Luke 10:38 - 42
This little gospel story is found only in Luke, right after the story of the Good Samaritan, and right before Jesus gives Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer. It seems out of place and unrelated to the flow of things. And of course, the story made my mother mad. She identified strongly with Martha and had very little use for someone like Mary who would leave the work to someone else. And I think a lot of people sympathize with Martha and it almost seems as though Jesus is acting out of character. “Martha, Martha!” he says. “You are so worried and upset about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” I wonder how that dinner went. Martha, after all, had invited Jesus and his 12 companions for supper and it must have felt like a slap in the face. The fact that Martha continued her relationship with Jesus, as we will see in the Gospel of John when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, seems to be the real miracle here. I know my mother would have taken a long time to get over being put down in this way.
But Jesus knows who he is. He’s been going around telling people that he himself is the bridge between God and man. The most important thing any human being can do is accept his invitation to enter into that relationship. Mary has accepted that. She sits at his feet like any disciple -- even though she is a woman and acting totally against the norms of that time. Martha, I think, was appealing to that stereotype --” tell my sister to help me. That’s what women do, that’s our role. Back me up, Jesus!”
But Mary has chosen the better part. She has chosen to enter into the relationship that Jesus offers. But we are all Marthas and we are all Marys. Someone has to do the work of living, the cleaning, the making of meals, all the things that have to be done to get on with life. And yet it is so easy to lose sight of what is really important. Jesus did not want Martha to stop doing what she was doing. He wanted her to stop being distracted by what she was doing. And that’s the real issue here. A real problem for anyone who is serious about being a Christian is not how we can sit at Jesus’ feet and absorb his wisdom, but how we can take what we do, what we have to do every day, and turn that into a prayer, turn that into making us holy.
Saint Josemaria Escriva founded the organization he named “Opus Dei”, or work of God, precisely to help people like Martha use their work to become holy. It wasn’t a new idea -- it seems to be a recurring theme in Christianity. Many great religious thinkers concluded that to be really holy you had to withdraw from the world. We have a lot of Christian saints who thought like that. But we have others, starting with Saint Paul, maybe starting with Jesus and his encounter with Martha, who recognized that most of us would have to become holy through the work we do. Saint Benedict, whose feast we celebrated on Monday, truly recognized this and in the rule he wrote for his monks, there is a beautiful balance between work and prayer. Several centuries later, Saint Francis de Sales wrote his classic “Introduction to a Devout life” in which he insisted that everyone was called to be a saint, not in spite of the work they had to do, but precisely through what they had to do. Francis talked about how it would be totally inappropriate for a woman with small children to spend all her time in church. He compared the different vocations of Christians to a flower garden where everyone would blossom in their own way. And Saint Escriva in the 20th century said that we Christians are called to make our work holy, to make ourselves holy through our work, and to make the world holy through our work.
And in a way it all makes sense. After all, one of the first things God did when he created Adam was to give him a job; he was to take care of the garden in which God placed him.
Martha’s problem is not that she is working, but that she is not making her work holy. And all she has to do in this situation is remember that she is working to please Jesus. And that makes her yoke easy and her burden light, because when we invite Jesus into the work we do, God joins our humanity, God makes what seems so ordinary and pedestrian into part of his great plan -- through us.
We can’t always rush around being lost in work; we have to stop now and then to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his voice. The most productive saints knew this and did this. It’s a wonderful thing to go to our weekend liturgy every week. It reminds us of who we are, of our relationship with Jesus. But how much more wonderful to cultivate a prayer life, to introduce some spiritual reading into our day, to visit the Blessed Sacrament now and then -- after all, that’s what Mary was doing and that’s the better part. Jesus is always there waiting for us to visit him, and when we do this, when we put ourselves in his presence, he gives us the grace to make our work holy, to make ourselves holy through our work, to make the world holy through our work. So Martha, don’t stop doing what you are doing. Mary, after you’ve spent a little time with Jesus, go out and help Martha. And you disciples sitting around waiting for supper, get up and ask how you can help. And you will all have chosen the better part.
