Peter’s Mother-In-Law,
and Jesus and Us

by BJ Brown

Although her name is lost to us , Peter’s mother-in-law is the first woman we meet in the gospel of Mark. She is the first person Jesus touches in Mark’s gospel, the first he heals from disease–although, in Jesus’ time, there wasn’t the same bright line that we try to draw between demons and disease. So the three healings that come in quick succession at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in this gospel belong together; they are all one story: the man in the synagogue, Peter’s mother-in-law, and the Galilean man with leprosy.

When Jesus enters Simon Peter’s house, he is told about Peter’s mother-in-law ‘immediately.’ He seems to go straight to her, taking her by the hand and raising her up–a way of describing her cure that makes us think of how he will be raised up from death. Her fever leaves–not unlike the way the demon fled from the man Jesus had met in the synagogue earlier in the day. After that, Peter’s mother-in-law begins to “wait” on Jesus and his disciples–or, as other translations have it, to “serve” them. Her actions seem to foreshadow the women who Mark will much later tell us don’t flee from Jesus’s crucifixion–Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome–who were also said to minister to Jesus (Mark 15:40). Peter’s mother-in-law’s service seems to exemplify the role that all of Jesus’s disciples are called to play.

So, is Peter’s mother-in-law really just like her son-in-law Simon, like his brother Andrew and James and John? Should she be counted among the very first disciples that Jesus called? Should we find in her a model and exemplar for the role that women can and should have among the followers of Jesus, even today?

Or is that an act of eisegesis–a way of examining the Scriptures for what I want to find, instead of reading for what the Scriptures reveal, so that I might examine myself in their light? When I focus closely on the three verses of Mark’s gospel about Peter’s mother-in-law alone, will I find everything there is to learn about her encounter with Jesus? Or might there be more to her story?

Let’s return to Mark’s gospel, then, and see what happens next–let’s consider the rest of the gospel reading for this Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, in Year B of the church’s cycle of Scripture readings.

When Peter’s mother-in-law is freed from illness, she returns to the expected and important household duties of offering hospitality to a guest in her home. Then, in the evening, the whole town shows up at her door. Jesus cures many of these people too; healing illnesses and casting out demons, just as he did for Peter’s mother-in-law and the man in the synagogue. The next morning, as Peter reports, everyone is still looking for Jesus, and so are the next towns over, so he goes on to “drive out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.”

Mark’s gospel does not tell us whether Peter’s mother-in-law or anyone else from the whole town of Capernaum followed Jesus on his way. We must be careful not to read into this silence what we want to find. Perhaps the miracle for Peter’s mother-in-law, like the man in the synagogue before her and the many, many nameless people immediately after her, is that there is nothing special about them. Mark’s gospel doesn’t tell us that Jesus cured only the most deserving or the most desperate or the truly devoted. No special connections or even relationship with Jesus was required. Mark simply tells us that ‘everyone’ was looking for Jesus; that he cured ‘many’, without any attention to age or class or condition.

And it does not seem that Jesus called anyone he healed that day to some special status or responsibility. He did not ask them to become disciples; he simply made them whole again. The wonder of it all seems to be that in casting out demons and disease, Jesus returns us to ourselves, making us fully human once again.

But in truth, is this not what our salvation is? Isn’t this why Jesus came–so that we might become what God intended us to be? So that we might become, indeed, what the Son of God was willing to become for our sake? Not heroic or extraordinary or special in any way, but simply, fully human. That is everything and all that we are called to be, because it is exactly what has, in Jesus Christ, been made one with God.

There are so many people in our world who are treated as if they were not fully human. Pope Francis calls them the victims of a throwaway culture. Their ranks are vast–the very youngest, the oldest, the infirm. They are people who live on the streets of our city, perhaps with the demons of mental illness untreated; they are fellow citizens serving out long, harsh prison sentences. They are women, abused, trafficked, or facing doors of education and opportunity that are closed to them. They are families of refugees stranded at our southern border or scattered across the globe.

Mark’s good news is that Jesus takes all of these people–and us too–by the hand to raise us up. Peter’s mother-in-law may have been among the first, but she was certainly not the last, of the people that the Son of God came to heal and save.

If Peter’s mother-in-law is simply one among many, one like many of us–old and young, women and men–perhaps she does offer us a challenge to follow the example that she sets. How can we, freed from what ails and bedevils us, rise up to offer hospitality to whatever guests show up at our doors?