Martha’s mistake

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 38-42) offers us the famous scene in which we learn practically nothing of the teaching Jesus delivered! Instead, we hear the story of a harried woman run off her feet, feeling like she is the butt of everyone’s whims and like she has been let down by her supposedly lazy sibling. We do hear one lesson from the Lord, however: that Mary, Martha’s sibling, has chosen the better part and will not have it taken from her.

We know Martha learned deeply from this experience. We know this for when later came the grief of her brother’s death, it was she who had the composure to talk to Jesus first of all. She had seen by then the one thing necessary: the call to be in the presence of the Lord with all that that implied.

Martha was so hurried and so busy in her own house. But the question is: what was she seeking? Ostensibly, she sought the comfort and the refreshment of her guests. Martha was perhaps what some people call a “feeder”, one whose love language could be expressed in the care and the craft of the kitchen and in the triumphantly flourished plate of culinary dainties. But there was only one thing necessary.

Martha was so intent on this agenda of her own creation that it led her into mindreading. How do we know? Listen again carefully to the words she addresses to Jesus:

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?

Lord, do you not care? Thus do we all try to mindread the Mind of the Eternal One. It is not just that Mary is not helping; it is not even that Jesus has not yet spoken to correct Mary’s misbehaviour. Martha has gone one step further and read into Jesus’ failure to act an indifference that piques her annoyance. Lord, do you not care…?

Martha’s first sin may have been vanity in seeking the approval of her guests, or it may even have been resentment at judging her sister’s inaction. But where does it lead if not to the hopeless, the futile, the sterile attempt to squeeze the living God into the space and scope of her own desires and expectations? Lord, do you not care…? Martha, Jesus might have replied, do you not think?

Yet Jesus answers this question not by contradicting her assumption but by holding up a mirror to her soul: by showing her that what lay behind her actions was not care but carelessness. We have come to think of anxiety only as a psychological condition; but here we see that it may also have a moral root in a lack of purity of intention, an almost wilful lack of peace, in a failure to encounter the burdens of the day in a spirit of service: not where can I do good but where do I best please the Lord? There is all the difference here between the ethics of Christianity and its ethos. It is not really possible to do good (small g) unless in doing so we are seeking the Good (capital G); every other action falls in some way short of our calling.

Yet, Martha is not attentive to these things, for her own drives have gone unexamined. She has not learned to question her apparent diligence; her pride will not permit it. She has not learned to take a step back and remember that, whatever the day brings, God has a plan; that God plants an angel chorus at every turn of our day to cheer us on, if only we will learn to open our hearts to their song of perpetual adoration to the glorious Trinity.

Martha was rebuking the Lord for failing to sink to her level, to shrink His expectations until they were as petty as hers, until they sought her satisfaction. In return, Jesus gently rebuked her for failing to rise to His expectations, for not reflecting His largesse, or for not seeking above all merely to please the Lord, her God. This is the one thing necessary, the upper room, the heights of Tabor, the crux of the Cross before Jerusalem, from which transcendent place we are called to cast our blind eyes upon the world and receive His sight: the grace to rest our eyes on the Heart of the One, and the grace to see all things and people as He sees them.

Martha dictated to Jesus: Tell her then to help me. How often we dictate to Jesus, sometimes in bold statements, and sometimes by passive-aggressive non-cooperation! And yet Jesus offers no counter command in this instant. Rather, He instructs her heart by pointing out the value of what Mary had done, the value of the path that Martha had not yet found.

It was not that Mary was lazy, although we can imagine that when this exchange was over, she offered to take her sister’s role while she, Martha, sat at the Lord’s feet herself:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

But there, in the final analysis, as Martha had to learn, is where all true action for God’s kingdom must begin and end: not in schemes and plans, not in busyness and not-enough-time-for-youism, not in initiatives and campaigns, not in mission statements, committee meetings, or any of the hideous metaphors that assault us with their pious idealisation of building an ecclesial paradise on earth; but in a quiet yet fierce loyalty to the one thing necessary, to that command of the Lord that whispers still through the olive groves of Gethsemane: watch and pray. For only out of that mighty stillness comes the triumphant assault of the Lord on the Cross and on the Tomb.