Readings – Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10: 38–42
‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’
Earlier this week, a member of the Trinity congregation told me they thought this was the hardest story in the Gospels to deal with. Many of us have a visceral emotional reaction to it, which we try to suppress because we want to be good Christians who value our Bibles. Yet we find ourselves disappointed in the Jesus who seems to bark at an overworked Martha when she asks for help. If that’s your instinctive reaction to the story, please don’t suppress it, but hold on to it as we unpack it.
An ’away match’ in Jersey in July; what a hardship posting?!?!? (Trinity Parish Church, 10 July 2022, © Gerry Lynch_
This reading, from Luke’s Gospel, is one of three Bible stories that mention Martha. The other two are in John’s Gospel: they are the raising of Lazarus, and then John’s version of the story of the woman pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet.
While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”.
The story in John’s Gospel of Jesus visiting the house in Bethany for a meal is so similar to the one we heard this morning that we might well wonder if they are different accounts of the same event. In that one, Martha serves dinner while Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with some very expensive perfume.
Any conversation between Jesus and Martha needs to be understood in the context that they are the closest of friends. He wasn’t snapping at a stranger.
So, I wonder was Jesus gently teasing his dear friend Martha here? Would Martha have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs and being the perfect host and told her just to take it easy for a few hours? Because basically He did tell her that – “you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing.”
We get the sense that perhaps Martha was the sort of very practical person who can’t relax until every bit of work is done – but then keeps finding another little job to do. Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.
It is tempting to get our sense of our own worth from what we do, rather than from accepting what we are. Of course, we all have a regular round of tasks we need to get done to earn our living and keep ourselves and our homes in order. But that is not what makes us valuable; you, I, and every human being in the world is of value simply because we are children of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes, therefore, we need to give ourselves space to just be – to be ourselves and to be with God, to accept ourselves as the people God made us, imperfect but loveable and dearly loved by God.
That’s the first lesson I’d draw from our readings this morning. There is a little bit of Martha in all of us – but we also need to give ourselves space to be Mary sometimes.
Another thing I’d like to explore is why we struggle with Jesus’ reaction here. We want Him to be nice and never be sharp tongued or challenging to anyone – because that means He’ll never be challenging to nice people like us. We want to domesticate Jesus as a holy teacher with a ready supply of wise biblical catchphrases to memorise and bring out whenever it suits us.
Now, listen to this excerpt from this morning’s first reading, written in St Paul’s breathless prose:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible …He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
The Christian claim about God is ridiculous and obscene. It is not that Jesus was a wise and holy teacher, a sort of ancient Desmond Tutu multiplied by the Dalai Lama – but that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, God in human form. The Christian Faith teaches us that the maker of the stars and galaxies, present with God the Father before the Big Bang went bang, walked the Earth as one of us, caught viruses and had to blow His nose, got hungry and had to go to the toilet, and mundane things like that.
Now in a world that can leave us angry or mystified by the way it can be harsh and random, we can expect that the maker of that world to sometimes leave us mystified or even angry. If this passage makes you angry or disappointed at Jesus, don’t run away from that feeling. God is big enough to take it. You are not a slave or a prisoner of God but a friend of God – and real friendships, like that of Jesus and Martha, are strong enough for people to express their feelings honestly.
That’s the second lesson I’d draw from this morning’s readings.
Now a final point: the world can sometimes be so harsh and random that we human beings can find ourselves rejecting the idea that the universe could have been created by a loving intelligence at all. Especially over the last two centuries or so, with our science, our technology, and our cleverness, we convinced ourselves that we could make the world a vastly better place than that we had inherited from our Christian ancestors. In some ways we did.
But perhaps a dose of humility is in order as we brace ourselves, yet again, for record temperatures, and remember that, here in Jersey, this year has already seen an all-time record for June temperatures. Climate change is on us, not on God. This is how badly we’ve damaged creation just by burning coal and oil. As we explore genetic engineering and ever more intimate interfaces of human and machine intelligence, climate change is not the last major mistake we are going to make as a species.
We are going to be tempted to look for technological or legal or structural solutions to the problems generated by our technological knowledge advancing ahead of our wisdom, when instead this presents us with a spiritual problem.
This is the third lesson I’d draw from this morning’s readings: we need to rediscover our place in the universe. If we’re going to work out how to make the world a better place, we need to acknowledge that as we’ve become more powerful and technologically advanced, we’ve often made it a worse place. We are made in the image of God but we are not gods.
In conclusion, in this overheated, angry, world of pandemics and wars and climate change, whose problems suddenly seem so difficult to overcome, allow yourself space simply to be, to be yourself in the presence of God who loves you, even if that means being angry with or disappointed by Him or bewildered by the world He has made. Love yourself for what you are, not for what you do – not as the answer to the world’s problems, but as a beautiful gift of God, made in the image and likeness of God – and then love others for the same reason.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
