Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

There is need of only one thing.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

Mary and Martha, traditionally, represent the contemplative and the active: the life of mystical ascent vs. the life of service to the world. The two are often considered opposites, or at least widely divergent kinds of spiritual temperament. Our Lord Himself seems to endorse the contrast by saying that “Mary has chose the better part, which will not be taken from her.” And you, Martha, can go back to the kitchen. One almost hears Him add! Sitting at the feet of Jesus is better than fussing around the house.

This is really an interesting passage. People identify strongly with one or the other sister, sometimes with pretty strong reactions. Let’s read it closely. First of all, Luke tells us that is was Martha’s house. She had a sister ~ presumably younger ~ who lived with her. There is no mention of any men. Both of the women were unmarried. In St. John’s gospel, we hear that they had a brother ~ the famous Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead ~ but Luke knows nothing of him. If he did, he wouldn’t have called it Martha’s house. It would have been Lazarus’s house. But unmarried Martha, living alone with her unmarried sister, invited Jesus in, along with, presumably, at least some of His disciples. Maybe some friends and neighbors, too, because somebody was listening to whatever it was Jesus was saying as Mary sat at His feet.

In this little story, both sisters flout social convention, in a more or less shocking way. First Martha invites a bunch of strange men into her house. This would have been a disreputable thing to do. (Maybe that’s why a brother shows up in John’s later accounts of the family, with who Jesus was obviously close.) Martha, apparently, didn’t care much about social convention. She must have liked what she had heard about Jesus’s teaching (why else would she ask Him in?) and she was certainly on His wave-length about social convention, and rules and regulations in general. The Sabbath is made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath, and so on. And if people with nothing better to do clucked their tongues at her entertaining men at home, she didn’t care very much.

But, having invited them, she had a lot to do, and she ~ quite naturally ~ expected some help from her little sister. This was NOT an unreasonable expectation. If there was going to be any dinner, somebody would have to get it ready. And, as long as I am imagining unspoken lines like “go back to the kitchen”, I might as well add her rejoinder: “NO! if Mary’s choice is better, as You say, I’ll just follow her example and sit at Your feet too, and we can all go to bed hungry!” Martha has a point. And Jesus seems almost like atypically insensitive male when He chides her. He DESERVES to go to bed hungry. (This is difficult. I guess that’s what makes it interesting.)

One interpretation is that Mary was more liberated than Martha. I have said that they BOTH flouted social convention. What social convention? Well women were not “seen but not heard”. Women were NOT seen and not heard. Years ago, I was invited to a Bedouin house in the Negev. A tent in every way, except that it had a tin roof. We sat on cushions on the carpet over the dirt and at roast lamb from a big brass platter in the middle ~ with our hands. When we drove up, I caught a momentary glimpse of a black-clad figure, who immediately darted out of sight. That was that last I saw of her, except for her hands pushing the brass platter through the flap. I imagine it was pretty much the same in Jesus’s time. If Martha was daring in her invitation, Mary was too, by sitting with the men and listening to lofty words. She has chosen the better part may mean a better social role than the one convention assigned to women. And THAT is what Jesus endorsed. Women weren’t expected to understand anything profound, such as might be uttered by a rabbi. Their social role was in the kitchen. So in this interpretation, Martha would represent not only the conventional, oppressive role assigned her, but her own internalization of her oppression. While Mary had the effrontery to break out by sitting around with the men. This interpretation does underline Jesus’s consistently unconventional attitude toward women. But I have grown uncomfortable with it. It doesn’t square with Martha’s own willingness to break out. She was hardly the slave of convention. After all, not many women would dare to rebuke a rabbi, as she did! Then again, maybe she was nothing but an unpleasant control freak, who manipulated people by taking care of them.

Still, we are faced with the invidious distinction that jumps off the page: Mary has chosen the better part. Perhaps there is a clue in what Jesus actually scolds Martha about: it’s not her acceptance of a traditional role as much as it is her distraction in it. This word occurs twice in our translation. Distracted and also worried. Whatever else she was, Martha was anxious and forgetful of the mysterious one thing that is needed. What might that one thing needful be? We are not told. Just that Mary’s choice is a little nearer. But still, without Martha, everybody starves!

Whatever lesson we are to draw from this little domestic spat, if we DO take Martha and Mary as representatives of action and contemplation, we have to understand that in the context of the whole Catholic tradition of spirituality, as we now seem to be forced to call it. And in the context of the Catholic dogma of the Incarnation, they are inseparable. Contemplation ~ the way of Mary ~ is the gradual stripping away of illusion, which may be something else Paul means by the flesh. Every illusion: about myself, about others, about the world, and about God. Contemplation leads to the point at which we lose everything, including our own identity, as we behold the Abyss of eternity, silence, and nothingness; the point at which we say with the dying Savior, My God, My God, Why hast Thou forsaken me? At that moment, the precise moment of annihilation and disintegration, God speaks: the Word is born in us.

The Word implies Community ~ self-disclosure, self-sharing ~ Someone speaking and Someone hearing. With God’s Word, the community is Communion. In Catholic tradition, this Communion is union not only with God, but with all other creatures. The end of contemplation is NOT a blissful, eternal solitude of me and God. That vision is an illusion, too. Christian contemplation always ends with the WORD, the Word INCARNATE.. We can behold Him as He is only when all else is gone, when there is no more distraction, no more anxiety. Martha’s commitment to serve in the world was not her mistake: her anxiety and distraction were. In her worried distraction, Martha was, perhaps, a little further from this terrible, blessed state than Mary. But it is also possible to be blissed-out in illusion in the name of contemplation or spirituality. As long as contemplation is seen as the opposite of action, it is also a kind of illusion. In that sense, maybe Mary as well as Martha got it wrong. Only when they are yoked together, only when the two sisters are seen as inseparable as the two sides of a coin, almost as the same person even, only when action and contemplation are truly united, as heaven and earth are united in the Incarnation, do we have one thing.

If the Incarnation is the marriage of heaven and earth, heaven is still superior to earth. God is superior to humanity. So Mary’s may be the better part, just as divinity is the better part of the Incarnation. But the union is what is important ~ the Communion, the WORD MADE FLESH, God and humanity made One Thing. Action and contemplation must always go together. Maybe this necessity is what Jesus meant when He said to Martha, There is need of only one thing.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!