21-13. The Healing of Simon's Wife's Mother

13. The Healing of Simon’s Wife’s Mother Mat 8:14-17; Mark 1:29-31; Luk 4:38-40 This miracle is by St. Mark and St. Luke linked immediately, and in a manner that marks historic connexion, with that which has just come under our notice. Thus St. Mark: “And forthwith when they were come out of the synagogue, they entered into the house of Simon and Andrew.” In St. Luke it is only “Simon’s house;”^[1] his stronger personality causing Andrew, though probably with the natural prerogatives of an elder brother, and certainly with spiritual, as the earlier called and the bringer of his brother to Jesus, here as elsewhere to fall into the background. It was probably to eat bread that the Lord on this Sabbath day entered into that house. “And when Jesus was come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother laid and sick of a fever,”—”a great fever,” as St. Luke informs us, as he also mentions the intercession of some on her behalf; “they besought Him for her.” We owe to him also the remarkable phrase, “He rebuked the fever,” even as on another occasion ’’ He rebuked the winds and the sea.” St. Matthew alone records that “He touched her hand” (cf. Dan 10:16; Rev 1:17; Luk 7:14; Luk 8:54). From that life-giving touch of his health and strength flowed into her wasted frame; “the fever left her,” and left her not in that state of extreme weakness and exhaustion which fever usually leaves behind, when in the ordinary course of things it has abated;^[2] not slowly convalescent; but so entire and unusual was her cure, that “immediately she arose, and ministered unto them,”—providing for her sons’ guests what was necessary for their entertainment;—serving, it has been often observed, as a pattern to all restored to spiritual health, that they should use this strength in ministering to Christ and to his people.^[3] The fame of this miracle, following close upon another wrought on the same day, spread so rapidly, that “when the even was come” or, as St. Mark has it, “when the sun did set,” “they brought unto Him many that were possessed with devils; and He cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick.” There are two explanations of this little circumstance, by all three Evangelists carefully recorded, that only when the sun was setting. or had actually set, they brought their sick to Jesus;—either, as Hammond and Olshausen suggest, that they waited till the heat of the middle day, which these were ill able to bear, was past, and brought them in the cool of the evening; or else to assume that this day being a Sabbath (cf. Mark 1:21; Mark 1:29; Mark 1:32), they were unwilling to violate its sacred rest. This in their own esteem they would have done by carrying their sick to be healed before the close of that day. It did close, as is well known, at sunset. Thus Chrysostom, on one occasion,^[4] although on another he sees here more generally an evidence of the faith and eagerness of the people, who, even when the day was spent, still came streaming to Christ, and laying their sick at his feet. The quotation which St. Matthew makes from Isaiah (liii. 4), after he has recorded the numerous healings which Christ upon that day effected, is not without its difficulties; “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.”^[5] The difficulty does not lie in the fact that St. Peter (1Pe 2:24) finds in the same words a prophecy of the Messiah rather as the bearer of the sins, than the healer of the sicknesses, of his people. As far as the words go, St. Matthew is nearer to the original, which declares He came under our sicknesses and our sorrows, the penal consequences of our sins; and any apparent difference between the two inspired writers vanishes at once, when we keep in mind the intimate connexion which Scripture every where asserts between sin and suffering; the disorder of our moral, and the disorder of our physical, being; Gen 3:17; Gen 3:19, being the first in the series; and not Scripture only; for probably there is no truth which has imprinted itself more deeply on all the language of men; few languages failing to possess a word like our own “evil,” with its double meaning of sin and of calamity. But the application of the verse is more embarrassing. Those with best right to be heard on the matter, deny that “bore” can mean “bore away,” or that “took” can be accepted in the sense of “removed,” and affirm that the words must mean a taking upon Himself of the sufferings and sorrows from which He delivered his people. But in what sense did our Lord take upon Himself. the sicknesses which He healed? Did He not rather abolish, and remove them altogether out of the way? It is, no doubt, a perfectly scriptural thought, that Christ is the κάθαρμα, the ϕάρμακον, the piaculum, who is to draw to Himself and to absorb all the evils of the world, in whom they are all to meet, that in Him they all may be abolished and done away; yet He did not become this through the healing of diseases, any more than through any other isolated acts of his life and conversation. He was not more this piacular expiation, after He had healed these sicknesses than before. We can understand his being said in his death and passion to come Himself under the burden of those sufferings and pains from which He released others; but how can this be affirmed of Him when He was engaged in works of beneficent activity? Then He was rather chasing away diseases and pains altogether,^[6] than Himself undertaking them. An explanation, which has found favour with many, has been suggested by the circumstance that on this occasion his labours were not ended with the day, but reached far into the evening;—so that He removed, indeed, sicknesses from others, but with painfulness to Himself, and with the weariness attendant upon labours unseasonably drawn out; and thus may not unfitly be said to have taken those sicknesses on Himself,^[7] Olshausen adopts, though in somewhat more spiritual a manner, this explanation. The obscurity of the passage, he says, only disappears when we learn to think more really of the healing activity of Christ, as an actual outstreaming and outbreathing of the fulness of his inner life. As therefore physical exertion physically wearied Him (John 4:6), so did spiritual activity long drawn out spiritually exhaust Him; and this exhaustion, as all other forms of suffering, He underwent for our sakes. A statement questionable in its doctrine: moreover, I cannot believe that the Evangelist meant to lay any such stress upon the unusual or prolonged labours of this day, or that he would not as freely have cited these words in relating any other cures which the Lord performed. Not this day only, even had it been a day of especial weariness, but every day of his earthly life was a coming under, upon his part, of those evils which He removed from others. For that which is the law of all true helping, namely, that the burden which you would lift, you must yourself stoop to and come under (Gal 6:2), the grief which you would console, you must yourself feel with,—a law which we witness to as often as we use the words “sympathy” and “compassion,”— was truest of all in Him upon whom the help of all was laid.^[8] Not in this single aspect of his life, namely, that He was a healer of sicknesses, were these words of the prophet fulfilled, but rather in the life itself, which brought Him in contact with these sicknesses and these discords of man’s inner being. Every one of these, as a real consequence of sin, at every moment contemplated by Him as such, did press with a living pang into the holy soul of the Lord. Not so much the healing of these sicknesses was Christ’s bearing of them; but his burden was that there were these sicknesses to heal. He “bore” them, inasmuch as He bore the mortal suffering life, in which alone He could bring them to an end, and finally swallow up death, and all that led to death, in victory.

Footnotes

[1] Maldonatus is greatly troubled that Peter should have a house, while it has been said before that he “left all,” and to allow this really to have been Simon’s house appears to him to militate against the perfection of his state. His explanation and that of most of the Romish expositors is, that this house was one which had been Peter’s, and which he had made over to his wife’s mother, when he determined to follow Christ in the absolute renunciation of all things. It is needless; the renunciation was entire in will (see Mat 19:27), and ready in act to be carried out into all its details, as necessity arose.

[2] Jerome (Comm. in Matt, in loc.) observes this: Natura hominum istiusmodi est, ut post febrim magis lassescant corpora, et incipiente sanitate aegrotationis mala sentiant.

[3] Gerhard (Harm. Evang. 88): Simul vero docemur, quando spiritualiter sanati sumus, ut membra nostra praebeamus arm a justitiae Dei [Deo?] et ipsi serviamus injustitiâ et sanctitate te coram ipso, inservientes proximo, et membris Christi, sicut haec muliercula Christo et discipulis ministrat.

[4] In Cramer, Catena, vol. i. p. 278.

[5] St. Matthew here forsakes the Septuagint, which would not have answered his purpose (οὗτος τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν ϕέρει‚ καὶ περὶ ἡμῶν ὀδυνᾶται), and gives an independent translation.

[6] Some have been tempted to make here λαμβάνειν and βαστάζειν=ἀϕαιρεῖν, as Tertullian (Adv. Marc. iii. 17), abstulit. But this plainly will not suit with the original, where Messiah is described not as the physician of men, but the sufferer for men; or, at any rate, only the first through being the second.

[7] So Woltzogen, whom, despite his Socinian tendencies, here Witsius (Meletem. Leidens. p. 402) quotes with approbation: Adeo ut locus hie prophetae bis fuerit adimpletus; semel cum Christus corporis morbos abstulit ab hominibus non sine summâ, molestiâ ac defatigatione, dum ad vesperam usque circa fegrorum curationem occupatus, quodammodo ipsas hominum aegritudines in se recipiebat..... Alterâ vice, cum suis perpessionibus ac morte spiritualiter morbos nostrorum peccatorum a nobis sustulit. Cf. Grotius, in loc. Theophylact had led the way to this explanation, finding an emphasis in the fact that the sick were brought to Jesus in the evening, out of season (παρὰ καιρόν), though he does not bring that circumstance into connexion with these words of Isaiah.

[8] Hilary (in loc.): Passione corporis sui infirmitates humanae imbecillitatis absorbens. Schoettgen (Hor. Heb. in loc.) lias a remarkable quotation to the same effect from the book Sohar.