The one thing necessary

Today’s gospel (John 11: 19-27) relates the scenes that occur just before Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, His last great public miracle in the week of the events of the Passion. Jesus arrives at the house of Mary and Martha where they are receiving mourners who have come to offer their condolences upon the death of their dear brother Lazarus. We do not hear of the miracle in this snippet of the gospel. Instead, today’s feast of Sts Mary, Martha and Lazarus, hones in on the faith of Martha who professes her belief not only in Jesus’ power to raise her brother, but also in His identity as the Christ, the fulfilment of God’s promise sent into this world. As mentioned in the last blog, such faith not just a matter of sheer conviction, but conviction about one of the key mysteries of the revelation that Jesus came to share with the world. Intelligence and love meet, and Martha’s heart professes the eternal truth, and confesses the depth of her belief in it.

What is striking here is that while Jesus had travelled to Bethany, it was Martha who had been on a journey since her first appearance in the synoptic gospels in Luke (10: 38-42). When we first met her, she was fraught with busyness, with a houseful of guests and no chance to listen to the Rabbi Jesus, unlike her sister Mary. Martha’s faults in that moment were perhaps twofold. First, she fell into comparisons: what am I doing and what is she doing? We can assume that, to those present, Martha’s treatment of Mary as a feckless sluggard was manifestly unjust. After the event, however, how the words of Jesus must have burned in her mind: Martha, you are worried about many things but only one thing is necessary. It is not that there is nothing else to do; but only one thing is necessary.

Jesus’ reference to worry is Martha’s second problem. There is a kind of busyness that is a sweet immersion in fruitfulness -a saying 'yes' to the Lord every minute of our lives; the busyness of the Virgin Mother no doubt. But there is another kind of busyness that is a tale of stress and friction where things that have to be done chafe upon on our hearts and minds. Our activity then might look like commitment, but it is filled with a spirit of flight, of a subtle desire of not wanting to be in the moment but somewhere, anywhere else. Martha, you are worried about many things but only one thing is necessary. Jesus tells her - as He tells us - to stop her flight and to focus on the one thing necessary: surrender to God.

The Martha we meet in Bethany in the week before Jesus’ death had reflected on this lesson and learned it. Watch her in this scene. She has not lost who she is; it is she, the active sister, who comes out of the house to greet Jesus, while Mary, the gospel says, remained sitting in the house – whether through the collapse of grief or the stillness of her assured faith in the coming Lord, the gospel does not tell us. Yet if Martha comes out of the house to meet the Lord, it is only that He had sought her first, giving her that compass point of the one thing necessary. His words then make her actions now possible.

Then, there comes a dialogue in which she professes her belief in the resurrection, unlike the Sadducees some of whom were surely among the mourners gathered at the house. And Jesus rewards her with a declaration which confirms His divinity: I am the resurrection and the life. It is not that He will be resurrected or that He has life; He is life and, therefore, He is resurrection, i.e. the undoing of death, its utter defeat. Martha now steps forward in faith, and - surely to the surprise of her grieving heart - Jesus sweeps her up in some of the sweetest words ever uttered to mortal ear.

Do you believe this? He concludes, as if He did not know the answer, just as He questions Peter before His ascension: Peter, do you love me? He asks the question not so He can be reassured, but so Martha might profess before the mourners the faith that connects her to God. Jesus works no public miracle, as it were, to buy this faith; it is enough that He has chastised Martha previously, that she has thought upon her failings, and that now she has endured her fiat in sorrow with her brother's death. Martha has ceased her restless flight, and chosen to be still, like the one she loves. She has stopped comparing herself, and instead, she looks in hope to the one who has come into this world. She steps forward in faith and hope, not because Jesus has bought her belief but because she has heard His invitation to embrace the one thing necessary. 

Thus it is that in the conclusion of these scenes which we do not read today, Martha perhaps hears an echo of the words captured by Francis Thompson in The Hound of Heaven, and much beloved of this blog:

"All which I took from thee I did but take,

        Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.

        All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

        Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"