Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary,
There are two kinds of people.
There are Marthas and there are Marys.
It is all very simple. Some of us are tuned into the practicals; we are the doers. Some of us are more in tune with the spiritual and the philosophical; we are the thinkers.
And, while clearly, we need both thinkers and doers, the thinkers, according to Jesus, are the winners. We who abandon the practicalities of the world, or at least, put them well into second place, we are the ones who have chosen the better (many translations have good) part. We still focused on keeping the cold out and getting a meal on the table, well, we’re not just left with the dishes; we’re left with a very clear message: spiritual good, practical, not so good.
Is Martha a passive-aggressive shrew deeply resentful of a sister, always a wastrel who, in her effort to break the glass ceiling, abandons the sisterhood? Or is she the only one in the story who is living in the real world; the only one with the courage to call a spade a serving dish and to call out Mary and Jesus?
Is Mary a courageous, would-be disciple, trailblazing a new path for women, or is she a vacuous airhead so enamoured with her own spiritual enlightenment that she is blissfully—or wilfully—unaware of the daily grind of getting food on the table?
And what of Jesus? Is he a poster boy for unreconstructed patriarchy, blithely brushing off Martha as a tiresome hysteric who should just get with the program, lighten up and sing a few bars of Bobby McFerrin’s, ‘Don’t worry, be happy?
We surely need a reading of this text that gets us away from a there-are-two-kinds-of-people nursery rhyme. That kind of simplistic, binary cleaving of the world—some are in; some are out—always does damage. Flattening the extraordinary complexity and variety of how we are human hollows out and deadens our humanity. Simple, gross binaries have always been favoured and enthusiastically boosted by oligarchs and autocrats—it is always about divide, demonise and control. And that way leads to the camps.
What if we decide to read this text more parabolically? This is not to say that we do not have here an account of an actual incident, nor is it to dismiss reading the passage as a possible proto-feminist liberation text in which a woman, refuses to be put ‘in her place,’ to be caught up in the patriarchal expectation, and instead, sat at Jesus's feet; the stance strictly reserved for male students.
There are two hints in the text that, I think, invite a more parabolic reading. First, these events take place in a certain village. Twice in Luke, Jesus introduces parables with the word certain (Luke 7:41, 18:2). We might here be invited to take this story out of the particular and into the universal. Secondly, we learn that two women, with teasingly similar names, are sisters. While there is nothing in the text, nor in the traditions, to suggest that these two were twins, in mythology, especially that of the Celts and the Norse, twins have a special archetypal place. They often represent the conflicting elements in our natures that are at war with each other deep within the spirit/soul/psyche. In stories, the perceived special interconnectedness of twins and their individual otherness represent the struggle we all as individuals live; between who we are and who we wish to be, between what we say and what we do, between what we believe and how we actually live.
If we explore the possibilities in this text from the point of view of the internal struggle, we are in good company. In the New Testament, this restless, lifelong struggle, this internal duality, is spelt out by Paul: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7:19, 24).
Martha is introduced to us in the purity of her intentions and actions; she welcomed him into her home. In the world of the ancient Near East, hospitality and welcome were a woman’s supreme duty and honour. Martha begins the story in goodness. Soon, however, she is distracted by her many tasks. This is the human experience. All of our stories begin in welcome and openness. As infants, we open our arms and our senses to receive and welcome. We are hungry to experience and understand the world. Researchers in early childhood tell us that what we sometimes read as a constant distraction in toddlers is not their inability to pay attention but their inability to not pay attention. They need to take in everything!
We begin, arms wide, taking in all of life. But life is overwhelming. We cannot deal with all that vies for our attention. We must learn that some things require our attention, and some things must be left. We learn, quite quickly, to be ‘practical’ and ‘sensible’ and ‘realistic.’ And this is right and good. We must make a life, a livelihood. We must get on.
But the arms-open, infant part of us knows that we are choosing to close ourselves down. And, if our reading of this text is right, we don’t do that easily. There is that within us that wants to remain open, to be childlike in our wonder and our learning, to be in the very vulnerable position of Mary, sitting on the floor looking up, just as we did as children. And we know, in the quiet moments of our hearts, that the words of Jesus are true and right; whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it (Luke 18:17). Whoever does not remain open, vulnerable and wondering, will miss all the glory and miracle that the world offers in abundance.
And knowing this, knowing how much that which is necessary distracts us from that which we long to be and are called to be, we lash out. We lash out at others, Lord, do you not care? – It is the system! It is the culture! It is all the responsibilities that have been foisted upon me that are keeping my life disjointed and divided!
We lash out at ourselves too; my sister has left me to do all the work by myself—who I truly am has left me! I have failed so often to be who are truly am—who I could and long to be, who I am called to be—that this failure has almost become who I am.
But this story tells us we can choose the better part. We can choose! We are human. We are the ones who get to choose to name the animals in the second creation story (Genesis 2:19). We were born to have agency. We need not be trapped in endless self-recrimination and disappointment. We no longer need to hide behind our job, our money, our status, our busyness, our many things. We no longer need to cry out: Lord, do you not care? and thrash about seeking someone to blame or someone to join us in our misery. We no longer need to demand: Tell her then to help me. We no longer need to hunt down the new book, the correct creed, the exciting job, the right house, the perfect relationship, or any of the things that we attach to our lives in the hope that they will magically stitch our disparate selves into unity.
There is need of only one thing.
Here, I think, is one more hint in the text that allows for a psychological reading. The ancient manuscripts can’t agree whether Jesus here says, one thing, few things, or few things are needed—or only one. I think this imprecision invites us to turn away from a creedal response, where we are required to adhere to a single, concrete doctrinal position. It invites us to leave behind binary simplicity—this is right, so that must be wrong. We can turn toward a deep, rich, complex contemplation on the purpose of existence, of what is needed for us to experience the fullness of life.
What is needed, according to this reading of the story, is not the addition of new practices, beliefs, or commitments, but rather a shedding of things that are not needed. This involves courage. We need courage to go against the prevailing culture of acquisition to embrace the abandonment of that which we no longer need. All the stuff we have collected all the stories and images we have of ourselves that we think make up who we are. Only one, or a few things are needed. We need courage to sometimes say, not, as we good, western culture people have been taught, ‘Don’t just sit there. Do something!’ But, ‘Don’t just do something. Sit there!’ Doing something, frenetic activity, can only ever give us an illusion of humanity. It was Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher, who famously said, ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’
Courage is hard, especially courage to go against the prevailing wisdom. But let us not be disheartened. It was G.K. Chesterton who said, ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.’ However much we stumble along, sometimes half-heartedly, however much we continue to live disjointed, disconnected, disparate lives, Martha-like one minute, Mary-like the next, however often we are overwhelmed, we are, for all our faults, and all our scars, already creations of the divine. We are, as the late Catholic Cardinal Basil Hume put it: ‘made in the image and likeness of God and possess a dignity and value which can never be taken away.’