Mark 1:1-45

Mark 1

The Cure of Simon's Wife's Mother.

Pain, sickness, delirium, madness, as great infringements of the laws of nature as the miracles themselves, are such veritable presences to the human experience that what bears no relation to their existence cannot be the God of the human race. And the man who cannot find his God in the fog of suffering, no less than he who forgets his God in the sunshine of health, has learned little either of St. Paul or St. John.

I. All suffering is against the ideal order of things. No man can love pain. It is an unlovely, an ugly, abhorrent thing. The more true and delicate the bodily and mental constitution, the more it must recoil from pain. No one, I think, could dislike pain so much as the Saviour must have disliked it. God dislikes it; He is then on our side in this matter. He knows it is grievous to be borne; a thing He would cast out of His blessed universe, save for reasons.

II. Let us look at the miracle as received by the woman. She had a great fever. She was tossing from side to side in vain attempts to ease a nameless misery. A sudden ceasing of motions uncontrolled; a coolness gliding through the burning skin; a sense of waking into repose; a consciousness of all-pervading well-being, of strength conquering weakness, of light displacing darkness, of urging life at the heart; and behold! she is sitting up in her bed, a hand clasping hers, a face looking into hers. He has judged the evil thing, and it is gone.

III. In the matter of healing, as in all the miracles, we find Jesus doing the works of the Father. God is our Saviour; the Son of God comes healing the sick, doing that before our eyes which the Father, for His own reasons, does from behind the veil of His creation and its laws. The cure comes by law; comes by the physician who brings the law to bear on us. We awake, and lo! it is God the Saviour. Need I, to combat the vulgar notion that the essence of the miracles lies in their power, dwell upon this miracle further? Surely no one who honours the Saviour will for a moment imagine Him, as He entered the chamber where the woman lay tormented, saying to Himself, "Here is an opportunity of showing how mighty My Father is!" No. There was suffering; here was healing. What I could imagine Him saying to Himself would be, "Here I can help! Here My Father will let Me put forth My healing, and give her back to her people."

G. Macdonald, Miracles of Our Lord,p. 25.

References: Mark 2:1; Mark 2:2. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. vi., p. 8; H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 38.