I can remember as a child being able to visualize this story in a way that I could not see other Bible stories. In my imagination Jesus sat on a hard-backed chair in the family living room (the Lord would not want to be too comfortable) while Mary sat at his feet looking up into his face with devotion. She hung on every word and was awed b y his wisdom. Meanwhile Martha was in the kitchen with three or four pots bubbling on the wood-fired stove. (My great-grandmother had a wood stove, which I thought must have been as old as Methusalah.) She cooked away, humming to herself all the while as she waited for Mary to come and help her, but Mary didn’t come. So after awhile Martha began to bang things around a little in the kitchen as she tried to get her sister’s attention. She let the dishes clatter a little more than necessary when she took them down from the cabinet; clanged the pots as she moved them about on the stove; and jangled the silverware with more energy and noise than was really necessary as she removed it from the drawer. Finally in exasperation she marched into the dining room where Mary was still sitting at Jesus’ feet and complained: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Do you not care? It was unfair. It wasn’t right, and Jesus of all people should recognize the injustice in it. Not many of us have the opportunity to sit around doing nothing. We live on the run. Activity fills our lives as we rush from one appointment to the next, from one task to another, from one pressing responsibility to yet one more. Some of it is of necessity, to be sure. Work sometimes demands more of us than at other times and we may well find ourselves busier than we might otherwise choose. If you are the parent of little children, you are on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And even if you are retired, sometimes the volunteer work to which you have given yourself can be incredibly demanding. But some of it, maybe a lot of it is, if we examine ourselves, by choice. It is not that we can’t be still. We simply choose not to be still. Like Martha we are worried and distracted by many things—goals to be met, challenges to be overcome, money to be made, problems to be solved. We are not people who are inclined to sit around doing nothing. We have to be busy doing something, producing, accomplishing, squeezing the most out of the hours of the day. Marva Dawn writes: “one of the ugliest things about our culture is that we usually assess a person’s worth on the basis of his or her productivity and accomplishments. One of the first questions we ask when meeting a stranger is ‘What do you do?’ as if the data in the person’s response will help us really to know who he or she is. Most of our inferiority complexes derive from the fact that we haven’t done everything we wish to do or that we haven’t been as productive as someone else. No matter who we are, we can always find someone who has accomplished more than we have, so we are doomed to feel second rate. The need to accomplish also leads to a terrible frenzy about time,” Dawn continues. “The criterion for everything in our society has become efficiency. We seek power to climb the corporate ladder and learn all the tricks of the trade in order to excel. Educational institutions are often dedicated not so much to learning as to academic competition. The root of all these yearnings to produce is the struggle for security” (p. 17, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly). We define our worth as human beings in terms of what we produce, what we achieve, what we own, or the position we hold professionally or socially and consequently find ourselves running a race which we cannot win, but which we also cannot afford to quit. A character in Michael Crichton’s novel Timeline gives a little different perspective on our contemporary compulsion for busyness: “Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the (twentieth) century. In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do.” And that can be not merely boring but terrifying for it leaves us alone with ourselves. So, we press on. It is exhausting, though, totally exhausting, because there is no place where you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that you have arrived. And it is costly—costly to ourselves, our health, the relationship we share with those we love and those who depend upon us. We are “worried and distracted by many things,” or perhaps we might say “we are worried by many things and seek the distraction of many others” when the one thing we may most need is simply the time to be—to be with family and friends, to walk on the beach, to listen to or make good music, to read a book, to gaze at a sunrise or sunset, to sit on the bank by the river, or simply to stop wherever you are to ponder for a moment the inexpressible joy of the gift of human life and relationships. That kind of pause is critical to our physical and emotional health as well as the health of our relationships. What Jesus was talking about, though, when he said that Mary had chosen “the better portion” was a more particular kind of renewal. It is taking the time to sit at Jesus’ feet and to listen; to be still and feed upon the bread of life; to be nurtured by the word of God in corporate worship, holy communion, Bible study and prayer. The words we hear shape us. Words are more than passing sounds that communicate simple messages. They are lasers of sorts that shape our perspectives, our attitudes, our convictions, our very selves in ways in which we ourselves often are not even aware. These words bombard us—on the television, the radio, the computer, CD’s, in newspapers, magazines, billboards, and out of the mouths of friends and strangers. As believers, if we do not humble ourselves before God’s word, how shall we be shaped? The answer is obvious. It is as we listen for the voice of God to us in the words of scripture, or prayer, of sermons, of hymns and anthems, in the shared silence of the gathered community of the faithful that our lives are shaped in accordance with God’s will and purpose for us. That is not to say that in the Christian life a quiet piety is all that matters. In Luke’s gospel this story of Mary and Martha is paired with the story of the lawyer who was told the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer knew the Scriptures well. He had been a life-long student of them. His problem was not a lack of knowledge or even devotion, but of a lack of action upon what he already knew. “Go and do,” Jesus told him. Martha was so busy, so distracted by the many things she felt she had to do to show her guest the proper hospitality that she did not take the time and opportunity simply to be in the presence of Jesus and to feed upon his word. Fred Craddock writes in his comments on this passage: “If we were to ask Jesus which example applies to us, the Samaritan or Mary, his answer would probably be ‘Yes.’” There is a time to go and to and a time to sit and listen, a time to serve and a time to be served, a time to give and a time to receive. Both are needful, indeed both are essential in the Christian’s life and in the life of the church, for either without the other is incomplete. And either without the other leaves our lives and our faith unbalanced. Brothers and sisters, we are not called to make a choice between one or the other but to seek both in our lives as disciples and our life together as the church, the body of Christ in the world. God grant us grace we need to find that balance and to live it. J. Dudley Weaver |