Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” The Lord said to her in reply, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” (Luke 10.38-42)
Multi-tasking is a myth. According to neuropsychologists and contrary to popular belief, the human brain is incapable of doing multiple things simultaneously. Instead, it focuses on one thing. So what we call multi-tasking is simply moving our brain from one thing to another in a linear fashion, not doing multiple things concurrently.
And, as research shows, people who are “multi-tasking” do not do optimal work because their focus shifts, whereas output increases if we allow our brains to stay focused on one thing at a time, a fact sure to be contested by multi-taskers who are confident of their ability to do a multitude of things simultaneously, each equally well.
Martha, much like many of us, believed herself to be a multi-tasker, but found herself frustrated when she learned she couldn’t be in the kitchen and in the front room at one and the same time. Hearing a knock on her door, she opens it to find an old friend, Rabbi Jesus, who is on his way to Jerusalem. As we’re told, she welcomes him and hurriedly goes into the kitchen to prepare a meal for him, as any good hostess would do.
However, her sister, Mary, stays in the front room, content to catch up on the news with Rabbi Jesus, leaving Martha to sweat behind the pots and pans on the stove in the kitchen. Soon enough, Martha becomes frustrated, wanting to be at two places at the same time, and so says to Rabbi Jesus, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.”
Much to her surprise, Martha hears Rabbi Jesus chide her, not Mary, saying to her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” The story ends there, the next scene having Rabbi Jesus at prayer in another place.
If there is one story in the gospel that regularly does not set well with people, it is the story of Mary and Martha, almost everybody siding with Martha and believing Rabbi Jesus to be unfair to her. The only ones who may find comfort in the story are contemplative nuns, assuming they don’t spend much time in the kitchen, someone else doing the cooking for them, an unlikely event in itself.
Any reader of the gospel is doubly confused because we’ve just heard Rabbi Jesus send out seventy-two disciples to neighboring towns and villages, telling them that the harvest is rich but the workers are few. So why chastise someone like Martha who clearly is a worker. Adding to our confusion, immediately before the visit with Martha and Mary, Rabbi Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, the only one out of three passersby who takes action to see that the wounded man on the side of the road is helped, also clearly somebody who isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty with work.
So, it is near to impossible to make a convincing case that Rabbi Jesus prefers non-workers to workers, which puts this story at odds with just about everything he says before and after it. And yet, the conundrum remains because he says, “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her,” an indication that sitting at his feet is to be preferred to getting a meal on the table for him.
More ink than is imaginable has been spilled in an effort to make sense of this story, most writers ending up with a dichotomy between active and contemplative modes of living out the gospel, with the suggestion that somehow the contemplative mode is the preferred one, while the active mode, while meritorious, is less heroic.
A handful prefer to see the dual responses as possible in each person, a mishmash of Martha and Mary allowing us to be both, although not simultaneously. And certainly there is much to commend that answer to the problem, recognizing that nothing happens if we live on the couch, while also accepting that doing too much work isn’t good for the mind or body.
Having listened to people complain about this passage for years beyond counting, I do not pretend to have an answer that is going to satisfy everybody, the two sisters at odds in this one, with Rabbi Jesus stating categorically that Mary “has chosen the better part,” setting the stage for upsetting the Marthas of the world for all future ages.
Accepting that Rabbi Jesus apparently has good cause for what he says, I offer these few thoughts, while acknowledging up front that my sympathies lie with Martha, as do most people’s. Stepping back a bit from the mess in the kitchen, it seems to me that Martha may have made two or more mistakes, resulting in Rabbi Jesus’ gentle criticism of her.
First, Martha failed to see what was needed in the moment. A go-getter, task-oriented person, she rushes into the kitchen, believing–as most of us would–that getting a quick meal together is the right thing to do. When someone enters our home, one of the first things we ask is if we can get them something to drink or to eat, a failure to do so considered a faux pas or insensitivity.
But apparently Rabbi Jesus–one who never declined a good meal–wasn’t in the mood for food at that moment or, at least, thought it could wait for a while. Again, we need to remember that he has been on his way to Jerusalem for some time, now only two miles away, and he has a clear sense of the doomsday ahead of him in that place. Eating may be the last thing on his mind.
Given those circumstances, it is easy to see that he might have preferred the company of his close friends, confiding in them his fears and trepidation at entering the city. The evangelist simply says that Mary “sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak,” a statement that does not suggest he was offering some profound teaching or an erudite point that a student needs to listen to with rapt attention.
Instead, he easily could have been telling Mary of his misgivings about continuing on his way into Jerusalem, sharing his concerns about the plot to silence him by the religious leaders in the city, opening his heart and soul to her as a friend would do to another close friend. In staying with him in that space, Mary allowed him to find comfort, while Martha, busy in the kitchen, seemed more concerned about his empty stomach than about his soul weariness, believing, as many do, that food solves just about every problem.
But, in this instance, food wasn’t the answer. Staying beside him and listening to him as he opened up about the peril he faced down the road–that was what he needed. Mary, perhaps more intuitive than her sister, realized he needed company, not a three-course meal with after dinner drinks. Martha, for her part, following the rules of hospitality, misread the signs, resulting in Rabbi Jesus telling her that “Mary has chosen the better part.”
A second mistake that Martha made, in my opinion, is that she works herself into a tizzy, throwing a quick meal together with the odds and ends she had in her pantry, and takes her frustration out on Rabbi Jesus, asking him–rather pointedly–if he doesn’t care. “Lord, do you not care,” she asks him, “that I am left by myself to do the work in the kitchen?”
It is safe to say that Rabbi Jesus always cared for people, whatever their circumstances, whatever their cause, eager to help them in whatever way he can, going out of his way many times as he finds an answer to the need put in front of him. So, Martha’s criticism is unfounded, putting him on the spot, asking him to choose sides in this sibling rivalry that Martha is publicly playing out.
Nobody likes being put on the spot, particularly when a jab is implied or intended, and nobody relishes refereeing a family squabble. Again, Martha misreads the situation, trying to pull Jesus into the drama, while he knows in his gut some deadly drama is around the corner when he gets into Jerusalem. Here, in this place, he seeks some peace and quiet, not some bickering and back-biting.
And a third mistake our counterpart Martha makes is when she openly judges her sister, suggesting that Mary is lazy, unwilling to help with the work, or implying Mary wants all the attention, positioning herself in front of Rabbi Jesus, while Martha does KP behind the door, sweat pouring off her forehead, fingers caked with dough, murdering Mary with her eyes when she steps into the living room.
Judging others never goes well with Rabbi Jesus and we can’t expect him to stay silent when he hears Martha take to task her sister. If there is one thing he preaches against, it’s judging others, insisting that judgment belongs to God, not to us, and reminding us that we can’t read people’s hearts, only God can, which means hands-off and mouths shut when it comes to rash judgments about others.
Martha, her ego bruised and her patience exhausted, judges Mary, and Rabbi Jesus tells her as much when he says that Mary has chosen the better part and “it will not be taken from her,” his statement a sure indication that Martha should hold back on her judgmental attitude, however justified she may feel in finger-pointing.
That evening, as Martha puts away her dishes, she may have come to see things a little differently, assuming she took to heart what Rabbi Jesus had told her. And as she lay in bed replaying the day and the catastrophe that unfolded, she may have seen that Rabbi Jesus was right, that she was at fault, or, as he said, she had made the less correct choice.
And as she listened to her sister’s breathing in the bed next to her, a tear may have dropped from her eyes, realizing that everything could have been avoided had she simply kept her eyes focused on Jesus, and not on her sister. Had she taken a moment to look at him, she would have seen what he needed and, generous and good-natured as she was, she would have done all in her power to give it to him, even if it meant just sitting quietly beside him as he unburdened his soul. There was time later for pulling together a meal.
Instead, she let her eyes drift away from Jesus and land on her sister, causing her to misread the cues and to misjudge the person she loved. I’m sure Martha closed her eyes eventually that night, but only after she had them opened, seeing now that multi-tasking never really works.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 