The Barefoot Evangelist

Read Mark 1:29-39 with your family.

The Gospel of Mark moves fast. We aren’t even out of chapter 1 and already Jesus has been performing healings and teaching so much he has already become well known.

This story starts with Peter’s mother-in-law who was very sick. Jesus asked her to ‘rise up’, the same word used at the end when Jesus dies and is then resurrected, or rises up. The people who heard this story in the first century would have made that connection quickly.

And then we read that she ‘served’ Jesus and the other people in the house. One of the poor choices of the early Bible translators was how they turned the Greek word for ministry into ‘serving’ for all the women, and then made it seem like they were serving food. For men, they always treated ‘serving’ as ministry.

Women were doing ministry too. They were not serving food. Peter’s mother-in-law was also a disciple of Jesus and helped Jesus with his ministry. Women and men worked with Jesus to spread the good news that Jesus had come to share.