What I like about a study bible are the footnotes. Not because they provide me the “proper and accepted” interpretation of a particular bible passage, but they provide a starting point. As in today’s passage, “In the story about Mary and Martha, Jesus insisted that a right balance must be maintained between the life of active service and that of quiet meditation and communion with the Lord. Serving Jesus a meal was not as important as sitting at his feet and learning what he had to teach.”
This
clarified for me a struggle about ‘balance’ and putting the sisters on a
continuum, from work, aka “Martha” to communion, aka “Mary”. The footnote calls for balance but definitely
skews the ‘correct’ behavior toward the quiet meditative end of the range.
Next
step, read the passage and the footnote, see if they resonate with each
other. This time they did not. The Bible expresses in a verse or two what other
literature might take chapters to unfold.
Consider Martha. She welcomed
Jesus into her home. I cannot help but
connect this to what happens at the beginning of Luke 10. The 72 are sent out two by two to prepare the
way of the Lord across the towns and villages Jesus is preparing to visit. It feels like Martha has been prepared and is
now preparing, because she’s heard Jesus is on his way.
When
Jesus gets there, Mary chooses to sit at his feet and listen, and Martha is
left on her own to do all the work. The
Bible says, in a bit of understatement, “Martha was distracted by her many
tasks…” But then she loses it
completely, comes out into the public view of Jesus, Mary, and whoever else is
gathered there and not only tries to embarrass Jesus onto her side of her
troubles, but she publicly shames her sister in the process.
“Lord
do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Jesus, who cares for us so much that He is on
the way to giving His life for us in a most cruel and dreadful manner? “Tell her then to help me.” I was thinking about how this might translate
to today. Imagine I have kids here in
church and their enthusiasm tends to skew their behavior. Then,
when we have a time of joys and concerns before the pastoral prayer, somebody
stands up and looks at me and says, “Pastor, don’t you care that I am trying to
worship here? Curb your offspring.”
Martha
is not looking for balance, she is looking for help. She is crying out for help. She is so burnt and resentful that she will
shame the people closest to her in her personal pain.
To
look at life around us, I see more connections in Martha with the ads I get for
pastoral burnout on Social Media. I see
connections to the frustrations and resentments of people who are committed to
their churches and their congregations, only to see things continuing to shrink
and shrivel, no matter how hard we try.
Martha is trying so desperately to keep things going in the welcoming of
the Savior that she’s lost sight of what the Savior is even doing there in the
first place.
Jesus’
response might be mistaken as our Lord tossing her a softball in reply,
something quiet and easy for her to respond to.
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things…” It is straight to the point, Jesus sees into
her heart and speaks her truth. She is
worried, she is distracted. He names
what he, as the Son of God, sees as her moment.
But while He names her feelings, He also holds her accountable for her
behavior. Mary shall not be shamed and
he shall not be blamed.
“There
is need of only one thing.” (key word
NEED). Mary has chosen the better part,
which will not be taken away from her.”
What
has Mary picked? It is not simply a life
of quiet meditation and communion with the Lord. She has taken her place at the feet of Jesus
to receive from Him the only thing that is NEEDED. She needs Jesus.
She
needs Jesus as we need Jesus, our Savior whose death and resurrection have
brought to us God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, and God’s salvation from our
sins. In a world where all have sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God. In
a world where the devil appears to reign supreme (He thinks he does). In a world that is broken, our hope is built
on nothing less than Jesus and his righteousness. We ought to put that in a hymn.
Why
was Martha so overwhelmed by it all? I
believe it was because this was Jesus in her house and she wanted everything to
be up to the standards of have God in the room.
That’s something I see in church as well. Arguments and disagreements and
mis-statements and faults that arise in the church setting, they seem to last
longer and dig deeper into the lives of church folks than they do in the rest
of life. Every six months or so someone
will come to me and tell me about something deeply personal and cutting that
has happened to them in their church or religious life and I am falling back to
full pastoral care mode. Let me listen,
let me care, let me bring the love.
Then
I find out it happened five or fifteen or more years ago. My favorite was the thing that happened to
grandparents that not only their kids, but their grandkids talked like it
happened to them. It was fifty seven
years, but to hear it, you’d think they just had a fight after choir practice.
It
blows my mind, but I think arguments here carry more weight, because they carry
into our spiritual lives. Like Martha,
church folks want everything to be up to the standards of having God in the
room. We are at our most personal and
vulnerable here.
Which
is why Jesus brings Martha back to the need for one thing, and one thing
only. And that is the love of Jesus
Christ. That is basking in the glow of
the Light of the World. That is the sure
and certain knowledge that it is Jesus who is our Lord and Savior. That ultimately, it comes down to that one on
one relationship. Jesus has done
EVERYTHING and all I need do is open my heart to him. And the rest will follow.
I
would go so far as to say that the potential to burnout and the fears of
irrelevance and the feelings of resentment to those ‘not doing enough’ come
from we ourselves slipping away from the one thing that we need. There is a word for this in the techno-babble
of Christianity. It’s called
‘contemplation’. It’s more basic than
the things we do, its more basic than the words we share, even the prayers that
we might offer. It is loving God at a
most foundational, soul-based level of our existence. There are Christians who have specialized in
this across the history of the church.
We label them as “Mystics” and, quite frankly, such folks can appear a
little…well…nuts.
But
what Jesus is telling Martha, what Mary has received, that shall not be taken
from her, is raw exposure to the love of God and, in returning that love,
moving through all of what the beauty and forgiveness of Jesus is. It is not simply accepting the death and
resurrection of Jesus for our salvation, it is living into all that means at
the deepest levels of our being. Disease
and crime and violence and brokenness and addiction and everything that rips us
down as human beings, it melts into healing and peace and forgiveness in Jesus
Christ. And when we are anchored in that
hope, in that strength, in that reality, our foundation is upon Jesus.
From
there, our love of God, meditatively and contemplatively considered, the rest
of it comes. The work we do, the
hospitality we show, the haven of a congregational life that we built to be
intentionally safe, intentionally loving, and intentionally connectional, all
of that flows from simply floating in the joy of being God’s own (this is why I
call mystics “weird”, when they try to describe in words the whole reality of
living into God’s love).
So
its not a balance at all. Martha’s work
does not balance with Mary’s quite meditation.
One flows from the other. Martha
needs what Mary has received so that the gifts that Martha has to share will
flow out of a sense of gratitude, peace, and cooperation with the love of Jesus
in the world instead of a sense of necessity, responsibility, and
resentment. I want to versus I have to.
Where
Martha was, we are. We have the same
stuff going on today. We have pressures,
we have problems, it can feel like we are flapping in the breeze. What she needed, we need. There is one thing that we truly need, only
one thing. And that is to sit at the
feet of our Lord and allow all his truth, all his love, all his strength, all
of HIM, to fill us, empower us, embolden us, excite us, and lead us back into
the world where we, His Presbyterian Church in Merchantville, will celebrate
Him.
Amen.
Rev. Peter Hofstra
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