Mary and Martha have been compared for years. Maybe there’s a different way to look at it.
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I find it interesting that Luke tells the story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha’s house right after the parable of the Samaritan that we read last week. We don’t have any real indication that one happened right after the other, as if Jesus finished the parable and then said, “Go and do likewise, but I have to head to Bethany for dinner with friends.”
Luke isn’t offering that kind of account of Jesus’ life. He, like the other gospel writers, decided what stories to tell and in what order to tell them as well. A timeline of how all four fit together is not easy to figure out, which gives us reason to think about why the story is laid out the way we have it.
Luke 10 starts with Jesus sending out “seventy others,” which seems to imply that the twelve we know were not the only ones significantly connected to what Jesus was doing. He sent them in pairs to go into the towns and villages and say, “God is here. God is near.” If they were welcomed, they were to stay and partake of the hospitality that was offered. No need to rush off. Enjoy the gift. If they were not welcomed, he told them to “shake the dust off of their feet” and leave with the reminder that God was still there.
They returned and then came the encounter with the man that led to Jesus telling the parable of the Samaritan, which we talked about last week. What we didn’t talk about very much were the two who walked by the man in the ditch rather than help him. They were both clergy. We aren’t given any reason why they crossed the road and kept going, only that they did. Jesus gave no details, but used them as the backdrop for the Samaritan who stopped and stayed and helped.
Where the seventy were told to remind people God was there whether the people welcomed them or not, the parable said the man who needed help was in the ditch whether anyone stopped to notice or not. Remember, Jesus told the story to illustrate who are neighbors are. Whether we walk by or stop, whether we take notice or take leave, our neighbor is the one in the ditch, the one in need.
The scene moves quickly to the home of two sisters, Mary and Martha, whom Jesus knew and visited more than once. They also had a brother named Lazarus who doesn’t show up in the story this time. As you can see from the length of our reading this morning, Luke doesn’t give us a lot of layers to work with. We have to use our sacred imaginations and give ourselves room to see the words between the words, if you will.
Having people in the house meant being an exceptional host to Martha, it seems. Luke said she “welcomed him as a guest.” For her, that meant a lot of good food and drink. Jesus sat down to eat, just as he had told the seventy to do when he sent them out. Mary, her sister, appears to have welcomed Jesus more as a teacher or a mentor. She sat down to listen to Jesus, which is a different kind of hospitality.
This is a good example of what I mean by unspoken layers. The two sisters looked at and responded to the world differently. In fact, it was—at least in part—because they were sisters that they did things differently. It sounds like Martha had the catering part of hospitality locked down. If you were Mary, wouldn’t you look for a different way to participate?
Though doing the work of preparing all the food was Martha’s love language, she was also a little miffed that her sweet sister wasn’t speaking the love language of what-can-I-do-to-help, and she said so. One translator pointed out that Martha’s words show they, as a family, were not wealthy enough to have servants. Martha really was doing it all on her own and that would have been onerous work. In her frustration, she walked into the middle of the conversation and said quite bluntly, “Tell her to help me.”
Jesus said, “Martha, you are overtaken by the details of your hospitality. Mary chose what matters most to her. I’m not going to take that away from her.”
And that is where the story ends, though we can infer that a lot more happened, which brings us back to looking at how these stories fit together. Many times all three of these scenes—the sending of the seventy-two, the parable of the Samaritan, and the dinner with the sisters—take on an air of comparison, as though someone in each of the stories is the one to emulate. The parable is perhaps the easiest one to read that way, since the Samaritan does so much, but comparing everyone to decide who did it best doesn’t feel like it offers much more than the ranking.
Luke didn’t tell us about Mary and Martha so that we would know who was better, or who acted better. Jesus wasn’t asking them to compete against each other, nor was he offering a comparison between them, which is hard for us to hear because we live in a world that is inundated with comparison and competition, a world which doesn’t trust that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, whether we are sweating in the kitchen or soaking up the conversation in the living room.
Even the word comparison makes the point.
The original meaning of the word, going back about six centuries, was “regard or treat as equal,” since the roots break into two Latin words: com, which means with or together, and par, which means equal: “together equal.” To compare was to represent as similar, to look for likeness. It took a couple of hundred years to look at dissimilarities as well, which has created issues ever since, leading up to Teddy Roosevelt’s often quoted words, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Perhaps not, if we see each other as together equal.
Our three stories offer an arc of hospitality and belonging, we might say. Jesus sent people out saying, “Knock on doors and stay where you are welcome and leave when you are not.” Then he told the parable about a man who was a country where he was not welcome and yet stayed to take care of the person who had been left for dead. Then he went to the house of his friends and accepted all of the hospitality that was offered him.
Another way we could talk about the stories is to say they are about asking for help. The people went out with nothing and asked for a place to stay. The man in the ditch couldn’t ask, so the Samaritan asked for him. Martha didn’t really ask—she kind of demanded—and Jesus offered her a way to move beyond her indignation and share in the moment.
As we sit in this very room, we are not being sent out empty-handed to ask strangers to take us in like the seventy, nor are we trying to navigate a place where we are not welcome and help where we can like the Samaritan. But we are in this room to encounter Christ, to see Jesus, if you will. And after we finish here, we will go across to Fellowship Hall where we will have another chance to encounter Christ in our conversations. Whether we move beyond our indignation, or our woundedness, or whatever it is that stands in the way of allowing the Spirit of God to help us be together equal is up to us and our willingness to open our hearts. Amen.
Peace,
Milton