times it may just be waiting patiently for the time it is safe to be face-to-face with others, not endangering yourself or them. You will need to rise and look for just what Jesus asks of you. But whatever it is, Jesus raised you up to experience health and joy in doing it. May you find that joy and that health as you rise in Him.

Amen.