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14 Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever. 15 So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. And she arose and served them. ~ Matthew 8:14-15
Today, we return to our study of Matthew where the Lord Jesus' teaching is being authenticated by 10 miracles which are recorded in Matthew 8-9. We have considered two of these 10 miracles: The first one the Lord Jesus healed a leper, somebody who had been driven outside the city. The second was the slave of a gentile outside of the covenant. In this third miracle we have the Lord Jesus healing a woman, someone who was outside the patriarchal society. This third healing is the shortest and least detailed of the ten. According to Mark’s gospel, this incident happened in Capernaum, on the Sabbath day. In these miracles, systematically we see the kind of people the Lord Jesus valued.
In v.14 of today's passage we read, "Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever."
Two thousand years ago in Israel it was extremely patriarchal, so much so that pious Jews would sometimes pray, "God, I thank you that I am not a slave, a gentile or a woman." In some cases at birth if a boy was born there be a celebration, if a girl was born everyone packed up and went home. This, of course, was not right, but it is a fair assessment of how women had it in those days. When the Lord Jesus came to this earth, He came partly to liberate woman. He consistently valued the outcasts, those who had been opposed, those He was not supposed to touch. The Lord Jesus Christ is the all-inclusive Savior.
When the Lord Jesus entered Peter's house, he learned that Peter's mother-in-law had a very high fever. Sickness is a common part of the curse which sin has brought upon us. We are all sinners and there is not a righteous man or woman upon the face of this earth. This fever was caused by the universal presence of sin in humanity. This fever came upon Peter's mother-in-law as a result of the hypothalamus, which is in the middle of the brain and controls the body temperature became diseased and when the body begins to fight it off, it raises its temperature. Peter's mother-in-law had a fever so severe that she could have died from it.
In v.15 of today's passage we read, "So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. And she arose and served them."
Matthew employed the same verb translated "touched" as he did when he described the healing of the leper. He did not simply touch her but took her hand into His own. This is the only healing recorded in Matthew where the Lord Jesus acted without any prior request for it. In fact, no words were spoken. No one came to the Lord Jesus on her behalf. The Lord Jesus saw her plight and He grasped her hand and the fever was immediately gone. She immediately got up and began to serve.
Her healing was so complete that she didn’t show any lingering weakness, as people with fever typically do. Immediately she went to serving everyone. One of the evidences that we have been touched by the Lord is that we find joy in serving others. Peter's mother-in-law served the Lord out of gratitude. Her service was based upon her healing, not vise versa. She didn’t let her past dictate her present. She got up right away and served forward. She didn’t earn her health or her salvation through her service. It was by the grace of God that she was blessed with healing and then she served.
C.S. Lewis once said, "The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see." God did not originally make the world to be weighed down with disease, hunger, and death. This is why the Lord Jesus came, in order to redeem what was wrong and to heal what was broken. His miracles are not just proofs that He has the power but also amazing foretastes of what He is going to do with His power in eternity. The miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts.
This miracle proved the Lord Jesus has authority over disease. While the Lord Jesus has absolute authority over everything, His authority is not cold or detached; it’s deeply personal. He doesn’t wield His authority to dominate or to control but to heal, to restore, and to bring life. He touches the untouchable, He embraces the outcast, and He offers hope to the hopeless. He ministered largely to the marginalized, the overlooked, and the outcast of society. He crossed boundaries and He broke barriers to reach those whom the world has pushed aside. His miracles call on us to respond to Him out of a heart that has been miraculously touched by Him.
