If you were to walk into my house, you would find piles of folded laundry on my coffee table. The kitchen countertops would be covered in cereal boxes, stacks of junk mail, an overflowing compost bin, spilt coffee grounds and many many crumbs of unknown origin. We have dust bunnies in the corners, questionable stickiness in the fridge, and fingerprints on all the stainless steel. So, uh, yeah, you’re welcome to stop by anytime. I like to think of my house as “comfortable,” “clutter chic,” and just clean enough to keep the social workers at bay. Being Holly Homemaker or Domestic Debbie just never really appealed to me. Thank goodness I have a true partner in the art and science of all things housekeeping.
My mom, on the other hand, was a pretty amazing housekeeper. I mean, I never would have admitted that to her at the time, but looking back now, I just think she was crazy. I guess you’d have to be to have eight kids. But she made our beds every morning. She vacuumed several times a day, and if she wasn’t doing the dishes or running a load of towels in the washer after just one use, she was wiping something sticky off of little hands, little mouths, or all the little places little fingers could reach. She never made us do chores. (Which probably explains my poor habits today). She said that she wanted us to have a childhood, and that she didn’t want to put the burden of having so many kids on each of us. But she made sure the house was clean and our school uniforms were ironed and there were bows in our hair because she didn’t want people to think she was the little old lady who lived in a shoe. You know, the one who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. Mostly, though, I think that making us do chores would mean things took longer and made a bigger mess, and instead of arguing with us, she’d just rather do it herself, do it right, and get it done. Still though, I think all that work weighed on her. I think that the frustration of the never ending cycle of dirty, to clean, to dirty again took its toll. Never ending cycles of dirt dirtying things, again and again.
But that’s where I go when I think about this passage today. Peter’s poor, ill mother-in-law, who’s as sick as a dog, but jumps up and starts preparing tea service for twelve as soon as she’s healed. Immediately, she begins serving them. I mean, what gives, you almost die from a life-threatening fever and you don’t even get the rest of the day off? Why can’t these disciples set the table and fold their own laundry for once? It’s almost as if Jesus and his buddies walk in to Peter’s house and they’re like, “Oh no, who’s gonna make us dinner now?” And instead of calling for take-out, or, heaven forbid, learning how to make the roast themselves, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and is like, “Well, I guess I better heal the mother-in-law if we’re gonna eat tonight.” So he takes her by the hand, lifts her up, the fever disappears, and voila, she’s back to the traditional suffocating gender roles that have persisted for thousands of years. Suffice it to say, this has all my inner and outer feminist ideologies firing on all cylinders, has me flashing my patriarchy warning lights, and clutching tightly to my copy of The Feminine Mystique. I mean, why does she have to get up and serve the men? Why can’t she, I don’t know, take the afternoon off, you know, have her sitting in her lazy boy in the basement watching football while she calls out for Andrew or John to bring her another beer? Why does this unnamed woman’s healing return her right back to the constricting expectations that she was stuck with before? I mean, where’s the liberation, Jesus? Where’s the breaking out from the shackles? The release of the captives and freedom from oppression? Where’s the maid service to free my mom from all those dishes in the sink and fingerprints on the windows and toothpaste splatter on the bathroom faucet? What does it mean to be healed, if we just return back to the life we had before?
I don’t suppose Mark asked any of those questions when he was writing this account. I don’t suppose he was focused on anything other than the miracle that was this woman’s physical healing, which, we have to admit, is pretty amazing in its own right. And I am absolutely coming to this text with my women’s lib, post-industrial revolution, post-modern eyes. But if that’s all God wants for Peter’s mother-in-law, if that’s all that God wants for us, to heal us enough to make us productive members of society in service to the oppressive systems that rule over us, then that feels kinda empty. It feels incomplete. It doesn’t feel like true healing at all. It feels like a return to the status quo. And that doesn’t feel like Jesus at all. So I guess I want us to hold on to this question, “what is healing?” for the next couple of minutes. Is there more than just a returning to the cycles that oppress us?
It’s pretty well documented that trauma is passed down from one generation to the next. Usually, when someone hurts someone else, it’s because they’ve been hurt. It’s like germs. We get sick because someone else was sick before us, and they got sick because someone else was sick before them, and on and on it goes. Hurt people hurt people, as they say. When we’re sick, or broken, or struggling, we can’t help but pass that on to the next person that comes our way. And the hardest and most important work we can do as humans is whatever it takes to heal from those illnesses, those traumas, and those struggles, so that we don’t pass them on to the next generation. If I don’t do my own dishes, I’m gonna leave them for my kids. If I don’t do the work it takes to heal from the trauma of my own experiences, then guess what? They will be burdens that my children will carry, and on and on trauma and hurt goes, like a plague passing from one person to the next, eventually obliterating the whole village.
But the good news is that the corollary is also true. If hurt people hurt people, then healed people heal people. Healing grows, and gets passed down, and transforms us, from one generation to the next. Like when you can’t help but smile when someone smiles at you, healing is addictive, transformative, and renewing.
So if Peter’s mother-in-law is truly, fully, healed, how do we know? How can we tell? Besides the fact that she gets up and goes right back to scrubbing the floors?
I think the full cycle of healing can be seen when we put all of these verses together. We have to hop in the helicopter and get a bird’s eye view of what is going on here. We can’t just stop with Peter’s mother-in-law. If we keep reading, we see that her healing literally opens the door for the healing of others. Her healing doesn’t end with the mopping of the floors or the windex-ing of the windows. Because she has been healed, she opens the doors to her home to all the sick and demon possessed in her village, and they come flooding in, and Jesus heals them, too. Healed people invite healing to people. I think that’s how Jesus’s healing works.
Peter’s mother-in-law becomes the first deacon, literally, she “diakoneo”s - the verb form of the Greek “diakonos,” which is where we get the word “deacon.” Her daily work is transformed to become more than the slavish domesticity of the women of the day. Her service becomes more, is expanded into leadership in the early church. The first official leader of the early church was this unnamed woman who got up and served. The first official leader of the early church was the one who opened her doors for the healing of others. The first official leader of the early church was a woman who received healing, and then, by serving others, continued that cycle of healing.
See, we cannot heal until we’ve been healed. We cannot do the work of mending the world until we have been mended. I can’t make dinner for my kids or change their sheets or vacuum the carpet until I remember all those dinners and those beds that my mom made, all those carpets that she swept. But when I do make the dinner or change the sheets or turn on the roomba, I’m opening the door for my kids to do that for their kids, and on and on and on it goes. Someone cleaned up after my mess, so that now, I can clean up after someone else’s.
I hope you get the metaphor here. I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t leave our dirty dishes in the sink, although I should preach that sermon to myself every day. What I want to do is tell you the story of how this passage was read to a group of incarcerated women and they responded with longing. They said how they ache to be able to clean their house or serve their families once again. They would love to do the dishes. Because of their own healing work that they’ve done, they see the meaning and the importance and the sign of healing that is getting up and serving. For them, the mundane now carries significant healing. For them, healing really does look like scrubbing the floors, or doing the laundry, or making a meal for their families. From where they’re sitting, service is healing.
What I want to say is that this piece of scripture shows us how healing transforms us, makes us whole, makes us new, simply because our perspective has changed. What I want to say is that when we do the work of our own healing, we open the doors for the healing of others. We clear the path, we make room, we sweep away the debris and open the windows so that healing can enter in to the rest of our lives. When we are healed, suddenly everything we do is transformed into service, transformed into the healing of our world.
And then the cycle keeps going.
Of course we never get all the way there. We're never finished in our healing. We heal, we hurt, we heal again. It just keeps going.
This passage is a radical testimony, not to how we should maintain traditional gender norms, or how I should greet my husband at the door in heels with a baked ham, but about how our own healing transforms everything we do, from the most radical, to the most mundane, into the healing of the world. Peter’s mother-in-law becomes the first deacon, and her service cleans the way for the healing of others.
And then, Jesus wakes early and sneaks off to pray. All the disciples come looking for him, the townspeople are asking for him, but he knows that there is no healing without his own. He knows that healed people heal people, and so he goes to find his own.
Thanks be to God.
