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)
As we continue our study of the Gospel of Luke today, we find another story unique to this gospel, a benefit that is ours in Year C because Luke, for whatever reason, provides his readers with a plethora of stories not found elsewhere in the other gospels. We should be clear that Martha and Mary do appear in the Gospel of John, but the context is entirely different, the death of their brother Lazarus being the focus of that story.
Here, the story has the two sisters at odds over household duties. Lazarus is not mentioned or found in the story. Through the centuries, the story of Martha and Mary has become one of the most familiar of the gospel stories while also being one of the most disturbing. As one woman who was always quick with an opinion once told me, there is no woman who likes this story.
To her way of thinking, Jesus got it wrong when he chastised Martha for her busyness while praising Mary for her attentiveness to his words. If all women were like Mary, she explained, nobody would ever get a meal. Over the years, I’ve found that her opinion on the story is widely shared, most everybody being bothered by Jesus’ rebuke of the efforts of Martha to put a meal on the table while Mary, in most people’s estimation, shirked her responsibilities, doing nothing to help her sister in the kitchen.
Of course, there is an endless effort to explain the whys and wherefores of Jesus’ reaction to Martha when she said to him, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” As we heard again today, he answered 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.”
Before I offer the scholarly response to Jesus’ rebuke of Martha, I have heard more than a few women say that Martha should have turned off the stove, hung up her apron, and walked into the living room, leaving the meal uncooked. As they say, Jesus would have become hungry soon enough and seen things in a different light.
As for the scholarly opinions on the matter, the most popular that is cited for Jesus’ praise of Mary is that she was the one who really paid attention to Jesus, while Martha, on the other hand, was busy doing her thing in the kitchen. As a result, Mary was the one who truly offered hospitality to Jesus because she focused her attention on the guest, not on the food for the guest.
Obviously, there is a counterargument to that opinion, the simplest being that Martha also was being attentive to the guest in the house by seeing that he was fed while he was with them. Even today, it would be inhospitable for a host not to say to a visitor, “Can I get you anything to drink or to eat?” So, a strict focus on Mary’s attentiveness to Jesus seems a very narrow understanding of hospitality.
Another opinion put forth is that Mary made the right choice because as Luke sees it she responded in the right way to the presence of a prophet in her house. She listened to him, respecting his position as a prophet because, after all, a prophet is defined by his word. It is not a weak argument overall, even though it suggests a prophet never gets hungry.
At the end of the day, I think the best answer is not to look at the story in a way that forces us to take sides with one or the other of the two sisters, Martha or Mary. That solution, as we see, ends up with an unsatisfactory situation, as many othereither/or answers to a situation do. Instead, I propose that we see the story as a study in two sides of one person.
In other words, we have tendencies in our personality that belong to both Martha and Mary. Few, if any of us, could make it in the world if we were totally one or the other. We’d wear ourselves out and suffer burnout if we never took a break or a day off from our Martha duties, and, likewise, we’d starve to death if we stayed still all day, doing nothing and not bothering to open the refrigerator or the pantry.
But if we allow the possibility that we have both a little of Martha and a little of Mary in us, then we can better appreciate what Rabbi Jesus is saying here. Then, we approach the story not so much as a reprimand for Martha’s busyness, but as a suggestion that she should strive for a better balance in her life. Seeing the story in terms of a call to having a good balance makes a lot of sense to most of us.
We can admit freely that it is easy to find ourselves with a lot of Martha in us and too little Mary in us, resulting in us always on the go and never taking a breath. We’re constantly moving from one demand to another, never stopping to smell the roses. That kind of hectic and harried schedule certainly ends up with our being “anxious and worried about many things,” just as Jesus describes it.
Without a pause or a breather in our long day, we find ourselves exhausted and running on empty, a fact that benefits neither ourselves nor anyone else around us. Taking a Mary break is an antidote to that possibility. We find a few minutes or a few days off beneficial to our physical and psychological well-being, allowing us to return to our duties energized and more focused.
Of course, Luke is particularly interested in our duties as disciples, defining discipleship being one of his principle aims in the gospel that bears his name. Given that fact, the message is much the same. We can become so involved in our activities as disciples–clearly important because Jesus himself says a tree is known by the fruit it bears–that we overlook the need for a recharging of our spiritual batteries.
When that happens, we easily lose sight of why we’re doing something and, in time, may even lose our zeal for doing it. Compassion fatigue is a real thing, especially for people who continually look after the welfare of others. After a long duration of serving others in need, a person can enter a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the result of a buildup over time of attending to others without attending to the needs of oneself.
When that happens, a person begins to lose heart and lose interest, showing less empathy and more indifference to others whom they serve simply because they don’t have anything left to give. It’s just a job. The corrective, of course, is to step back and to do the one thing that Jesus says is needed. We do as Mary did, finding a quiet place where we can sit still for a while, letting our spirits be revitalized by the spirit of the Most High God who resides deep within our hearts and who feeds us with his peace, his love, and his mercy.
As a matter of fact, we find Jesus exhibiting both sides in his own personality, often as busy and overworked as Martha was, and at other times, going off to a secluded place where he can pray, attending to his Mary side, knowing he can only give if his own spirit is replenished. He understood that if a well runs dry, it can provide no drink for the thirsty traveler.
Apparently well aware of this reality, Luke, more so than the other evangelists, tells us that Jesus periodically would put his busy schedule to the side so that he could spend some alone time, listening to the quiet inner voice of his Heavenly Father. Luke offers several examples, no doubt meant as instructions for the would-be disciple who might also find him or herself overwhelmed and overwrought if he or she did not find quiet time to listen to the whisper in the wind.
In Luke 4:42, he writes that at daybreak, after a period of teaching and healing, Jesus “departed and went to a deserted place. And the people sought him and came to him, and would have kept him from leaving them.” Again in Luke 5:15, we are told that “the news about Jesus was spreading, even farther, and large crowds were gathering to hear him and to be healed of their illnesses. But Jesus himself would often slip away to the wilderness to pray.” Then, in Luke 6:12, we learn that “At this time Jesus went off to the mountain to pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God.”
In these examples–and others–we find Jesus providing us clear indications that he also respected both the Martha and the Mary sides of his personality, teaching us that the disciple cannot always be working in the vineyard, nor can the disciple always be in the wilderness alone and apart from others. Both the active and the contemplative sides of the disciple must be honored if we are to thrive as his followers.
It may be for this same reason that Luke precedes the story of Martha and Mary with the story of the Good Samaritan. We should not mistake their placement side-by-side as by chance, overlooking the intentions of Luke when he first told the story of the actions of the Good Samaritan and followed it with the story of Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet. It is not insignificant that both people are praised.
And we should not assume that they are paired only because both are stories of hospitality. Instead, the two stories present us first with the Good Samaritan who is busy attending to the needs of another–as Martha would do–and then with someone who sits quietly in the company of Jesus–as Mary would do. Back to back, the stories complement each other, two halves of a whole, presenting us with the portrait of the complete disciple.
One other matter must be addressed for a full understanding of the event. Clearly, Jesus seems to say that Mary’s “inaction” is better than Martha’s action, telling Martha, “Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen the good part.” What are we to make of that statement in light of the argument that both dimensions are part and parcel of discipleship?
The answer is found in Luke’s description of Mary. Although he says next to nothing about her, allowing Martha to do all the talking in the story, he does say that “Martha had a sister called Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him speak.” The key word is “listened”. It is another Lucan theme throughout his gospel. The disciple is one who listens to the words of the Teacher.
So, for example, in Luke 9.28, in the Transfiguration story, the voice from the cloud tells the disciples, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” Or, again, in Luke 16.29 in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham tells the rich man who wants his brothers to avoid the torment he himself has found on the other side of death, “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.”
It makes sense, then, that Jesus should say that Mary has chosen the good portion. One cannot become a disciple without first listening to the words of Jesus. Then, having listened and having appropriated the teachings of Jesus, one can go into the world, actively doing the works of Jesus, now being informed of what it is that he wants of his followers.
That fact does not diminish the importance of the work that Martha does. It only emphasizes that the work can be done in the right frame of mind only if it has been informed and formed by the words of Jesus who himself first listened to his Heavenly Father and then moved into the world, sharing with others the good news of salvation.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 