Andrew and I have a friend named Virginia, and last month, Virginia’s mother, Janice, died just nine days after her 94th birthday.
It was a holy death. Janice was crowned with wisdom and full of years, a faithful matriarch, a masterful musician, a dauntless traveler, an avid Francophile, a delightful baker and artisan, a prophetic environmentalist, and an inspiring and skillful faith leader.
Janice’s life story inspires all who knew her to engage the world and all people as she did: with an open and bright mind, a creative and adventurous spirit, a full and faithful heart.
Even in death, Janice inspires ever more life.
We encounter Jesus this morning in Capernaum, raising up a woman so that she can return to her diaconate, her vocation, a vocation we all share as members of the Body of Christ. This healing event is not, strictly speaking, the raising of someone from death. But this scene in Capernaum is meant to foreshadow the raising of Jesus from the dead. Mark the evangelist uses similar verbs when, in chapter one, he writes that Jesus raises up this woman from her bed; and then, in chapter 16, he writes that the terrified women at the empty tomb hear the news that Jesus has risen from the dead. And so we are meant to understand that this “raising up” was not just the breaking of an ordinary fever. She is not just a walk-on character who is given Tylenol so that she can feel better and get up to fix dinner. Simon’s mother-in-law prefigures Christ himself. As Jesus is raised from the dead and returns to Galilee with the Good News of resurrection, so this Galilean woman is raised up to new life so that she can return to her vocation.
I see my friend Janice in this woman Jesus raises, Simon’s mother-in-law. Like so many people in our story of faith, Simon’s MIL has no name, and says nothing within our earshot. Janice, too, was modest and did not draw attention to herself. But this should not obscure the importance of these women, or hide from our view their prominence as leaders of faith.
I invite you to rest with me a little longer alongside Mark the evangelist, and reflect for a few more moments on all of this. Imagine we are around the campfire together with Mark, and he is telling us the whole story. While he is still on chapter one, he gives us the first direct foreshadowing of resurrection: a woman from Galilee is raised to health, and she immediately returns to her vocation as a servant-leader. Then, much, much later, at the very end of Mark’s Gospel, after so much has happened that we may have forgotten all about Simon’s mother-in-law, we hear that the women at the tomb are terrified by the news of Jesus being raised up. They run away in terror instead of following Jesus back to Galilee, where his ministry had first begun. Now, look at the whole thing, chapters 1-16, and see the great circle: a Galilean woman is raised up to a life of servant-leadership, and then Jesus is raised and returns to Galilee where everything started. Mark’s Gospel doesn’t end with a klunk, the women running away, afraid, and all of us helplessly wondering what it all means. Mark’s Gospel doesn’t end at all! The resurrection returns us here, to Capernaum in Galilee. Mark’s Gospel returns us, via the resurrection, to the bedside of Simon’s feverish mother-in-law, to my friend Janice’s bedside, and into the fevers and frantic anxieties that all of us feel. We return to these places of human frailty, and we see God raise us all up as servant-leaders.
Resurrection raises all of us up.
Bible stories can be maddening. I admit that I read stories like this healing event and I wish it were just that simple: I wish that everyone who has a fever could simply and literally be raised up to health. But what really happens? As of this morning, The New York Times has reported a total of 462,037 deaths in the U.S. alone from complications of the coronavirus. My own mother is one of the people I know who did not survive a serious illness. She died nearly 25 years ago, in her late fifties. You can be forgiven for feeling a little bit irritated at Mark the evangelist, who seems to be too clever by half, reporting a woman’s fever leaving her as a foreshadowing of resurrection, all while uncounted billions of people in our own day remain so sick, and so tired.
But if we rest even longer with Mark’s Gospel, and let it sink in, we can start to put our current suffering into perspective, too. We can also find, in this book of Good News, boundless empathy in the heart of God for our suffering, our confusion, our grief, and even our rage. Jesus in Mark is bereft on the cross, calling out to God in agony that he has been abandoned. His followers experience terror, confusion, anger, sorrow, every last human struggle. Yes, they witness wondrous things, turning to one another in astonishment as Simon’s mother-in-law stands up in strength. But in Mark and elsewhere, our faith story never denies the truth and power of human suffering.
Our faith simply says that in the great circle, suffering does not prevail. Resurrection does. The prophet Isaiah stirs up our courage today, as he did to those poor exiled Israelites ages ago, telling us that we will mount up with wings like eagles, and we will run and not be weary.
And so we are right to grieve, and right or wrong, we will grieve. My friend Virginia misses her mother, and no amount of well-meaning reassurance will ease that sting. While Simon’s mother-in-law gets up to serve, other bedsides bear witness to more upsetting news: not every fever breaks. Sometimes it takes one or two generations to see how a life cut short nonetheless generates new life. Sometimes the immensity of God’s grace is known only in the midst of great loss.
In all of this; in the great circle of life, death, and new life; in the dreadful circle of hope, dashed hope, and the grey dawning of another new day; in all of this, we find by our side the Risen One, Christ himself, who has gone before us to Galilee, and joins us now. He understands our suffering because he has felt it himself in his human body. And he extends his wounded hand, extends it to raise us up, all of us on either side of the grave. He raises us up, always, into his resurrected life, so that we might give our own lives away to others in love.
Some fifteen years ago, Andrew and I had Janice and her husband Art in our home for dinner, with their daughter Virginia and her husband Dale. Andrew cooked a great dinner, as usual — he is skillful in the kitchen. Janice was one to notice such things, and she commended Andrew warmly, well aware of the countless things one must be good at doing when assembling a complicated dinner for people who know about good food. Then Janice turned to me, and with good humor she asked me point blank: “and you, Stephen, what do you do around here?” “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I fold t-shirts?” Everyone laughed. And yet I think I can hear a note of serious purpose in Janice’s question. It is a question asked by someone who has always known the importance of taking care of family, and someone who expands the idea of “family” to include a whole community. It was a servant-leader question. In a sense I think there is something holy, something of God, in the question.
The questioner, finally, may be the risen Jesus himself, filled with empathy for our suffering, raising us up, lifting us to our feet so that we can minister to one another, and to our neighbors. Jesus lifts us up, and then he asks his question — a piercing question, but his spirit is good:
You, my beloved, what do you do around here?
***
Preached on the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 7, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39
Artwork: Rembrandt, sketch of Jesus Healing Simon’s Mother-in-Law