Tuesday in the 27th Week of Ordinary Time, October 5, 2021

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.”

St. Luke tells us here a very touching little story about the Lord Jesus that does not involve startling miracles or engaging and thought-provoking parables.  It is a story about Jesus and two women.  Nothing like it can be found in the other Gospels.  

Much was made of this story by the Fathers and medieval writers who used it to show the two ways of religious life: the active and the contemplative.  Martha was held up as an exemplar of the active life — living out the Christian life in the world.  Mary was pointed out as the exemplar of the contemplative life, giving up worldly occupations in order to dedicate oneself entirely to listening to the Lord and to prayer.  Since in this story the Lord praises Mary as having chosen “the better part”, the contemplative life has been understood as the higher calling, and so it is.  But focusing only on this aspect of the story may cause us to miss its truly remarkable context.  

“Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.  She had a sister named Mary.”  St. John also tells us of a pair of sisters named Martha and Mary, who lived with their brother Lazarus in the town of Bethany, near Jerusalem.  It is usually assumed that Luke’s Martha and Mary are identical with John’s.  However, when John talks of Martha and Mary, he includes their brother Lazarus as well.  It seems odd that Luke does not do this, if it is the same Martha and Mary.  He might have been present throughout the occasion and Luke, wanting to tell his simple story in the simplest terms, does not mention him.  We might note also that Luke does not mention the Apostles, who certainly must have been with the Lord.  We would naturally like to know if these are the same folks, but not knowing does not hamper us from drawing out the riches Luke provides us.

Again, “Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.”  This verse does not raise eyebrows in twenty-first century America, but it would have done so in first century Israel.  If Jesus had entered a house belonging to two unmarried women in that time and place — and because Luke tells us that “Martha welcomed him” and not her husband or brother, we can come to this conclusion — scandal would certainly have erupted.  Luke does not tell us that it did, leaving us to wonder.  Also, we note the unusual circumstance that Martha and Mary (or, at least, Martha) owned the house and appear to not have been married at the time.  One or both may have been widows.  If Martha was a widow, Mary might have lived with her as yet not old enough to marry.  This is assuming their parents were dead.  Still, the arrangement is odd in that time and place.  Had they no other living relatives with whom they could live?  We do not know.

“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.”  This is more literally translated as: “Mary sat down beside the Lord at his feet, listening to his word.  Martha, greatly troubled with much serving at table, being urgent, said.”  This helps us better understand the situation Martha was facing.  Knowing that “Martha welcomed him”, we are assured that she had invited the Lord, and that she was in some way already prepared to offer him and his Apostles hospitality.  All the same, even with servants, anyone would struggle to oversee the cooking, roasting, baking, providing of wine, the serving, and making comfortable of so many guests.  

“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.”  Martha expresses her distress emphatically in the Greek: “She has abandoned me alone to serve at table.”  If Martha herself is serving at table, this indicates she lacked servants and was overwhelmed with supervising what servants she may have had and also with physical labor.  At this point, she is distraught.  Now, Mary was sitting beside the Lord, at his feet, listening to his word.  Luke uses logos for “word”, and so we see that Mary was listening to the logos spoken by the Logos of the Father.  And she was not merely listening but hanging on the Lord’s every word, oblivious to all else as the smells of roasted calf or goat, and the noise of the bustle of her sister and perhaps a few servants filled the room.  In all her world, there was only the Lord.

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.”  The Greek word translated here as “worried” really means something stronger, as “agitated”.  All Martha can see is that she is failing in her hospitality.  Her dinner is falling apart, and the help she had counted on from her sister is a big reason for this.  The first part of the Lord’s reply to her does not seem to help.  It only states what she is painfully aware of.  It may have exasperated her that he did not speak to Mary, and that Mary, for her part, did not leave the Lord in order to fulfill her responsibility as co-hostess.  

“There is need of only one thing.”  The Greek word translated here as the unhelpful and unspecific “thing” in fact means “need”, “necessity”, or “business”.  The Lord’s words mean something more like, “There is one need” or “one necessity”.  The compactness of the Lord’s statement seizes our attention.  In Martha’s mind, many terrible necessities clamor at one time for attention.  Mary, on the other hand, sits at peace, rapt in the Lord’s presence and his teachings.  “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”  The Greek text does not have this comparative.  It says, “Mary has chosen the good part” or “portion”.  That is, of life, in the sense of, “The man was satisfied with his portion in life.”  The implication is that Martha has not chosen the good portion.  She has chosen to be agitated and distracted, although there is one necessity for her: to sit with Mary and to bask in the presence and love and wisdom of God.  

Luke says no more about the dinner.  We are left hanging as we are at the end of so many parables.  What did Martha do?  It is as if Luke wanted us to wonder what should we do, for we often choose to be distracted and agitated.  And we allow whole industries which sell distraction and agitation to manipulate us.  Perhaps Martha would have done better — choosing the good portion — not to have the dinner at all, but to have been content to listen to Jesus in the marketplace or to have listened outside a bigger, better equipped house where the Lord might have eaten, or listened to him as she helped serve there.  

In serving the Lord, we should not decide for ourselves what it is he wants, but to ask him what he wants and then do it.  So much of the time we are like a server in a restaurant who tells the guests in her station what she will order for them.  What did the Lord want for Martha and Mary?  For them both to sit at his feet and listen intently to him.  This is also what he wants most for us.