Advent 2025: Wed 10 Dec
Mark 1.29-34 Healing
29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. 30 Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. 31 So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.
32 That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all who were ill and demon-possessed. 33 The whole town gathered at the door, 34 and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.
Jesus was an itinerant, a no-fixed-aboder. The Son of God had no palace, no throne, no servants and no subjects. He ate and slept wherever he was at the time – sometimes in the house of someone who offered a meal and a bed or a mat, sometimes out in the open. I’m sure he would have been hungry at times on his journeys.
He has come to the house of Simon and Andrew. By house I mean a place to live – it will have been a simple building, not large, and now at least three guests have turned up and are probably going to stay. Simon’s mother-in-law is unwell. Her fever may have been a passing condition, but that makes no difference to Jesus. He heals her. We would refute the argument that Jesus would not have got any food if he hadn’t healed her!
Jesus certainly needed sustenance because so many people were turning up at the house (after sunset, because this was now no longer the Sabbath day) with candidates for healing and cleansing. He was going to be busy. We would be unwise to think that Jesus, could simply achieve healing by a gesture or a casual wave of his hands, without a smudge of dirt on his hands or his white robe, as some iconographers and artists tend to portray him. It took an effort – Jesus’ compassion for each person would have taken something out of him, even in those cases where Jesus seems to have effected healing by a word. We read that a very tired Jesus saw people coming to him for healing as sheep without a shepherd, and he had compassion on them. He spat. He picked up dirt. He came close to people. As the sick people or at least their companions needed faith, so too did Jesus! Every time.
Dealing with those who had impure spirits was another part of Jesus’ healing ministry. Healing and cleansing, two aspects of health. It might be tricky these days to think of the Church involved in the latter, but for Jesus it was all part of his ministry. I wonder how whacked he’d have felt by the end of that evening.
Is the full range of Jesus’ healing ministry still valid today?
Is healing something that is (or should be) restricted to ordained people?
Father God, take me to the crowds, the grubby ones who’d walked or hobbled long distances. Take me to where Jesus was moving among them, to the noise of pain and the greater shouts of praise. Let me see into the eyes of the Compassionate One and know his love and care for me, a shepherdless sheep. Amen.
There’s a bit of an incongruity about two big men singing what feels like a children’s song, but they carry it off well. The Word came from heaven to damp, cold earth to live among fallen humanity. We don’t see many pictures of Jesus in mucky robes.
Paul