Tuesday in the 27th Week of Ordinary Time, October 6, 2020

Luke 10:38-42

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.”

The opening lines of the Gospel reading for today’s Mass would be more accurately translated: “Now it came to pass, as they traveled, that he entered into a certain village, and a woman named Martha received him as a guest.  And there was also a sister named Mary, who was also sitting beside at the feet of the Lord, hearing his word.”  The differences between this and the text as translated above are subtle, but because this is the Word of the Lord, every detail is important.  We will pay as close attention to the written text as Mary paid attention to what she heard the Lord say with his mouth.  First, Jesus was traveling at the time he stopped at this house.  He may have been on his way to Jerusalem and he paused at this village to preach or to draw water from the village well for himself and his Apostles.  The village itself was not his primary or even secondary destination.  And yet he did not treat it with contempt as another traveler with a long road ahead might have done, for it is not significant except for its location.  Luke does not even tell us its name.  (Traditionally, though, it is thought that this was Bethany, where Lazarus, Martha, and Mary lived).  But Jesus treats the place and its inhabitants as though he had come all the way from Capernaum just to visit it.  A woman named Martha received him as a guest.  That is, she did not “welcome” him as though she had known him previously.  Furthermore, to welcome him as a guest meant that she performed or had performed for him certain services, such as anointing his head and washing his feet.  We ought to note that this would be the job of the male member of the household, whether a husband or a brother, but Luke tells us of only Martha and Mary.  Luke also does not mention the Lord’s disciples.  For Mary to have hosted the Lord as well as his Apostles, she would have needed to live in a house bigger than was customary in a “village”, and she would have needed substantial stores of food.  Perhaps receiving these guests required her to run about the village, purchasing a goat or a calf as well as bread or at least flour.

Luke tells us besides that “there was also a sister named Mary, who was also sitting beside at the feet of the Lord, hearing his word.”  Mary must have been not only younger than her sister but also not old enough to be married since this seems to be Martha’s house — if Mary were old enough to be married, she would be living in her husband’s house. It is apparent that the two women did live together and that Mary was not simply visiting because of how Luke constructs his sentence: he uses the imperfect form of the verb to-be, signifying a continuous action in the past.  If Mary were merely visiting, Luke would most likely have used the aorist tense.  The sense in Luke is something like, “There also was being there a sister named Mary”.  Now, this young, unmarried woman was not sitting beside Jesus as though the two shared a couch: Luke tells us that she sat alongside the Lord “at his feet”.  This indicates something more than a lack of furniture: Mary was adopting the position of a disciple and, even more than that, that of a handmaid, who would sit in close proximity to her master, in a position to hear his ever word and watch the gestures of his hands.  In a word, she was poised to serve even at a cue given by the wave of a hand.  Now, she was “hearing” his word.  The Greek could also be rendered as “comprehending through listening”, which is to say, learning.  She was actively engaged in learning about the Lord Jesus and the kingdom of heaven.

“Martha, burdened with much serving at table, came to him”.  This might be more literally translated as, “Martha was greatly troubled with much serving at table.”  Martha was overwhelmed with all the tasks necessary for providing hospitality for these men.  Even with servants, if there were any, preparing a meal for thirteen or so men plus herself and her sister, would have made enormous work.  We might wonder that Martha invited him into her house in the first place, knowing how much labor would be involved.  We might see here how the Lord affected people — not by his preaching alone, but by his personality.  To see him and to hear his voice caused people to leave everything to follow him, or to otherwise completely change their lives, as in the case of the tax collector Zacchaeus.  Martha perhaps invited the Lord and his disciples to her house out of the joy he gave to her heart, and in her excitement, she overextended herself.  Luke tells us that she was “greatly troubled” by the workload, not that she was very inconvenienced.  She must have wondered how she would carry this through.  She had the reasonable expectation that her younger sister would help her.  As it was Martha’s house, and Mary was living with her, and no mention is made of their parents, we can assume that their parents are dead.  Martha would have acted in place of Mary’s mother.  We could also assume that the two sisters lived poorly, without husbands or regular income, unless it came through using the house as an inn for travelers.  At any rate, the clues Luke provides lead us to think that these were not wealthy women with abundant servants to help them.

“Came to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do serving?’ ”  The Greek says, “Standing, she said, ‘Lord, does it not matter to you that my sister abandoned me to serve alone?’ ”  We can hear the despondency in Martha’s voice and we feel for her.  She also asks a good question.  Why should Martha have to do all the work by herself?  However, we can also ask, Why did Martha invite Jesus and his disciples to her home when, even with her sister’s help, providing the necessary hospitality would have proven difficult?  But Jesus looks tenderly at Martha and addresses the question within her question: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.”  We can hear the depths of his love and compassion for this woman in the repetition of her name, something we know him to do only two other times: when he weeps over Jerusalem (Matthew 22, 37), and when he tells Simon Peter at the Last Supper that Satan has sought to sift him like wheat (Luke 22, 31).  “There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”  Actually, the Greek has it that Mary has chosen “the good portion”, not merely the “better”.  The word  rendered here as “good” does not mean useful or attractive, but “good” in the moral sense.  We can understand “portion” too as “portion of service”, for that it is what Jesus means.  Mary is serving the Lord by listening attentively in the ready position of a handmaid, while Martha labors at providing dinner.  As generous as Martha may be, the service Mary provides far surpasses Martha’s service.  We may recall here the words Jesus quotes the devil in the wilderness: “Man does not live by bread alone but be every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4, 4, from Deuteronomy 8, 3).  With this, Jesus upends the Ancient Near Eastern understanding of hospitality towards guests.  In fact, we can see Jesus as the real servant here, teaching Mary and the others in the house the word of God.

We see in this short account the absolute supremacy of listening to the teachings of Jesus over everything else, no matter how urgent it may seem.  We must become like the younger sister Mary here, listening to the Lord and poised to carry out his command, and prepared to go hungry in doing it, if need be.