Thirsting for the Word

Good morning, Church. For the benefit of those who don’t know me, my name is AnnabeI, and I’m M’s daughter and M’s older and wiser sister. I’ve been a Methodist preacher for thirty years now – it’s a long story, but basically at the time, the church where we worshipped in London was what they call a Local Ecumenical Project, both Anglican and Methodist, and when the time came to answer God’s call, it turned out to be becoming a Methodist preacher. Which turned out to be just as well when the Anglicans unilaterally pulled out, leaving us as a Methodist congregation only.

Anyway, I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be here with you this morning, having worshipped here on and off for the past 65 years. I was a very small child indeed when I first sat in the family pew down there, and my brother C wasn’t much more than a baby – M hadn’t even been born then. And although I haven’t lived here much since I was ten years old and went off first to boarding-school, and then to work first in Paris and in London, I have frequently worshipped here down the years, and always love it when I do come. And I have always loved looking at the statues carved into the pulpit – I have always felt sorry for the dragon, he looks so uncomfortable with St George treading on his wing like that!

And there is St Wilfred with his Bible, and two other saints round the other side that you can’t see from our pew. My father, who I know you will remember, said that when he was a small boy, he used to think St Wilfred was carrying a petrol-can rather than a Bible, so that he could come to the aid of stranded motorists – probably a good idea in his boyhood, when petrol stations were few and far between and the tanks on cars smaller than they are now.

Talking of my father, he used, you might remember, to have a fairly bottomless stock of Bible jokes and anecdotes, and one of these was that he said that if you asked him whether he preferred Martha or Mary, he would reply:
“Before dinner, Martha;
afterwards, definitely Mary!”

Me, I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Martha.
There she was, desperate to get all these men fed,
and her sister isn’t helping.
And when she asks Jesus to send her in,
she just gets told that Mary has “chosen the better part”.

Yet it was Martha who, on another occasion, caused Jesus to declare:
“I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
And Martha herself gave us that wonderful statement of faith:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,
the Son of God,
the one coming into the world.”
Martha was seriously a woman of faith.
And she wanted to show her love to the Lord by providing him and his disciples with a really good meal.
Maybe she overdid it –
the Lord might have preferred Martha’s company,
even if it did mean dining on bread and cheese, and perhaps a few olives.

The family at Bethany has many links in the Bible.
Some people have identified Mary as the woman who poured ointment all over Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and because he lived in Bethany –
Simon the Leper, that is, not Jesus –
some people have also said that he was married to Martha.
We don’t know.
At that, some people have said that Jesus was married to Mary;
again, we don’t know.
What we do know is that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and that they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that on one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet of the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other accounts or a different one isn’t quite clear.
But whatever, they seem to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home where he knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he shared when Lazarus died,
even though he knew that God would raise him.
Lazarus, I mean, not Jesus, this time!

In some ways the story “works” better if the woman who poured ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper and this Mary
are one and the same person,
as we know that the woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some kind of loose woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate with.
Now she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply adores Jesus, who made that possible for her.
And she seems to have been taken back into her sister’s household, possibly rather on sufferance.

But then she does nothing but sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.
Back then, this simply was Not Done.
Only men were thought to be able to learn,
women were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I have a feeling that the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were able to learn.
They would thank God each morning that they had not been made a woman, a slave or a Gentile.
And even though St Paul had sufficient insight to be able to write that “In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”,
thus at a stroke disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make daily, it’s taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and events in the United States would show we haven’t really worked it out yet!­

Anyway, the point is that Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was behaving in rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like throwing herself at him.
He might have felt extremely uncomfortable,
and it’s quite possible that his disciples did.
Martha certainly did, which was one of the reasons why she asked Jesus to send Mary through to help in the kitchen.

But Jesus replied:
“Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary, with all her history, was now thirsty for the Word of God.
Jesus wanted to be able to give Mary what she needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
if only Martha could be persuaded that they’d be quite happy with bread and cheese, and perhaps a few olives.
But Martha wasn’t ready.
Not then.
Later on, yes, after Lazarus had died, but not then.

In many ways, Martha and Mary represent the two different sides of spirituality, perhaps even of Christianity.
Mary, wrapped up in sitting at the feet of her Lord, learning from him, listening to him,
was perhaps so heavenly-minded she was of no earthly use.
Martha, rather the reverse.
She was so wrapped up in doing something for Jesus
that she couldn’t see the importance of taking time out to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.
Or if she could, it wasn’t something she wanted to do while there was work that needed to be done.
She expressed her love for Jesus by wanting to feed him,
wanting to work for him.

All of us, I think, are like either Martha or Mary in some ways.
Many of us are more or less integrated, of course,
finding time both to sit at Jesus’ feet in worship, adoration and learning,
and time to serve Him in practical ways,
mostly through working either in the Church or in the Community.
Others of us are less balanced.
We spend our time doing one or the other, but not both.
Mind you, it usually balances out within the context of a church;
the people who do the praying and listening,
the people who do the practical jobs that need to be done around the place,
and the people who do both.
And perhaps in an area, too, it balances out,
with some churches doing more in the way of work in the community than others,
but perhaps less in the way of prayer meetings,
Alpha, or similar courses
and other Bible studies.
And so it goes on.

But, you know what? Just look at the first reading this morning, from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. This letter may well have been written in about 62 AD, so probably less than 35 years since that evening in Bethany. People who had known Jesus as a human being would still have been alive. Maybe even Mary, Martha or Lazarus was still alive. They might have remembered that evening, Mary, sitting at her Lord’s feet with the men; Martha, bustling about in the kitchen and wishing for another pair of hands to help dish up. We’re not told what Lazarus was doing, or even if he was there, but if he was there, he was probably sitting at Jesus’ feet with his sister.

And yet, only a few years later, Paul writes of Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible,” and “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Imagine – all the fullness of God sitting in your living-room eating olives! It kind of blows your mind, doesn’t it? And yet, this was what Martha and Mary experienced, and learnt to believe that Jesus was “the son of God who has come into this world”.

And, of course, the even more extraordinary thing is that we, too, can know Jesus, if not eating olives in our sitting-room, exactly, yet still alive and living within us – indwelling us, they call it – through the power of his Holy Spirit. Indwelling us, delighting in us, loving us, growing us, changing us, helping us become, day by day, more and more the person we were created to be.

You know this, of course. And you know, too, how easy it is to slip away from being God’s person, how it’s a commitment you have to keep on making, not just the once.

The first time you make such a commitment is huge – and, by the way, if you never have, you really do have nothing to lose by saying “Yes” to Jesus,
deciding to be God’s person,
deciding that what you say and do here on a Sunday
should carry over and be part of who you are during the week, too.
Truly, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain!
But the point is, even if you first consciously made that commitment, as I did, over fifty years ago, you know how you slip away, usually quite unintentionally, and have to keep on coming back and back. But the Jesus who let Mary sit at his feet, who reminded Martha that she, too, could, and should learn from him, the Jesus in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell – that Jesus will always, always, always welcome us back! Amen.