1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Mark’s Gospel alternates between stories of Jesus surrounded by large crowds and of him teaching his disciples alone inside a house (ex. 4:10, 34; 7:17).
• Mark’s Gospel is sometimes dismissed as being anti-family, but many times the healing revolves around a child. Here, the person being healed is a mother-in-law, and in Peter’s own home.
• The word translated as “lifted her up” in v. 31 is the same word later translated as “raised.” It shows up often in healing stories in Mark (Mark 1:31, 2:9, 2:11, 3:3, 5:41, 9:27), and also has resurrection tones.
• When Peter’s mother got up to serve them, she was reclaiming her place of honor as the matriarch of the family. The word “serve” also shows up in Mark’s Gospel in reference to the angels waiting on Jesus in the temptation in the wilderness in 1:14, and as a description of Jesus’ ministry (“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,” Mark 10:45.) In serving, Peter’s mother-in-law is a model of Christian discipleship.
• In v. 34, we once again see Jesus preventing demons (the only beings who recognize who he is) from speaking of him, just as happened in the previous story of the man with an unclean spirit.
• In v. 35, Jesus retreated to “a deserted place” to pray. This is less a literal geography—there are no desert places around Capernaum—than it is a parallel between Jesus’ ministry and John the Baptist appearing in the wilderness.
Works Sourced:
Kittredge, Cynthia Briggs. “Commentary on Mark 1:29-39.” Working Preacher.
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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