Growing up in a family of four
boys, I guess it was inevitable that one of us would have to be “Mother’s
little helper,” and for whatever reason, I got the part. Every evening, when the call came from the
kitchen for a volunteer to set the table, I was that “volunteer.” I was the one who learned to grind flour and
bake the weekly bread. I was the one who
tried and failed to apprentice at the sewing machine. The summer that my mother decided to market
the surplus produce of her large and bountiful vegetable garden, I was the one
anointed to spend my vacation as the proprietor of the road-side stand.
Those early imprints are deep and
lasting, as I discovered when I left home.
No matter how far from my mother I got, no matter where I went, or in
whose company I found myself, I always seemed to be one of those who stood up
when there was work to be done. I was
one you could count on to take responsibility for the thankless chores of
keeping the house tidy, and the kitchen clean, and the people fed. Which would have been admirable, I suppose,
if I’d always done it with a loving and generous heart.
But this is where the story of Mary
and Martha has a bite. Because, like
Martha, I wasn’t always happy to serve. Sometimes
I felt like I’d been saddled with an unfair and unwanted burden. Sometimes I did the work because it made me feel
less anxious, and sometimes I did it because it made me feel superior, and all
the while I’d be looking sidelong with envy and resentment at those who seemed
to have no guilty conscience about sitting idly, just enjoying themselves, and “going
with the flow.”
This story has a bite of
psychological truth, and it goes even deeper than I’ve already said. Because if all Martha wants is a little help,
why doesn’t she just go to her sister and ask for it? Why does she create what Family Systems
theorists call a “relationship triangle,” she dragging Jesus into her little
drama, trying to guilt-trip him into taking her side? Why does she ask him to judge between her and
her sister, and to find Mary in the wrong, and chastise her for being lazy,
like a disapproving dad?
Needless to say, Jesus doesn’t take the bait. He knows Martha needs help, but not the kind
of help she thinks she needs. Martha
needs to learn to let go, and it’s a lesson Mary can help her with, because
she’s learning it from Jesus.
It’s not that there isn’t work to
be done. From the very beginning, the
mission of Jesus has involved work—and not just the work of teaching and
preaching and praying, but also the work of serving. There has been bread to be baked, and tables
to be set, and dishes to be washed. And
from the very beginning, Christians have looked around at the world and seen work
to be done—widows and orphans going hungry, and sick people and prisoners
lonely and in need of care and friendship.
They have looked around and seen justice denied, and peace forsaken.
And they have remembered the
example of Jesus, and the self-sacrifice of his life and his cross. They have remembered his teachings about
self-denial and selfless service, like the parable of the Good Samaritan that comes
immediately before this story in the Gospel of Luke, and they have gone to
work. But the story of Mary and Martha suggests
that from the very beginning the work of Christians has also been a source of
temptation. Self-sacrifice, self-denial,
and selfless service can easily become self-righteousness, just another
yardstick by which we judge ourselves against each other, and against the world.
Jesus knows this about us, and his
reply to Martha lays bare the heart of the matter. Because Martha’s real problem is not that her
sister is lazy and won’t help with the housework. Martha’s problem is that her heart is full of
anxiety and can never come to rest. Martha is anxious about the “many things” and
lets them pull her in every direction because deep down she knows that none of
them can ever give her what she really needs.
So what is this only one thing that
Martha, like the rest of us, truly needs?
Jesus doesn’t say, but he gives us some clues. The first clue comes when he says that Mary
has chosen the “better part.” The way I read this, if Mary has chosen her
part, then so must have Martha. In other
words, Martha thinks she doesn’t have a choice, that the “many things”
absolutely must get done, and that if she is the one who must do them, but
Jesus is questioning that. Maybe these
chores that Martha thinks are so all-important really aren’t. What would happen if they didn’t get done
until tomorrow, or not at all? And why
does Martha have to do them? Maybe if
she just left them alone, someone else would decide to get up and help. But Martha will never know, because she keeps
choosing to deny her own freedom and responsibility for the choices she has
made.
A second clue about the only thing
that is truly needed is what Jesus says about the part that Mary has
chosen. I don’t know exactly what he
means when he says that it’s “better,” but I can accept as self-evident that
he’s right. But the thing that he says
about it that I’ve always found really interesting is that “it will not be
taken away from her.” And this makes
sense to me when I thought about as a teaching to Martha about the deeper
reason she is so anxious about all those “many things” that have to get
done. Because any feeling of well-being,
or self-worth, or inner peace that depends on getting all the work done isn’t
going to last. The work is never
done. You clean up the kitchen after
dinner and the next thing you know it’s time to cook breakfast. You feed one hungry family and five more appear
at the door. You fix the hole in the
ozone layer, only to find out about the greenhouse effect.
Which is not to say that there’s no
point in working. But it does mean that
the real importance of the work we do doesn’t derive from the results we
achieve. Thinking that way is a recipe
for anxiety and distraction. The real
importance of what we do comes from who we are when we’re doing it. And sometimes we learn best who that is when
we aren’t doing much of anything at all, when we are just sitting there at the
feet of Jesus. Who we really are (which
is the same as who we really want to be)—that is all we really need. The author of the Letter to the Colossians
calls it “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and
generations,” and goes on to say that God has made known to us the “riches of
the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Nobody knows what words Mary heard
when she sat at the foot of Jesus. It’s
not important—she heard the one Word that matters, the one Word we all need to
hear, the Word of God about the riches of the glory of the mystery of Who she
is, and Who she wants to be. And I guess
this is the better part of everything we do, the part that won’t be taken away. Having this faith that Christ is in us and in
others, having this hope of the glory that is yet to be revealed, we can do
anything, or nothing. It’s all pretty
much the same. It’s nothing to worry
about, nothing to feel superior or inferior to others for. It’s just a part we choose, because God
speaks, and because we stop, for a moment, to listen.
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