House Fire.

Mark 1:29-39

February 4, 2018

I.

Jesus and his disciples leave the synagogue in Capernaum and go into a house.  This seems like an inconsequential relocation, until we realize that it describes the movement of the early church generally.  For those who followed Jesus did leave the synagogues, that is, they departed from — or were kicked out of — the established, official, ordained places for worship and learning, and instead started gathering in homes.  

The synagogue, you recall from last week, is where they encounter the man possessed by an unclean spirit.  These establishment institutions bred narrow-minded attitudes about differentiating between people by their supposed cleanness or uncleanness.  They invented pecking orders and regimes of superiors and subordinates.  They fomented and fed inequality.  

The early Christians deliberately leave that behind; and they begin worshiping in “house-churches.”  Jesus never instructs his disciples that, having separated from the synagogue, they should now build their own building around the corner.  That doesn’t happen for centuries.  The disciples gather in members’ homes.

The house they go to is that of the brothers, Simon and Andrew, and their families.  When they get there they discover that Simon’s mother-in-law is laid up in bed with a fever.  So we learn that, if synagogues had these unclean spirits to deal with, family homes were not perfect and benign either.  But instead of a demon demanding social distinctions and separations, in the home we find a different kind of illness: fever.  The word in Greek means that Simon’s mother-in-law had, or was on, “fire,” intended to be taken figuratively, of course.  

We know that a fever is a symptom of infection.  It is the body’s strategy for eliminating foreign and destructive microbes.  But a fever that gets too high or lasts too long can start to do damage.  We also use heat and fire as a metaphor for a consuming desire, hot anger, or even the place of condemnation, or hell.

In those days people often believed sin caused illness.  Sickness was God’s judgment on our bad behavior.  It was sort of a physical manifestation of guilt.  If the disease of the synagogue is division, inequality, and exclusion exemplified in the unclean spirit possessing a man, the disease of the home is guilt, rage, and condemnation infecting a woman in the form of a fever.

We have to ask then how many people, even today, experience home — or as therapists say, our “family of origin” — as an oppressive system of guilt, resentment, and condemnation, passed on from generation to generation?  Mother’s-in-law tend to be in a particularly difficult position.  They can be dependent outsiders who have sometimes complicated relationships with others in the household that can lead to rivalry, mistrust, jealousy, and loneliness.  

II.

In this chapter, Mark sees Jesus begin his ministry by encountering two of the main pillars of society: religion and family.  And in each he immediately finds pathogens.  He finds corruption and disorder.  He finds something eating away at it, undermining the ability of that institution to function as God intends.  He finds broken people left to fester alone in their diseases.  One possessed and the other incapacitated, one unclean and the other on fire, indicating a weak, vulnerable, insecure, dysfunctional system, a system that does not support, protect, provide for, free, or heal those in them.  Neither religion nor family was working for people. 

Jesus casts out both the unclean spirit and the fever, of course.  The unclean spirit he dismisses by his word.  But Jesus does not banish the woman’s fever by just talking.  He does not verbally address the fever, or even her.  Rather, he physically takes her by the hand and lifts her up from her bed.  Whatever fire was consuming her, whether it be guilt or desire, anger or condemnation, he by his touch, lifts her out of it.  He lifts her up.  He makes actual contact.  Because the fire in her body was not a story but an experience, feeling, an isolation, an alienation, an infection, something corroding her physical integrity that took away her strength and power even to stand and walk.  By his touch, the Lord communicates to her his own strength.

And he also communicates to her his own mission, which is what our strength is for.  She immediately takes on his life of service, ministering to others.

Jesus here suggests that a household is healed through service.  Not subservience, but attending with grace and love to the needs of others.  This is his vision for his church generally.  It is a place of equality and mutual service, where he lifts us up out of the fires of anger, desire, condemnation, and guilt that we stoke as individuals, that cripple and quarantine us to stew about alone, and delivers us to a life of caring for and giving to others.  It is a place of mutual forgiveness and acceptance, and for that reason a place of healing.

He does not mean the kind of manipulative, patronizing solicitousness that tries to earn favor by ingratiating yourself to others.  Rather Jesus means service based on obedience and trust in him.  The church is only a community of humility and equality because of our common allegiance to One Lord.  

Here we are not ego-centric, small, sinful selves serving other ego-centric, small, sinful selves.  That would be to do things only for what we can get out of it personally.  In the church we are selfless.  We serve others purely because we have given up our wills to Jesus Christ.  We do what we do because it is his command to do so, and obeying him unlocks his Presence in us.  In him we become our true Selves, immune to infections and fevers, exempt from the consuming fires of destructive selfishness.

III.

This little proto-church, formed in the household of Simon and Andrew, exemplified in the mother-in-law who is healed of a fever, becomes a magnet.  Within hours people are lining up at the door to be a part of this movement.  We have almost completely forgotten that the church is an extension of Jesus’ healing ministry.   

At sunset, which is to say, when the Sabbath is over, which is to say early on Sunday, “they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.  And the whole city was gathered around the door.  And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.”  The home becomes a gathering place for the healing of the whole community.

Jesus intends his church to be a healing, liberating space in which he is personally present and active.  This healing happens because Jesus Christ is present in the church, the primary means of which is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  That’s why the Sacrament is so central to what the church is and does.  By it he is here, in the midst of us.

And the healing Presence of Jesus Christ happens among us in the way we embody his love as a community of acceptance, forgiveness, joy, peace, generosity, humility, compassion, and equality.  This revelatory, revolutionary love we will see expressed in the rest of the gospel.  But it starts here on a Sunday, the day on which it became the pattern for followers of Jesus to gather for healing and wholeness and to hear his message.

The healing ministry at Simon and Andrew’s house continues into the night.  In the morning, before light, Jesus rises to walk out into the hills to pray.  When the disciples find him they want him to come back because everyone is looking for him, and they assume he is up for another day of healing.  

But he does not want to stay in one place.  This ministry is a “movement” in that it actually moves around.  “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also;” he says, “for that is what I came out to do.”  Jesus immediately takes his mission on the road.

His intention, as we will see, is to do in these other villages the same kind of things he has just done in Capernaum.  His intention is that these things be done even now, even in the church he has planted in this town.

We need to be that church, that place where he is present where people find him and therefore find healing.  We need to be that community of love where people are lifted out of the fire, out of the fever of existence, and into the light of service.

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