The Whole Town at the Door

They walk out of the synagogue and straight into a house, which is how the whole chapter moves. Mark keeps writing at once, immediately, right away, and the effect on a reader is a kind of breathlessness. The morning happened in public, in front of a congregation. The afternoon happens in somebody's kitchen.

Simon's mother-in-law is in bed with a fever, and the household tells Jesus about her as soon as he is through the door. There is something buried in that phrase. Simon has a mother-in-law, which means Simon has a wife, and Mark mentions it in passing and never comes back to it. The man who ends up at the center of this book had a household and a marriage, and we know it because his wife's mother ran a temperature one Sabbath afternoon.

So He went to her, took her by the hand, and helped her up.

No words are recorded. There is no crowd here, no argument, nothing arranged for an audience; he held her hand and helped her stand. Mark then says the fever left her and she began to serve them, which sounds to us like a woman sent back to the stove. It runs the other way round. She had been flat on her back an hour earlier, and now she is up and moving and doing what she would do on any ordinary afternoon, and being able to do the ordinary thing is the evidence that she is well.

Then the sun goes down and the town arrives. Mark is specific about when: that evening, after sunset, which is when the Sabbath ended. He does not say why that mattered, and he writes as though a reader would already know.

That evening, after sunset, people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed, and the whole town gathered at the door.

A door, not a synagogue. The house belonged to a fisherman, and the whole of Capernaum was standing outside it. He healed many who were ill with various diseases, he drove out many demons, and he would not let the demons speak, because they knew who he was. They had him identified, and he refused to let them say it.