Martha and Mary

 This was a short reflection for an informal act of worship when on holiday with book group friends.  I am not recording it.  

I chose to only have the Gospel reading today, because this is, after all, meant to be a short act of worship! But, had I chosen to have the Epistle read, too, we would have heard that: “in Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

And in our Gospel reading, we basically find all the fullness of God sitting in someone’s front room eating crisps! Well, perhaps not crisps, but probably bread and olives, and maybe cheese as well.

We know the story of Martha and Mary so well; we probably learnt it in Sunday School. Jesus and his disciples visiting their good friends in Bethany, and Jesus teaching, as he so often did. Martha, bustling about in the kitchen, getting a meal ready for everybody, and Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening!

I think we probably see Mary’s behaviour as perfectly normal, but back in the day, it was incredibly shocking. Women weren’t supposed to be able to learn, and if they were, they should learn in private, ideally from other women, not in mixed company! The disciples may well have been embarrassed by her behaviour, and Martha certainly was. I rather suspect she didn’t ask Jesus to send Mary out to the kitchen because she wanted help, but because she thought Mary might be embarrassing Jesus by her behaviour. After all, this was Mary who poured a vial of ointment all over Jesus’ feet, and who may have had some kind of Past! Some scholars think this Mary was the same person as Mary Magdalene, but the Bible isn’t very clear how many people poured vials of ointment all over Jesus. But anyway.

It’s not that Martha didn’t want to know about Jesus, other than as a friend, perhaps a friend of her brother’s; it was, if you remember, Martha who declared, after her brother had died,
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,
the Son of God,
the one coming into the world.”
Martha, perhaps, was beginning to get a glimpse of who Jesus was. She knew he would have healed her brother had he arrived before he died; she was to see him raised from the dead – and, perhaps, later she was to meet the risen Jesus, as Mary did, as the other disciples did.

But not that day. That day she was fussed with preparing a meal, and by her sister’s embarrassing behaviour. Jesus and the disciples would probably have been happy enough with bread and cheese, and maybe some olive oil or even some olives, but Martha couldn’t, at the time, feel she was honouring him with a simple meal.

And yet – “Mary has chosen the better part!” Jesus never cared whether he was speaking to men or to women; he never cared whether or not he was made ritually unclean; he only cared that people listen to his message of the good news of the Kingdom of God.

“In Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

I wonder how we would react if Jesus, in person, was sitting in our front room nibbling on crisps and olives. Would we, like Mary, long to sit at his feet and listen? Or would we, like Martha, prefer to prepare a feast for him? I don’t think either is wrong – we need both Martha and Mary in our churches. And I think most of us lean to one or the other, although I hope we carry both of them with us. I know I’m more like Mary…. What about you?