We noticed in Bible study this week that Jesus is really impossible to please. Last week, with the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus told the lawyer to go and do. This week, Martha was busily doing, doing exactly what Jesus had told the disciples would be done, preparing and serving food to those whom she had welcomed into her home, and Jesus chided her for it. Ponder the scriptures and engage in intellectual pursuits like the lawyer, and Jesus said, get out and do something. Throw your whole self into service like Martha, and Jesus said, sit and listen. Come on now, Jesus, what do you want from us?!
I think the real grace and freedom in both this week’s and last week’s readings come from putting them together. So let’s start by digging into this one, and then we’ll see how putting them together really opens the whole thing up.
The temptation in preaching this text is to turn it into an object lesson on action versus contemplation. Martha chose work, Mary chose Jesus. Obviously then, you should choose Jesus too. There are all kinds of books and studies on whether you are a Mary or a Martha, and I’m going to say right out that I’ve read none of them, so this is not a critique on any of those books, some of them are probably great. But I do caution that setting it up as an either/or misses the point. I think this story might have less to do with action versus contemplation and more to do with expectation.
Hospitality is an essential part of the Christian vocation. In the sending of the seventy a few weeks ago, Jesus told the disciples to eat what was set before them, assuming the hospitality the followers of the Jesus movement would show to the disciples. The importance of hospitality is often drawn from our first reading this morning from Genesis. During the time of Abraham, hospitality was literally a life or death endeavor. There weren’t hotels or restaurants or even really roads in Palestine in the time of Abraham. People traveled from tent to tent, and if a tent didn’t welcome them, the traveler risked a very real possibility of death. But even for this expectation, Abraham’s show of hospitality was overkill. He ran out to meet the travelers, begging them to become guests. Then he sent Sarah to prepare bread for them, and a servant to cook a choice calf, before setting before his guests, quote, “the curds and milk and calf that he had prepared.” Except, notice, he didn’t prepare any of those things. Sarah prepared part, the servant prepared part, and Abraham took the credit of the preparing. Sarah in fact, wasn’t even at the table; she was in the tent. She cooked the food, gave it to Abraham, and disappeared, very much the proper ancient near east wife.
Flash forward a few centuries to the time of Jesus, and the role of women hadn’t changed all that much. In first century Palestine, discipleship was men’s work. Men sat at the feet of teachers and learned from them, women did not. I came across a quote this week that read, “when a visiting teacher comes, welcome him into your home, sit in the dust at his feet, and drink from the wisdom of his words… but do not speak with the women.” Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus wasn’t a beautiful act of contemplative piety; it was a radical stand against societal expectations.
I think the “better part” that Jesus said Mary had chosen was not a life of contemplation over and above a life of action. I think the “better part” was a life that was bigger then the box that gender had placed them in. Mary saw in Jesus an invitation to transcend that box. To be more than she had always been told she could be, to live more fully then she had before thought possible. Martha, on the other hand, was hemmed uncomfortably in by that box. The scripture doesn’t say that Martha was working happily away, lost in the beautiful contemplation of bread baking or dish washing or whatever, until Jesus busted in the kitchen and said, “get out here and listen to me.” No, it said Martha was distracted by her many tasks. She didn’t seem to want to be about the work, it seems more like she saw it as duty and obligation, the thing she was supposed to do and be, the limit to her role in the Jesus movement. And so Jesus, in his gentle way, invited Martha to step out of the limits she had been given by the world around her and be more than she thought she could be. In the same way that Jesus raised the widow’s son from the dead and brought the Gerasene demoniac back into himself, Jesus coaxed Martha into a fuller existence.
Each of us have a box that limits us. Maybe it’s the expectation of gender roles, or racism or homophobia. Maybe it’s economic limits, age, illness, anxiety, depression, addiction, or ableism. Even as we chafe against these imposed limits, there is a certain degree of safety within them. It’s comfortable to only be able to grow so far, to only have so much expected of us. That way when we fail, it’s not our fault, it is the fault of some external force beyond our control that keeps us in place. Martha might gripe at Jesus to send Mary back into the kitchen to ease her burden, so that she didn’t have to deal with the fact that she didn’t really want to be in the kitchen in the first place. The lawyer might have argued with Jesus over the specific legality of who was and was not a neighbor, so that he didn’t have to move beyond intellectual curiosity and into the realm of real relationship. But limits, even comfortable ones, are not what Jesus wants for us. The Jesus movement was not about hospitality or contemplation or even neighborliness. The Jesus movement was and is about freedom. It is about being drawn into a place where we discover that we are so much more than we imagined. It is about a God who sees the fragile, broken limitedness of our lives and draws us ever more fully into the unlimited expansiveness of grace. In Jesus the blind see, the lame walk, the oppressed go free. Those who think they can only do are invited to sit and listen. Those who see themselves as only listeners are challenged to go and do. If Jesus seems impossible to satisfy, it is only because Jesus just simply sees more in us then we are able to see in ourselves. Jesus just simply loves us too much to let us remain trapped in boxes, instead he is constantly calling us to be the people that he knows that we are.
That, dear people of God, is grace. Grace is believing so fiercely in someone, that you cannot bear to see them remain in one place, but instead you love them into a version of themselves that they did not know they were capable of. Grace is the continually drawing forward into the completeness of God. It is the shackled Gerasene demoniac sitting clothed and relaxed at the feet of Jesus, and then being sent as a missionary to his own people. It is Simon being named the rock of the church, denying he knew Jesus at the cross, and then going on to be one of the greatest apostles of the faith. It is Jesus inviting Martha to throw off who she thought she should be and instead to be who she wanted to be. It is the lawyer being challenged to see even the Samaritan as his neighbor. It is confessing our sins and requesting repentance every single Sunday, knowing that every single week we will again fall short of our best ambitions, and yet every single Sunday hearing those same words of forgiveness again and again, and knowing that they are just as true this time as they were the week before. Sometimes we dive headfirst into grace, like Mary. Other times we are more like Martha, needed coaxing and encouragement. But always, always, Jesus is drawing more out of us then we ever thought possible, shaping us with the gentle grace of love. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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