The Broken Hand

Propers: The Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“He took her by the hand and lifted her up. The fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

Jesus’ career began in the Galilee, in the north of Israel, where he was educated and raised. And with all due respect to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, it’s the boonies. Sparsely populated, mountainous and rocky, “Galilee of the Nations” was home to pagans, Itrurean converts, and settlements of horse-warriors from Persia claiming descent from King David some thousand years before. Nazarenes, they called themselves: the Branch.

There was a large lake for fishing, somewhat boldly called a sea. And Sepphoris, just a few miles from Nazareth, had been a nice enough city—before the Romans burned it down and sold the population into slavery. All in all, the more urbanized Judeans of the south looked to the Galilee as a hinterland, a backwater, a bunch of hillbillies. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” sighed Nathanael.

Had Jesus simply toured about the countryside, few outside of the Galilee might’ve heard His proclamation, the coming of His Kingdom but a local curiosity. Two of His Apostles, however, the brothers Andrew and Simon Peter, have a household in Capernaum. And Capernaum, while in Galilee, sits upon the Via Maris, one of the two great trade routes that run down either side of the Holy Land, connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Via Maris is an artery pumping money, soldiers, goods, up and down the continents.

When Jesus preaches here, when He heals and casts out demons in Capernaum, travelers from distant lands may now marvel at His works. News of this remarkable Galilean transmits readily to Judea, to Samaria, to the peoples and places beyond. It’s a shrewd move on His part. It elevates His message to a higher stage, a greater audience. Of course, by increasing His profile, He thereby increases His peril. But then Jesus always knew where this was going. He knew that we’d reward Him with a Cross.

Now, admittedly, Mark’s is a somewhat breathless Gospel. He leaps from point to point, sparing nary a detail. Yet he takes the time here to note that, after a long day of public exorcisms on the sabbath, Jesus finds the mother-in-law of Simon Peter sick. She is home in bed with a fever, and while today that might be for us an unpleasant inconvenience, back then it yet remained a somewhat riskier affair. Up until rather recently in our history, fevers often proved themselves quite fatal.

His healing of her is as tender as it is simple. He takes her by the hand and lifts her up. That’s it. Jesus takes her hand and she is healed! And immediately she starts to serve them. Please understand, this isn’t a gender role thing. The verb Mark uses here for “serve” is the same that he applies unto the angels. Jesus didn’t fix her so that she could fix Him a sandwich. There’s more to it than that, I should think. It would seem that the service is part of the healing. It may well be that none of us are truly healed, truly whole, until we too learn how to serve.

Set aside the demons for a moment. That’s a conversation we can have another time. Let us look first to the healing, of body and soul alike. Everywhere that Jesus goes, people are made whole. Sometimes that means the end of a chronic disease. Sometimes it’s the restoration of a social outcast. Sometimes it’s a person who just needs to know that they are seen, that they are loved, that they are forgiven.

When we pray for healing in our own day and age, we wish that miracles would happen on demand. And oftentimes they do: both modern medical miracles, as well as the more traditional inexplicable sort. And while we’ve all lost loved ones, while we’ve all had prayers that appear to go unanswered, nevertheless we look ever to the healing love of Jesus to find the heart of God. In the words of David Bentley Hart:

For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

Sooner or later, I have to believe, God will raise us all: healed, whole, and resurrected. C.S. Lewis pointed out that the miracles which Jesus works are the same as God works for us all, only on a different scale. Jesus turns water into wine; so does God for us all. Jesus heals wounds; so does God for us all. In Christ we simply see the purity of grace. And we are called to do likewise, are we not? To feed the hungry, house the homeless, instruct the ignorant, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant—in short, be Christ for the world?

And yet, health is not an end unto itself. We treat it that way, but it’s not. Even the healthiest lifestyle is but a deferment of death. Rather, health has a purpose: to help us to be human. And as bizarre as it may sound, illness sometimes aids in that. I don’t mean to glorify suffering. Surely God does not. But just as Satan twists God’s good things into evil, so can we in faith extract some goodness from our pain.

Our struggles can give us sympathy, humility. They can realign priorities. They can remind us what a gift it is to simply be alive, to gain another day, another chance. And on top of that, our own tribulations can empower us to help others, to see them through the same. Many a saint has prayed for healings that ran deeper than the flesh. They prayed and were conformed to Christ. They prayed and grew more human.

Jesus in the garden, sweating drops of blood, pled that this cup might pass from Him: the cup of His final Passover, the cup of His Passion and death. And I used to wonder if the Father had denied His Son that prayer. What a bizarre division in God that would be. But I’ve come to understand that His prayer indeed was answered. The cup did pass from Him: He tasted it from the Cross, from that sponge upon a stick, and proclaimed with His final breath, “It is finished.” The cup did pass: but He passed through it, not around it.

This is what we pray as well: not simply that bad things won’t happen. We know darn well that they will. This is the valley of the shadow of death, after all, the vale of tears, where even a sinless human being ends up lashed and pierced upon His Cross. But we pray we see it through. That Christ be with us through it all, through all we have to suffer, all we have to face, never leaving us abandoned, never leaving us alone; walking by us, suffering in us, and bringing us in wholeness to the other side.

He takes us by the hand and lifts us up. In this world or the next, He lifts us up. God’s is the broken hand that heals.

And when we know salvation is assured—when we know, no matter what, that we’re seen and known and loved, that even the grave cannot contain us—then suffering loses its sting. Then we can endure, for we are not alone. Where is God when we suffer? He is in our very wounds, as we are within His, suffering in us, suffering for us, bringing us to new birth. Everything will pass away, except the love of God. And that love will raise the dead.

We are healed, in order to be human. We are healed, in order to serve. We are healed, that we may be Christ for such a world as so sorely needs a Savior. Touch the holes in His hands. Place your hand in His side. And know that there is nothing you or I could ever face that He has not faced first, and conquered. Christ has gone before us so that He can be our Way, carving His Kingdom through hell, and up beyond the stars.

Life is a fever; we think we’re alone. But, O dearly beloved, look who has your hand.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.