What gospel would YOU write?
Juli Belian
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale MI
Epiphany 5B—February 4 2024
When Clare asked me to preach this week, and I opened up the lectionary to see what the texts were, I laughed out loud. That vixen had given me one of the hardest gospels to preach out of the entire Bible. The anecdote about Simon’s mother-in-law reads like a joke, a joke of which women are the butt: “As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him at once that there wouldn’t be anything to eat because she was the only one who cooked for the whole household. Hearing this, Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them, and Jesus ordered a BLT on wheat with a side of chips.” Poor woman can’t even get a break when she’s sick.
Why did Mark write about this? Well, what gospel would you write?
What makes anyone write the gospel they write? This is one of the first keys to biblical interpretation. Each author and editor of the words in our Bible was a specific person, living in a specific time and a particular place. Things were happening around them, things that had nothing to do with their religious life – illness, famine, political unrest. Those things show up in the record. We were watching a TV show the other day that was recorded during the daily grind of COVID precautions, and I was startled by the artifacts of the pandemic, even though it was only a couple of years ago and even though the pandemic is arguably ongoing. Just as we look back in wonder at recorded evidence of that blip of years in which everyone wore masks, we can look back on recorded evidence of the early Church and see all kinds of hints about the world the writers were living in.
Each gospel author also had some ideas about “what mattered.” Now, when I say, “what mattered,” I am being purposefully vague in order to include the enormous variety of theories that exist about exactly what did matter to each gospeler. Every scholar has a different way of reading and understanding these priorities – and yet, still, there are some categories of issues that we can use as metaphorical rulers for taking the measure of a particular gospel:
· Who do they think Jesus was? There is, of course, general agreement that Jesus was the promised Messiah – and we could talk quite a while about all the scholarship regarding what THAT meant – but the gospel writers also had additional ideas about who Jesus – or, at least, they had favorite turns of phrase for describing who he was. Jesus is called the “Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham”; “the Son of God”; “Son of the Most High”; “the “Word”; “the light.” These phrases may all refer to the same thing, but each reflects the perspective of the particular saint who wrote it. Not every gospel uses every phrase, and some descriptions are unique. How the writer chooses to name Jesus helps us understand the writer’s theological priorities.
· What role do the disciples play? The disciples, frankly, don’t come off looking very great in any of the gospels, as they fail utterly in all four versions, but how they fail, and how that failure is retold, tells us much about what the writer thinks about the disciples and about discipleship generally. They are perhaps “of little faith,” or maybe they lack a more fundamental intelligence, as Jesus keeps asking in Mark, “Do you still not get it?”
· Which component of Jesus’ multi-valent saving grace does the writer emphasize? Jesus is God made man. Jesus is the Son of Man. Jesus the healer. Jesus the storyteller. Jesus the miracle worker. Jesus the breaker of bread. Jesus the breaker of the law. Jesus the fulfillment of the law. Jesus crucified. Jesus risen. All true. All different. We learn a lot about each gospel-writer by noticing which elements of God’s grace grab their interest.
· And on and on with so many different things we can look at. Like any really good book, each gospel (and the gospels as a group) can be read and reread and reread and understood more and more deeply with each subsequent read.
Today we’re going to try to bring some of those ideas to bear on one of these stories. And because I know it’s hard to keep track of the story line from week to week, I’m going to do a little recap:
Previously on “The Gospel of Mark”: Jesus is baptized by John, then spends forty days being tempted by Satan. Jesus then calls Peter and Andrew and James and John to join his travel team. After some dynamic teaching in the synagogue, an exorcism. And tonight’s episode, the Mother-in-Law and the Escape.
And folks, we have done all this in less than 40 verses. Mark is a high-speed, highly compact gospel, written, some believe, to be read aloud in its entirety every Easter vigil. And that’s not an unreasonable task. Most people could read Mark silently in about 47 minutes, and read aloud, it would likely take little more than an hour from your life.
Lections from Mark are therefore jam-packed, almost always including enough material for at least two sermons, and sometimes three. And thus, it is that each individual plot point of Mark is more or less easy to overlook. And the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is a great example. Very few have very much to say about this passage. Most commentaries simply summarize or repeat the actions as if there really were nothing more that could be said about it. She was sick. Jesus healed her. She fixed supper. Move along, nothing to see here. Her individual healing certainly seems dwarfed by the crowd that subsequently appears. Jesus is besieged by the locals bringing “all who were sick or possessed,” which results in “the whole city” gathering around the door. Jesus has hit the big time.
So, with all that, why did Mark bother to include it at all? Again, we have baptism; temptation; grab some disciples; cast out a demon; heal Simon’s MIL, heal the whole town, take a break, go on tour. Why include both the exorcism and the healing of Simon’s MIL? Either could have precipitated local interest. Why include both?
When I was in my late teens and about halfway through college, my persistent devotion to the Christian faith was shaken and displaced for a time by the extreme hatred of women shown by the Church throughout time. The more I learned, the less I liked what I saw of the institution that had glorified what appeared to me to be a weirdly single-sex view of the universe. Women who were ordained were not pastors or preachers, they were “lady preachers.” Or they were nothing at all, since not every denomination even still recognizes a valid call to ordained ministry for women. From the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the malignant banality of the Great American Dream, the Church participated in (or led) a centuries-long disempowerment of women – on purpose, for that purpose – and I had a hard time figuring out how to continue in an institution like that.
Mark was the gospel that began to draw me back. Read through, multiple times – and yes, in one sitting – the frenetic energy of the Markan focus on the cross mesmerized me, and the pointed barbs he aimed at the foolhardy disciples tickled me. As I learned more, it occurred to me that I was actually seeing a miracle in the text, as I began to think along these lines:
· Point 1: We know that Mark was written at a time when male domination of society – Jewish, Greek, or Roman – was absolute. Men wrote histories about men. Precious little was known about women in any culture, because nothing much was written about them. As far as public life went, women did not count.
· Point 2: The gospel of Mark is, as far as we know, an extraordinary story written by a perfectly ordinary guy who would have had all the guy viewpoints guys likely had in this guy heyday. I don’t see Mark spearheading an equal rights movement.
· Point 3: The New Testament canon was not set for more than 300 years. The texts that made it into the final version were originally written by men, but then also edited by men, selected by men, and canonized by men. And then preached by men, of course.
· Point 4: Simon’s mother-in-law made the cut anyway.
And that’s the miracle. You see, there’d be no reason to keep the story in just to prove women were meant to serve, because women already were chained to that low status, lacking any political voice and almost all economic power. You also wouldn’t be likely to include this story to prove women had some role in the church, because this nameless MIL doesn’t get to do much. She gets healed and then she fixes supper. It is fun, however, to point out that the word used to say she served them is diakaneo, the same word root we use for deacon. I suspect the exorcism alone would have brought the entire village to the door just as effectively, so there really is no reason for Mark to include this story at all.
But she is there. And so is the woman with the flow of blood. And so is Jairus’ daughter. And the Syro-Phoenician woman and her daughter. And the poor widow. And the woman who anoints Jesus. And the women at the cross and the burial. And the women at the tomb on Easter morning. And Mary Magdalene, the first to bring the news of the resurrection to the disciples – who did not believe her.
I don’t know why Mark included these stories in his gospel. But I can say with no hesitation that the fact that these stories made it into any gospel at all is, in my mind, nothing short of a miracle, a statement by God that despite the patriarchy, by God, women are included in the new age, in ways the men of Jesus’ time couldn’t foresee but which they were powerless to stop.
I am not always faithful, not always convinced any of this will matter in the long run of humanity’s very short existence so far. But Peter’s mother-in-law has always been there to make me laugh and draw me back in, even when I have found it unbelievably caddish to cure a woman’s fever and immediately put her to work. I suspect a guy would have been earning free beers at the bar telling the story to strangers. But God has now fixed this for me, too. When I was trying and failing to find any scholarship about Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, I did find lots of poems. It seems that where scholarship breaks off, there be poems, and one of the poems I found has now solved my worry about Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.
THE MIRACLE (Peter’s Mother-in-Law Speaks)
By Emily Rose Proctor
It wasn’t just his aloe hand, spreading
on my burn-crackling brow, his clean breath
breezing sunshine through my thinking hole,
his gaze honeying my piggy joints.
Rest here, he whispered
a velvet tabernacle of time
unfolding in the crawl space
between the bones of only my
ear drum beating, beating.
As long as you like, he said,
his voice making room quietly
like rising bread. Everyone –
and I think he meant me too –
everyone will be fed.
I don’t know how long I lay there,
coming to all my familiar senses
in the warm dark, letting the pallet
hold me. They say I came right down
to serve them, but I swear,
it felt like blessed forever.
Of course! Have I not known? Have I not heard? God makes the rulers of the earth as nothing and calls the stars by name, God strengthens the powerless, so of course Jesus would make sure Simon’s mother-in-law got a well-deserved rest before she had to get back to work! That makes me laugh even more.
Now, obviously, my thoughts are mine, the observations of a woman, past middle age, with a long history of disagreement with and even occasional antipathy toward the Church. But we all tell the story of salvation from our own point of view. My version helps me see God in my everyday life, and your version helps you however it helps you. The miracle is that God squeezes in the essential stuff anyway.
What gospel would you write?