In the fishing town of Capernaum lived
a man called Jonah. Jonah was a
fisherman – with a wonderful ironic name for a fisherman. He was in business with Zebedee, and they
were, apparently, doing very well. Jonah’s
sons Simon (sometimes known as Simon Peter) and Andrew, and Zebedee’s sons
James and John, were all involved in the family business; which also provided
employment for a number of hired fishermen.
Our story today is centred on the home of Simon and Andrew: that is,
Jonah’s house. Most likely, the family
lived in one space. Simon is already
married, and the custom of their culture was (and still is today) that when the
son of a house became betrothed, a room was built on the flat roof –
effectively a second floor was added to the house – and once it was ready and
the wedding took place, his bride came to live with him there: that is, they
started their married life in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense building
on his parent’s family life. (When Jesus
uses this imagery hours before his crucifixion – John 14:1-4 – he is saying
that the Church is his bride, not that he goes to prepare rooms for each one of
us.)
We can be fairly certain of the exact
location of this house, because after the resurrection, it became the gathered
place of one of the very first churches, and was so for generation after
generation. And so what we see in this
story is the very beginnings of the Church (which, after all, Jesus would later
say he would build ‘on’ Peter).
Beginnings matter – not because the mature expression should look like
the juvenile expression, but because the juvenile form expresses the genetic
composition that will be present in the mature form, if it is truly what it is
thought to be. And so we ought to pay
close attention to the church we see here.
In this home we find Simon’s
mother-in-law. That she is part of his
home suggests that she may be a widow, vulnerable in her society unless
provided for, as God required of his people.
She has a fever: and the others tell Jesus about her. He goes to her, takes her hand, and helps her
up – and as he does so, the fever departs.
It is a reality of our experience of
life that there are times when we cannot do
anything: perhaps because we are ill, or aging, or existing under chronic sleep
deprivation due to a baby who does not sleep, or all-but-overwhelmed by any
number of circumstances. And part of
what it means to be church is that at such times others tell Jesus about us;
that through their ministering to us Jesus comes to us, takes our hand, and
helps us up. For some of us, loss of
independence is very hard to accept; we do not want to be a burden to others;
we have our faith in Jesus, and that is enough.
But Jesus comes to us with brothers and sisters, or not at all. We get to have Jesus and our brothers and sisters,
or not at all.
As soon as she is healed, Simon’s
mother-in-law responds in an amazing way, which is almost entirely lost in
translation. She ministers to Jesus and
his companions. The word has appeared
already in Mark’s Gospel, of the angels who ministered to Jesus at the end of
his forty-day fast in the wilderness.
This happens very rarely in the Gospels – the woman who prepares Jesus’
body for burial before his death, pouring perfume on his feet, does so; and so,
I suppose it could be argued, do those who offer a drink to Jesus as he
experiences thirst during his crucifixion – but Simon’s mother-in-law is the
first person who realises that part of what it means to be church is to minister
first-and-foremost to Jesus. That if we
do things for people but miss that in that way we are serving Jesus, we’ve
missed it. This is our first ministry:
to make who we are – our gifts, our passions, our experience, what we can offer
– available to Jesus, who has made himself available to us. Just as it is true that from time to time all
of us will experience the inability to do, so it is also true that all of us
have much to offer. This, to, is part of
what it means to be church.
As a result of what happened, lots of
other people turned up and were healed. We
are told that they came after sunset.
This is important: in the Jewish understanding, the day begins at sunset
(this is why in Genesis 1 it says, “And it was evening, and it was morning: the
first - etc. – day”). Here we see the
beginning of a new day: God is doing a new thing, working with and through a
renewed community.
But Simon does what the church has had
a tendency to do ever since: he concludes that the thing that Jesus has done is
the thing that he wants to be done. That
is, having seen that people gathered to the church and were healed, Simon
assumes that this is the agenda for the church: but it isn’t. Jesus says, no: we need to go out, be sent
out, to the surrounding villages. The
church is sent. The gathered church is
family, come together to bring Jesus to one another for healing and
strengthening, and to minister to Jesus and his companions, and so to be sent
out again. This, too, is part of what it
means to be church.
Over the past six months, literally
hundreds of people have come into our church building, on a variety of regular-
and one-off occasions. And very, very, few
have had their lives transformed by meeting Jesus as a result, in any way that
they or others can measure (e.g. comparatively) or testify to. In fact, where people’s lives have been
transformed – and quite dramatically – it has been where they have happened
upon a family-time gathering and encountered Jesus; not on those occasions
where the family has been overwhelmed by visitors, which tends only to result
in resentment. Perhaps we need to
rediscover what it means to be church?
Here, at the very beginning, we
discover that the church is meant to be a three-dimensional community, described
by the presence of height, depth, and breadth:
UP-ward space: attending to loving God
by ministering to Jesus, making ourselves (our homes; our gifts; our lives) available
to him; and
IN-ward space: attending to loving
ourselves by bringing the healing presence of Jesus to one another; and
OUT-ward space: attending to loving
our neighbours by going out, together, carrying good news with us.
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