Proper 11, Year C
Luke 10:38-42
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
July 21, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“As Jesus and his disciples went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.” – Luke 10:38
I spent most of this week avoiding today’s Gospel passage. After all, it’s familiar and looks pretty straightforward. Amos and the Psalm, on the other hand, are much more intriguing, somehow speaking, despite their antiquity, directly to what is going on in our society right now. It isn’t hard to recognize that what’s currently happening in our country is not in keeping with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and emphasizing practical living and social justice is one of the most important roles of a preacher in modern America, right? That practically obligates me to speak on Amos! Yet one of my undergrad film teacher’s mantras kept running through my head: “Trust your audience.” Preachers, like filmmakers, ought to assume their audiences are intelligent enough to follow a story’s clues and come to an informed conclusion without beating them over the head. We need to trust our audiences—our congregations—to listen to the Holy Spirit and act on that guidance in their own lives.
Despite my obsession with interpreting prophetic words from the Hebrew Bible, of proving to myself that I too am an adequate advocate for justice, the New Testament tale of Mary, Martha, and Jesus kept gnawing at the back of my mind. Eventually the mental noise grew loud enough that I had to give attention to the problem.
Luke’s story and its meaning are familiar: Jesus and the disciples go to visit Mary and Martha. Martha is busy in the kitchen while Mary sits listening to Jesus. Martha asks Jesus to have her sister to help her, but instead, Jesus rebukes Martha. Conclusion: Mary wins for listening to Jesus while Martha loses for being too busy. Moral: be good and submissive like Mary; don’t be a complainer like Martha.
But is that really what’s going on here? Is that all we’re supposed to take away from this passage?
I’ve always felt like Martha gets shortchanged in our common interpretation. After all, preparing dinner and taking care of the guests are important tasks for any host. Wanting family help isn’t out of line. Judging the one doing all the work makes Jesus look like an ingrate, and his words can easily be abused to promote or excuse laziness hiding behind the mask of “spiritual” living. Not to mention that the Church has ended up creating a dualistic and falsely hierarchal division in expectations of women’s behavior, too often limiting them either to quietly listening or roles of background service—with unquestioning, silent service (which definitely doesn’t appear in the passage) having been the strongly preferred traditional norm.
Modern commentaries try to alleviate those problems by emphasizing the need to combine last week’s parable about the Good Samaritan with this week’s tale. Since they’re right next to each other in the same chapter, Luke appears to be providing both as a connected exposition on the lawyer’s summary of the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” The tale of the Good Samaritan emphasized the right way to love your neighbor. The story of Mary and Martha illustrates what it looks like to love God appropriately.
But something about that still bugs me.
First of all, the chapter divisions weren’t added to the Bible until the high Middle Ages, well over 1,000 years after the books and letters of the New Testament had begun circulating throughout the ancient world. While the chapters give us a good idea of how faithful European scholars of the Medieval Era understood different stories to be grouped, they don’t necessarily reflect the intentions of the original ancient Christian communities. Therefore, while “love God and your neighbor” could provide some connection between the Good Samaritan and Mary and Martha, to me the tie appears tenuous at best. After all, if Jesus had thought it important to illustrate love of God to the already religious lawyer, he likely would have either included it in his original parable or immediately added another concerning that love. It doesn’t make any sense to have Jesus walk away from the lawyer and allow the coincidental behavior of two sisters do it for him. So as the text presents itself, it's perfectly reasonable to read the stories as being well enough contained to stand as unconnected incidents.
Secondly, if I was right last week, the tale of the Good Samaritan has less to do with being a “how to” of loving your neighbor (aka: be kind to everyone, just like the Good Samaritan) and more about emptying ourselves to follow Jesus into the role and position of the powerless, especially among those we view as “other” or “less than.” In that case, the “love God and your neighbor” connection between the stories completely falls apart.
So if the tale of Mary and Martha doesn’t simply show us the “right” way to honor God, what is it talking about? Let’s look again at the text itself to see if we can figure that out. I’ll be using a translation mildly adapted from the work of Richard Swanson, a Professor of Religion at Augustan University in South Dakota:
*****
When they were walking he went into some village. Some woman, (by name: Martha) welcomed him into her house. To this woman there was a sister; (she was called Mary). She was seated at the feet of Jesus; she kept hearing his argument.
Martha was pulled around by much deaconing. She stopped, she said: “Jesus, it does not matter to you that my sister abandoned only me to deacon. Speak to her therefore so that she take hold with me.”
He answered, he said to her, Jesus did: “Martha, Martha, you are thinking earnestly on and making an uproar on many things. One is a necessity. Mary chose the virtuous portion, which will not be taken away from her.”[1]
*****
I’m no language scholar, but there are a few things I like about this translation. First, the different wording helps me pay better attention to an all too familiar text. For example, did you ever notice that Jesus may have been alone with the women? I’ve always assumed the disciples were sitting there with Mary, but the Bible doesn’t actually say that. The passage starts with a “they” (presumably Jesus and the disciples), but only “he” went into the village. After that point, the only people referenced are Mary, Martha, and Jesus—the disciples don’t appear to play any role at all.
Secondly, it emphasizes that Martha’s work was important. No matter what she was doing, Jesus and the Gospel writer didn’t think she was just futzing about in the background with menial tasks. They wouldn’t have derisively said she was busying herself with “women’s work” or that her place was in the kitchen. No, she was doing significant work in service to her guest—so significant, in fact, that throughout the rest of the New Testament, the same exact word for her actions is ascribed to apostles, to deacons, and even to angels!
But finally, this translation helps me see Mary and Martha’s family system playing out. The principles of “Family Systems Theory” were extremely popular at my seminary, with multiple classes referencing or having assigned reading about them at any given time. One of the first things anyone learns about Family Systems is the emergence of “triangles.” “Triangulation” is a familiar concept. It has to do with the way power and tension are balanced or adjusted among any three people at any given time. You’ve almost certainly experienced triangulation in the Family Systems sense. Have you ever wanted someone do something but don’t actually want to talk to that person about it? To resolve your internal discomfort, you go to a third person in hopes they will talk to the second person and convince them to change. That’s an example of triangulation. Triangulation happens all the time—with children and parents, with coworkers, with fellow church-goers. It’s a natural, basic pattern of human relationships, a way of getting what we want while avoiding embarrassment or the potential conflict of addressing a problem directly. It isn’t ideal, but it definitely works. It’s been a constant of human behavior for all of recorded history, and it’s unlikely to stop any time soon.
In her attempt to get some help, we see Martha triangulating with Jesus and Mary. Let’s listen again to the middle of the story:
Martha was pulled around by much deaconing. She stopped, she said: “Jesus, it does not matter to you that my sister abandoned only me to deacon. Speak to her therefore so that she take hold with me.”
Do you hear the triangulation now? Sadly, it sounds like it goes a bit beyond triangulation. We could even accuse Martha of being a rude host, manipulating her guest to make him feel responsible for her sister’s choices.
The triangle is interesting to note. It definitely gives us some insight into the sisters’ relationship. But focusing on that route still sets up the sisters as adversaries, quickly leading us back to our starting problem: the traditional elevation of Mary’s silence at the expense of Martha’s service. Now matter how easy it is to come to that conclusion again, I can’t help thinking it’s a distraction, that Luke is trying to make a different point. One clue here is that Jesus doesn’t appear to be angry with Martha:
He answered, he said to her, Jesus did: “Martha, Martha, you are thinking earnestly on and making an uproar on many things. One is a necessity.”
Maybe that’s where we really need to focus our attention. Maybe instead of looking at what Mary and Martha are doing, instead of contrasting one’s busy hospitable actions with the other’s hospitable conversation, we need to focus on Jesus. It makes sense that Jesus should be the primary player in the story. After all, the entire Gospel of Luke is about him: his love, his service, and his redemption! I would be very disappointed if this story were just a morality tale about two sisters. Luke must be illustrating something else. Let’s look at Jesus’ words again:
“…you are thinking earnestly on and making an uproar on many things.
One is a necessity.”
Or as the NRSV puts it,
“…you are worried and distracted by many things;
there is need of only one thing.”
What if—and if you were here last week, you know to expect a lot of those two words from me now and in the future—what if Jesus is trying to show us mindfulness? Martha is indeed busy with important acts of service. Mary appears physically still, but she is undoubtedly responding to and debating with Jesus, just like any good conversation partner. Mary is focused on what’s in front of her. When we turn to Martha, we see her doing important work, but her heart isn’t in it. She isn’t present to the tasks God has given her as host. Instead, her internal dialog has become clouded, focusing its attention on her sister for not giving her the support she wants or deserves. Eventually she leaves her work—again, important, deaconing work!—to tear down her sister and shame her guest. Maybe Jesus isn’t rebuking Martha for working hard instead of listening or for expressing her need instead of bearing it silently. Maybe he’s pointing out that by focusing negatively on the other, in this case her sister, she’s lost all the joy and purpose in her own actions.
How would it look in your life if you were to focus on the gifts and work that God has given you instead of being distracted with what someone else is or isn’t doing? What might it look like in mine? (I ask because I find myself constantly guilty of this sort of comparison and distraction.) What could we as a community accomplish if we stopped judging and comparing ourselves with other people and simply lived out the Gospel?
I started the week wanting to talk about Amos, wanting to offer an equally prophetic word in troubling times. But what if my work isn’t to be a new prophet for a new age? What if my work is to listen to an ancient prophet’s words and then, equally importantly, to act in service on those words? Maybe my work isn’t to cast a vision or pronounce condemnation but to uplift others, to love God by loving my neighbor, to continue following Jesus into powerlessness, like we saw last week. Maybe your work is the same; maybe it’s different. Maybe your work is to be still, to pray. No matter what it is, your work is yours, and mine is mine. All of it is important. But I wonder what we as the body of Christ might accomplish if we focus our attention on our own work, on the tasks already in front of us. Performed faithfully and with intention, performed mindfully, maybe that will reveal God’s kingdom of love and peace that all the prophets hoped for.
[1] https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/a-provocation-sixth-sunday-after-pentecost-proper-11-16-july-21-2019-luke-1038-42/