Life can be busy, it can be hectic, stressful, and
frustrating. Work needs to be done,
things need to be taken care of, we have responsibility. All this is true, and the Word of God doesn’t
attempt to gloss over such concerns, but it does offer hope. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is confronted by
a frustrated hostess Martha whose efforts to prepare for Jesus’ needs and those
of his disciples, has been hampered, in her mind at least, by her sister Mary’s
lack of contribution to the work. Martha
interrupts Jesus to complain about this unfair situation and request, with much
emotion, that he order Mary to help out.
What was Mary doing this whole time, why wasn’t she helping? Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus,
soaking up the wisdom of his teaching, and acting as if she too, even though
she is a woman, is going to be his disciple.
This
passage can be viewed as a sibling rivalry, the struggles of an older sibling to
deal with responsibility and the younger of shirking it. Or it can be looked at as a clash of
personality types, with Martha’s “A” personality being frazzled by Mary’s
laid-back attitude. We’ve all
experienced such turmoil, in our family, at our work, or in our church. When people work together on projects it
always seems that some are left holding the bag and doing all the work while
other skate by.
How
will Jesus respond? Will he scold Mary
for not helping out? Keep in mind that
the previous passage was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a message about
helping out someone in need, and Mary isn’t helping out. Are the situations parallel? They are not, and therein lies the key to
Jesus response. In the parable, it was a
question of life or death, right and wrong were clearly in the choice, to help
was righteous, to fail to help was a sin of omission. Here in this situation, Martha and Mary are
not dealing with a right vs. wrong decision, but rather a good vs. better
comparison. Is it better to work hard to
provide for the needs of others, as Martha is doing, or is it better to satisfy
the spiritual hunger of learning from Jesus?
Much of
the commentary on this passage attempts to point out that Martha’s preparation
were overly indulgent, that she had put too into it, and thus the lesson for
her from Jesus is one of simplicity.
While there may be some truth to that line of thinking, it isn’t
necessary that we criticize Martha in order to understand why Jesus takes Mary’s
side by declaring that she chose something “better”. Martha’s didn’t do anything wrong, per se,
she just didn’t make the best choice possible.
There will always be more work to do, but Mary recognized that learning
from Jesus was a unique spiritual opportunity not to be missed. That was the better choice for Mary, it would
have been the best choice for Martha as well.
To watch the video, click on the link below:
