
Pentecost 8 - July 18, 2010
I trust you won’t fault me for refusing to go anywhere near that reading from the Old Testament book of Amos – or even the Psalm, for that matter – especially since we have as our Gospel reading this lovely story of Martha & Mary.
Martha and Mary were sisters who lived in the village of Bethany, whose house Jesus visited a lot during his travels. And as we just heard, our story begins when Martha invites Jesus into her home, only to grow frustrated when her sister, Mary, doesn’t help with the preparation but opts instead to sit at Jesus’ feet listening to his teaching. So Martha charges in the room – or so I imagine – and complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping; to which Jesus responds by taking the side of Mary.
I used to think that, to fully appreciate this story, you had to have a difficult relationship with a sister. (I won’t tell you whether I’m Mary or Martha in my family, but if you met my sister, believe me you’d know.) But actually, the passage has been applied and interpreted in all sorts of ways having nothing to do with sibling rivalry, and I thought I’d start off by sharing just a few of the ways it has been interpreted over the years.
Most recently, the Mary figure became a sort of hero among the first wave of women to be ordained as priests back in the 70s. A common reading of the passage at the time said that Mary, by sitting at Christ’s feet and listening to him teaching, instead of taking her place quietly in the kitchen, was assuming a role only reserved in her culture for the men – and in fact, this was proof that she was also one of the disciples. And so you’ll often hear those first women priests say that Mary empowered them to leave their lives at home – their lives as Marthas - and become Marys by pursuing a profession in the church.
Kind of humorously, I read one commentary by a women who said that the story would be perfect if only some of the men got up and helped Martha with the cooking!
Another famous interpretation of this story dates back to the 16th Century Protestant Reformation. As you know, Protestants were very keen on making sure everyone could hear or read the Bible in their own language because they believed that the Bible was the most important document in the church – not church doctrines, canon laws, dogmas, buildings, or authorities like priests and bishops. So in their reading, Mary became the model student of the Scriptures because she sat at Christ’s feet and listened to his words, while the Martha character was a metaphor for someone who was distracted by all that unimportant stuff the church had come to offer.
Just one last one. Even further back than that, the passage was popular among monks and nuns in the Middle Ages because they read in this passage an affirmation of the contemplative life. So in this reading, the Marys whom Christ approves of were the monks and nuns squirreled away in their prayer chapels all day, and the Marthas were either those monks who led more active lives out in the world, or everyday people who chose not to live the monastic life at all.
And if I could say just one more thing about this, sort of parenthetically, it’s interesting how rarely we expect an over-active person to justify themselves, especially in America where we tend to equate a frenetic life with productivity and purpose. But contemplative people accomplish a lot, too (maybe more), and it’s a shame the burden of explaining themselves tends to fall on them. You can see how this story about Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet helped generations of contemplatives explain their lives to others, and is no less useful for this purpose today.
But anyway, as I said, those are just some of the interesting ways this story has been interpreted over the years. And all that said, I want to shift gears and just briefly share with you something in this story that leapt out to me for the first time this week, and it comes from Jesus’ response to Martha about halfway through the passage.
After Martha complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping her, Jesus replies: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”
In the past, I’d always taken that line to mean All you need is one thing: to be like Mary and contemplate at my feet. That’s the way almost all of the commentaries on this story interpret his remarks. But that never quite made sense to me, basically telling someone You Need only One Thing: to completely change your personality. I mean, that should count for at least five!
Then, for some reason this week I heard it differently, more simply: Martha, you need only one thing … for this meal. You don’t need the mutton and the veal and the brisket – just the mutton is enough. In other words, rather than Jesus saying “Martha, you’re totally off base,” he’s saying “Martha, what you’re doing is OK, but just ease up a little bit. You only need one thing.”
In fact, I did discover that this was often how they interpreted it in the early church, and I couldn’t figure out why and when the interpretation shifted away from this simpler explanation of this line. The grammar, the context – there’s nothing really to argue one reading of it over the other.
I did find that a lot of art of this scene seems to follow the early Christian assumption that Jesus is referring to the meal. For instance, there’s a common depiction of this scene in which Martha stands in the foreground with this absurdly massive spread around her (like the one I put on your programs). In this example she looks triumphant or at least serene, but in other versions like this, she’s almost frantic, like she’s lost her mind in her frenzy to prepare all this food perfectly. It almost makes you want scream at her “Martha you need only one thing!”
And if that is the meaning, then this passage leaves us with an important reminder of simplicity. Carry that line around with you this week - You need only One Thing - and think about where it applies in your life. Maybe to your home and your possessions. Maybe to your entertaining habits. Maybe to what you want for your kids.
Maybe you even sit here some Sundays, look around and think “This church has only one thing. But it needs this, and this, and this” Obviously, that’s what I do! Don’t get me wrong: It does need a few things, but probably far less than we think.
And so too in all sorts of areas of our lives. As Jesus said earlier in Luke’s Gospel, the lilies of the field don’t need much, and neither do we. Usually just one thing is enough.