Today's Gospel for Mass (St. Mk. 1.29-39) has a line that has always bothered me, so I stuck that line in the title for a contemplation topic. Let's set the stage, St. Peter's mother-in-law is really sick with a fever. In those days fevers were serious business, as any fever now in the Time of COVID is serious business. Sometimes people recovered, but often they did not.
Ss. Peter and Andrew actually shared a house, along with wives and in-laws; nuclear families in one house were just not economically feasible then as often is the case now. We really don't know much about this relationship, except that they cared enough to tell the Lord about it, and He came at once and healed her. In the same verse it says the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
Now many people of many stripes would look askance at that passage. Some would see the subjugation of women, the unreasonable expectations on the unprivileged, and any other number of negative connotations. The issue is that as we (and I have been guilty of this too) read it through the wrong lens. Our Lord came to heal, to restore, and to reconcile, not for us to go off into the hills on our merry way doing heaven-knows-what, but to make us whole and healthy and able servants and children of the Kingdom of God.
Here was a woman racked with fever, unable to do anything. Keep her in mind as the type for humanity, racked with corruption, bound with sin, and unable to do anything that isn't to some degree or another tainted with that corruption, no matter how good it seems. In effect, we become useless to the Kingdom, doing as much to hinder as to help, or worse. And we cannot help it, we are so racked with spiritual fever that we suffer spiritual delirium and our efforts are weak and we face-plant more often than not. Often spiritually we are bed-ridden, unable to offer prayer or thanksgiving to God, our efforts empty and hollow. Then comes along the Lord Jesus, who heals us from our sin and corruption through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. That spiritual fever is broken, and the power of God in the Holy Spirit infuses us. As she rises up to serve, she rises up not to serve men, but she rises up to serve the Incarnate Word of God and His Kingdom, attending to fellow workers, her slavery to corruption over, her bondage to sin broken.
So a word of advice to us from St. Peter's mother-in-law. Let's get over ourselves and serve the Lord. The Kingdom of God is at hand, so let's not lay about.
Jesus Heals Peter's Mother-in-Law, mosaic, 12th-13th century, Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily, photo by Richard Stracke (copyright https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode)
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