Relationship

What are relationships for? Do you use them for your own gain? Do you give as much as you take?

Mark 1:29-45 tells of the store of relationships, relationships between Jesus and the disciples, and all of them and Peter’s mother-in-law, and the leper that is outside of community…

This text or set of texts comes on the heals of Jesus healing the man held by a demon… another relationship.

You see Jesus came here to be in relationship with all of us. He goes into the temple and heals a man on the Sabbath. It is not about the healing, it is a restoration to community.  Just like in the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is more than just curing a fever. Jesus allows this woman to return to her right place in community.  Being a gracious hostess to her guests.  (Please hear me, I am not saying a woman’s place is in the kitchen serving, I am saying she was restored by Jesus to her place in community.) Her disease had kept her from being who she was, and took her out of her place in community, Jesus by healing her restored her to her rightful place in community.  Just as the leper is an outcast, not allowed to be a part of community, and Jesus reaches out and touches him. He could have spoken him clean, but he touches him, to show him that he is a person, and someone who can be and is loved!  We are called by God to live in and to restore people to community.

Follow the model of Jesus who willingly went and restored people to community, not separating them because of who they are or what they have done, but restoring them to their proper place in the relationships of communal life.

For more on the story of the Leper, see the sermon I preached on this text from February 12, 2012 here.