Fr Marco Lazzaron
e continue with the reading of the Gospel of Mark and we hear how Jesus moves from the synagogue to the house of Peter. Jesus wants to come to your house, wants to enter into your house, where you live your fundamental relationships, where you speak, and where you listen to your husband, your wife, your children, your parents, your carer, etc., where you eat, and where you rest. God wants to be part of your daily life. Here we have one of the most beautiful definitions of Church: it is caring about the people around us, especially those who suffer, and bringing them to Christ and Christ to them. It is the place where daily relationships are lived, and where God is welcomed, where even our private houses can become a place of meeting Christ.
We hear of the first healing miracle in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus chooses to heal a woman (Peter’s mother-in-law), with a fever (not a big deal some may say!) and he heals her inside the house, with few people present there but every healing is an invitation to look beyond the sign, to see its meaning. From the smallness and irrelevance of the miracle, we sense that we must look elsewhere if we want to seek eternal life.
This miracle is for service, it is not to prove something or to convince or to make people believe. Jesus did not want to capture or seduce people with miracles. Miracles are always signs to build faith. In his life, Jesus will heal to give back to every sick person the ability to love by serving because loving is the only reality that makes us like him.
In the text two expressions help us to grasp the symbolic value of this event: “he approached and made her stand up by taking her by the hand” (but we should have translated “he made her resurrected”) and “she served them”. Jesus heals the hand which, from being closed, becomes capable of making a gift. Now the woman can live as a risen woman. We don’t know what they said or what happened. We only understand that Jesus took the initiative, he went to her and slowly approached her and spoke to her.
The hand of Jesus is “contagious”, the woman begins a new life thanks to Jesus’ contagious love. It is Christ who does the bulk of the work. We always think of reaching God through religious performances to deserve salvation, but Christianity is letting ourselves be reached by God who saves us for free. We think we are free when we don’t need anyone. You have to let yourself be helped, let yourself be loved, let yourself be carried, let yourself be resurrected.
Prayer has the power to “raise those who are lying”, and to give a new sense to our lives. Prayer is not asking to solve a problem but not letting the problem dominate you anymore. We know very little about Jesus’ prayer, what he said, what words he used. One thing is certain: prayer is not a list of requests to God, or worse, telling God how to be God. We do not pray for a certain reality to go differently, but so that through prayer we can change the way with which we face reality. Most of the time events will not change, because the course of life follows its own internal logic and we can’t do anything about it, not even God. The difference is in the way I live and deal with that reality. Even Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane will not change reality but will find the strength for his definitive and total “Yes”.