38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” [Luke 10:38-42, NRSV]
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, by Diego Velázquez, 1618.
Saint Augustine understood well the struggles of the human heart: “Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they shall know no rest, until they rest in you.”
That seems to harbor the depth answer to Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows’ search: “I was born into this world with a tortured complexity. For a long time I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish.”
It all resonates well with Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, who finds that “life isn’t simple”. In life, he says, we want both the right things and the wrong things. Generous and selfish at the same time, we like honesty, and yet we easily rationalize and speak partial truths. We try to be humble, but our pride seeks recognition. We desire to be prayerful, but too easily give in to entertainment instead. We crave to be spiritual, but find ourselves turning helplessly to the pleasure of sensual delights. We aspire to a life of sacrifice, but are turned away by cynical resistance and the pleasures of life. We crave purity, and yet we entertain promiscuity. Things of God have a great pull on us, as do the things of the world.
Søren Kierkegaard is absolutely right: “It is not easy to will the one thing.”
This is our “tortured complexity”, just as St Paul has written: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15).
Saint Augustine in the 5th century had drawn from the Martha and Mary story the moral of the superiority of the vita contemplativa (spiritual life) over the vita activa (temporal life). He was followed by countless others. In the 16th century Counter-Reformation, the usefulness of the “active life” was somewhat upgraded by many writers to counter the Lutheran assertions of the spiritual adequacy of “faith alone”.
Our spiritual project here is to relate Mary and Martha to one another for the benefit of both, and of the larger community. We need to find a way to integrate their seemingly opposing spiritual attitudes in a healthy tension, not in a negative opposition.
The answer lies in a clear understanding of what willing “the one thing necessary” entails. Unpacking the Gospel of Luke, Joseph A. Fitzmyer suggests that the Mary-Martha episode in Luke 10:38-42 is addressed to the Christian who is expected to be “a contemplative in action.” For Christian living, we should not pit Mary and Martha against each other, neither when judging the lives of others nor our own life. The two attitudes symbolized by Mary and Martha are meant to be combined in the old monastic saying “ora et labora”. Even speaking of a “better” part, thus stressing the listening or contemplative side, Jesus did not ask Martha to sit down with Mary and himself; after all, someone has to cook dinner.
And so we unpack the episode better, if we see Jesus pointing to the grace of discipleship embedded in the Mary-Martha duplex.
Notice, first, that we miss much in the Word, if we under-estimate the significance of Martha’s spirituality. Scriptures say prominently, though we may have neglected this “small” piece of detail, that she “welcomed” Jesus into her home. Hers is a ministry of “welcome” that characterises Bethany as “home” to Jesus! If anyone is tempted to downplay this “welcome”, just pause and recall the special significance in the work of Martha precisely at this critical point in Jesus’ life. On the eve of the season of Lent, we ought to be particularly conscious of the fact that Jesus was on his final week in and out of Jerusalem, before he entered into his passion. The end was near. Right then, the enemies were closing in, bent on taking him out of circulation. Conscious that he was heading into very difficult times, Jesus had thrice predicted that he would face torture and pain and finally death in Jerusalem. He knew in advance that his close friends would scatter in fear and abandon him. Located about two miles from Jerusalem (John 11:18), Martha’s home in Bethany became the single most important place of rest, privacy and quiet conversation with trusted friends, away from the public glare and the severe battles he needed to do in Jerusalem before his ultimate sacrifice. Martha’s “Bethany home” bears special significance for all Christians as the home of welcome to Jesus at the most critical juncture of his earthly life and Martha, Scriptures specifically single out for mention, “welcomed” Jesus! Pope Francis has thus stressed the very positive dimension of Martha’s work, calling it a ministry of “hospitality”.
We are thus compelled to see and appreciate that we failed to read Scriptures properly if we under-estimated the significance of Martha’s spirituality. Her spirituality, Jesus is teaching his followers, is one of two essential dimensions of the healthy, wholesome, and unified Mary-Martha spirituality by which Christians are all called to live. The two sisters symbolise side-by-side realities that are meant to be together.
- We can distinguish the two but it is wrong to separate them, as separating them diminishes them both.
- It is wrong to play Martha and Mary against each other, treating the former, which is “outer and active” as being inferior to the latter because it is “inner and contemplative”.
- It is not a matter of which one is more important.
- It is a matter of understanding how they complement each other.
- The text teaches us to discover their mutuality.
In this story, Mary is a representative of the inner activity. The Word reads:
- “She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.”
The very situation Martha thinks is the problem – Mary’s sitting at the Lord’s feet to absorb his teachings – is her only hope for productive and peaceful action (bearing good fruit). It is the one thing necessary. Of course, the Mary-Martha duplex requires of us not to stop at knowledge and prayer, but to continue on to action. In this regard, Saint Benedict eminently viewed prayer and work as partners, and believed in combining contemplation with action. So ora et labora is a phrase expressing the need to balance prayer and work in monastic settings and has been used in many religious communities from the Middle Ages onwards. In sum, the two sisters, Martha and Mary, signify the two lives of the Church – contemplative and apostolic.
The spiritual lesson here is that Mary is doing the one thing necessary, the interiorly realised love of God that is the energy for effective action in the world.
- Necessary because without it, Martha (whose work is good and even essential) might very well be ineffective and without peace.
- Necessary because, as Pope Francis has profoundly desired in his heart and tirelessly taught, the attention of our hearts must first look upward, to contemplate the holy face of God, a face of mercy, so that we may descend to the depths, to encounter the suffering of humanity at its loneliest and most marginalized.
- Necessary because, as the Lord said: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).
All this having been said, the posture of Mary has also given rise to a “traditional” spirituality that wrongly claims superiority of the vita contemplativa (spiritual life) over the vita activa (temporal life). Mary, this tradition insists, being contemplative, is the dedicated disciple (sitting at the feet of Jesus) absorbing the teachings of Jesus (listening to his every word). A simplistic picture gets paraded as a sound teaching, that to be “Mary” is good, and to be “Martha” is not.
In fact, Luke’s Gospel insists that those who effectively hear the Word do not just stay at the “high, mountain-top experience” with Jesus without coming down to earth. Jesus said, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21).
To be sure, Jesus’ teaching here is that disciples of his must begin with an encounter with him, to have him in their hearts. That is necessary – a divine “necessary”, if you will. But the aim of all that encounter is, so that we can go out and do good in works of Kingdom-advancement.
And so, Luke quotes Jesus’ explanation on the Parable of the Sower, where the seed is the Word of God, and the good disciples are those who inhabit the good soil, hear the Word and “hold it fast, in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance” (Luke 8:15). Luke, as we can see, integrates three elements: first, an inner activity involving the heart; second, a steady perseverance which entails patient endurance; and third, all of which over-flows into an outer activity, bearing good fruit.
- A little story of a married woman at a charismatic “Life in the Spirit” seminar is illustrative. High in spirit at the end of the first day, this woman was still hanging around the hall at dinner time. A level-headed leader came over and said to her quite simply, “Natasia, go home now. Your husband and children are waiting at home to have dinner with you. Come back tomorrow. Go home now.”
On the other hand, the problem with Martha is that she represents an outer activity that has disengaged from its inner grounding and has become scattered in multiple tasks.
- Distracted by her many tasks, she came to Jesus and asked, “Lord. Do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself. Tell her then to help me.”
She speaks in resentful tone and releases her feelings in voices of complaint. Like a practical person or a taskmaster, her inner problems came to the fore:
- She is frantic and distracted because she has too many tasks;
- Lumbered with a great deal of work and limited time, she grumbles on having to multitask;
- Her vision is bitterly obvious: she is overwhelmed, but Mary is not chipping in;
- Her solution could not be clearer: she asks Jesus to tell Mary to help her. The reality is: she wants Jesus to do her bidding on her terms, to get Mary to abandon her inner activity of meditating on Jesus’ teachings and to join Martha’s outer activity of ungrounded multiple-tasking;
- Her aim, even if she is not as articulate or aware, is this: she wants to make the two sisters the same, thus turning Mary into a Martha-clone.
As we see it, Martha wants to collapse the two-tiered (duplex), integrated world of Mary-Martha into a one-dimensional world of Martha-Martha – busy-busy; ungrounded multi-tasking. But Jesus sees it for what it is; such a life of Martha is without peace, and thus contrary to Jesus’ vision for us. Thus, seeing things differently, the Lord calls her “Martha, Martha”:
- But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by too many things (the Jerusalem Bible adds “and yet few are needed”); there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
Martha’s problem, therefore, is not a matter of having too much work and no one helping her. Rather, her problem lies in her having a skewed perception of the Mary-Martha duplex. Her real problem being her inner state of worry and distraction, this inner state undercuts her actions, rendering them not effective, not peaceful productivity, and not “good”. This inner state is not caused by multitude of tasks, as Martha thinks. The fact of the matter is, she would be the same with fewer tasks as well. In truth, the problem lies elsewhere. Where would that be?
Martha’s worry and distraction, the Lord is teaching us in this episode, is the result of ungrounded activity. She has engaged the many without being rooted in the one thing necessary, which is to stay connected to God who is good, who is the ground and energy of effective action, whose presence is grace. If she had stayed connected to God, she might be able to handle twice the volume of work, with peace.
Here’s a touch of reality with which we conclude:
- Do you wake up some morning with an impossible list of work for the day? There are some very faith-filled people amongst men and women that we know in the local faith community. Some days, they get up in the morning wondering how on earth they could get through the day with the long list of things to attend to. Yet, their stories are each accompanied by the same singular insight: by submitting themselves and their day to the Lord first thing in the morning, asking Him to stay with them, to guide them in their work, and consciously staying connected with Him, they always got through the day with greater ease and peace than they had dared to imagine.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, January 2017. All rights reserved.
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