Mark 1:29-31

The Kingdom Exemplified (2) – The Marginalised Are Healed

Mark: 1:29-31 – Jesus Heals Peter’s Mother-in-law

This was Mark’s first account of a healing by Jesus. Mark deliberately chose to situate it at this precise point of his narrative.

Jesus’ first recounted healing was of a woman. In the culture of the time, women were non-persons. Any legal recognition they had came from their relationship either to their father, husband or sons. If this woman was living in the home of her daughter’s husband, Simon, it could well indicate that her own father and husband were dead, and that she had no sons to look after her. A daughter’s husband had no duty to care for his mother-in-law. If he did, it was purely an act of compassion. According to the custom of the time, she would have been doubly a non-person. This was obviously not the attitude of Jesus or, for that matter, of Mark who was alert to the significance of Jesus’ response. 

Jesus took her by the hand and, in doing so, indicated a warmth of personal engagement and a respect for her inherent dignity.

Mark then remarked that the fever left her and the woman promptly began to serve them. We might initially see this as an act of submissive service, appropriate for a woman of the time. However, Jesus would insist later in the narrative that service was the hallmark of any true disciple. Mark was showing us that the woman had understood the thrust of Jesus’ message and identified her without fuss as a true disciple – in marked contrast to the higher-profile male disciples who would be seen later in the story to be quite incapable of grasping the concept of service (10:35-45).

At the end of his narrative, after the resurrection of Jesus, Mark would show that it was women who were sent to the male disciples and entrusted with the task of announcing the wondrous event to them. They were apostles (people sent by another) to the apostles (16:1-5).

Without drawing attention to the fact, Mark also showed that Jesus performed the healing before sundown while it was still Sabbath. Jesus would be challenged soon on this apparent lack of respect for the Sabbath.

It is also significant that he recounted the incident without the least need to underline the wonder of the event.

Did Jesus really Heal Sickness?

Wonders were accepted as part of life by people of the time. Reports of the unusual were not subject to the same rigorous critique as they would be in our age of scientific investigation and documentary reporting. People of any culture are likely to see or not see according to their cultural conditioning. Most people are not as objective or perceptive as they would perhaps like to think. 

Not only Jews but also pagans readily believed that their gods could and would heal people. They believed that their priests had access to these gods. Pagan temples were replete with thanksgiving gifts left by people cured by their gods, through the mediation of their priests. Many believed also that through their rituals of worship they could influence the fertility of their fields and even their own fertility. 

We recognise today that the human person is a complex reality. We are aware of the psychosomatic unity of the human person. Emotional well-being can impact on stress levels and physical health, and affect the operation of immune systems and recuperative capacities. Health and healing can happen in different ways. We are familiar with the “placebo” effect evidenced in some controlled experiments. We have come to see the therapeutic effect of human touch. 

In today’s world openness to unexplainable healings reflects to some extent people’s broader sense of what God is like, or, if they do not believe in God, their sense of the nature of the cosmos. Perhaps ultimately their attitudes reflect more what they would want to be true, than what they conclude is rationally acceptable.

Those who do not believe in God or an ultimately unexplainable cosmos are instinctively closed to the possibility of the supernatural, and put the unexplainable down to the fact that science has not yet unravelled all nature’s secrets (but will inevitably do so given time). In the case of the Gospel accounts, they would dismiss the evidence as historically unreliable.

Of people who believe in God, some sit easily with the otherwise unexplainable and allow scope for the unpredictable and perhaps arbitrary intervention of God. Others find uncomfortable the concept of an interventionist God.

Certainly, even in Jesus’ own time, healing was not seen as proof that anyone was God. The Hebrew Scriptures carried numerous accounts of significant persons performing deeds similar to the ones performed by Jesus. The prophet Elisha was even credited with having brought a dead person back to life, the wonders being interpreted as sign that he was a holy man (2 Kings 4:29-37). It is significant that not everyone drew the conclusion that Jesus was a holy man, though he was widely remembered after his death, even in non-Christian circles, as a powerful healer.

Within different religious traditions, including the Catholic tradition, many believe that certain persons have the gift to heal others. The early Church readily accepted healing as one of the charisms given to individuals by the Spirit of God

Would Jesus’ capacity to heal have made him unlike us? Not necessarily. We can accept easily the extraordinary talents of gifted people. Their unique giftedness does not necessarily separate them from the common person. What is significant is their personal warmth and inner truth – their capacity to relate compassionately and to be truly themselves. Jesus seems to have been an extraordinarily attractive person.

Yet healing the sick was in many ways peripheral to the mission of Jesus. Physical health, while important, was no guarantee of “blessedness”, and certainly not a necessary condition for conversion. Healing, however, could be the occasion of people opening up to the “the more” that Jesus wished to bring to his world. When coupled with faith, it was frequently seen as an indication of God’s saving power at work. Yet many of Jesus’ disciples had not themselves been healed, and no doubt many of those healed did not become disciples or continue in the conversion process so central to the heart and message of Jesus. Nor did Jesus’ own undoubted capacity to heal save him in the end from death on Calvary.

Unlike John the Baptist, who drew the crowds on the basis of his message and perhaps his striking appearance, Mark clearly showed that Jesus was seen as a powerful healer. His healings made a strong impact on people generally, even if all were not impressed.

As Mark would remind the reader later in the narrative (8:11-13), Jesus saw his healing activities as illustrations of the intervention of God that Isaiah had foreseen centuries beforehand - as signs that the Kingdom of God was entering the world in his own actions and attitudes.

Was this Jesus’ first experience of his own ability to heal? We have no way of knowing. As was mentioned earlier, and as Mark will inform us later in the narrative, Jesus’ own extended family and fellow townspeople had no knowledge of anything extraordinary about Jesus during his years living and working in Nazareth. Perhaps Jesus may have been surprised, as was everyone else, when his first healing happened. We can only conjecture that possibly, as in the incident with the mother of Peter’s wife, Jesus reached out to a woman in need; she felt the depth of the inner truth and love conveyed through his touch, and found herself changed and made whole from within.

Next >> Mark 1:32-34