In Mark 1, we hear about the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. So let’s just start with that, because as Catholics, some people hear this and panic a little: wait, St. Peter, the first pope, was married?
First, we needn’t panic, because there is nothing intrinsic about priestly ministry that requires celibacy. In Catholic law, this is largely a matter of traditional discipline in the Latin Church, even if it has strong resonances with our theology of the priesthood. In any case, there’s little to no evidence, apart from this one line of scripture, that Peter had a wife in his later ministry in the Church. Many argue that Peter was, by this point already, a widower—the presence of a mother-in-law certainly suggests that there had been a wife, but if she was around, it seems odd that she would never be mentioned in the tradition or the Gospels.
I always think it’s kind of a funny story. Jesus heals this woman, and she immediately turns into the hostess, serving the disciples and Jesus. One the one hand, we might think, let the poor woman have a rest; she’s just recovered from a serious illness. On the other hand, she wants to serve, with that stereotypical grandmotherly insistence, so maybe Jesus healed her precisely because he knew she would do what she wanted to do, regardless of her state of health. Further, the immediate transition shows that she is really healed, completely. It’s not just that the virus or the fever or whatever has left her so that she can now recover over the course of hours or days; she is restored. And no doubt this is what St. Mark wants us to see from this story. Jesus isn’t offering some kind of patchwork medicine; he’s the real deal. When he heals, he heals.
But let’s also notice another theme running through the readings. St. Paul talks about how he has made himself “a slave to all,” that he might “win more.” Everything, including his own rights as an apostle, takes a back seat to his sense of mission. We can connect Paul’s sense of service with Peter’s mother-in-law’s sense of service: in both cases, what matters is not our own needs, but the good of Christ. This service is a joy. It is its own reward.
By contrast, in our first reading, Job gives a rather different perspective on service. Is life, he wonders, anything more than forced slavery or hired drudgery? Months of emptiness, nights of grief, passing through life with no real joy? Of course, he says this after he has lost everything, as he sits in sorrow, wondering why God could have taken away his health and his family and his prosperity. Surely, his friends insist, there is a reason for these things; surely Job has done something wrong. But Job knows that he has done nothing wrong. His chapters of Hebrew verse amount to a beautiful iteration of that modern phrase “it is what it is.” There can be no justice, no healing, when the world is like this—when bad things happen to good people, when death and chance and sickness make our lives into drudgery without meaning.
Not that first-century Palestine is all living in the world of Job, but there’s a real question left lingering there, in the moral universe of the Old Testament: is there any meaning in suffering? Why bother with this life, why bother with service, when it can all fall apart because of a stupid virus that puts you in bed with a fever? Why bother when it can all be taken away for no apparent reason?
If you go back and read the rest of Job, the answer that God gives is not an answer. It is a challenge: what do you know about anything? God says, in effect, you want meaning, but your questions are meaningless. What makes you think you know what justice is? What makes you think you know what suffering is? Were you there when I created the heavens and earth?
I like to think that, by pairing these readings together today, Holy Church wants us to consider Jesus’ healing, and Paul’s preaching, as a kind of response to the pain and questioning of Job. You see, Job is right: suffering can be meaningless; life can be empty servitude. But God’s answer to this is not ultimately to make it meaningful, in some superficial sense, as in “I gave you the flu so that you could learn to be a better person.” Rather, his answer is to show up, in person, and be with us in those moments, and offer to transform them into his good purposes. For Paul, the reality of Christ’s personal presence and power was enough to get through any struggle. For Peter’s mother-in-law, the reality of Christ’s presence meant that her weakness had been transformed into strength. She now had the chance to participate in something of infinite value: the announcement of God’s kingdom come among us.
Rather than worry about what’s wrong, or what’s broken, or what seems to lack meaning—rather than sitting around asking why and what and how—can we instead invite Jesus into it, and ask him to show us how he will transform it into something good? And even harder, can we have the faith, like so many of those healed people in the gospels, to believe that he will?