I can’t hear the names Martha and Mary without thinking of my own family. I had an aunt Martha and an aunt Mary, and five other aunts besides, sisters all living in the same town. And while today’s gospel story clearly means to contrast Martha and Mary to make its point, in fact my aunts were pretty much all of a piece, and if we’re to be guided by today’s gospel, they might all just as well have been named Martha. My experience of them has always been from big family get-togethers that one or the other of them was hosting, and I don’t think I saw my aunt Martha sit down until she was in her mid-80s, because whenever I saw her, for the first three hours she was serving food, and for the second three she was putting it away. I still wonder when she ever ate.
I had and still sometimes have some wonderful evenings at the hands of my aunt Martha, and she never showed any of the crabbiness that we see in the gospel’s Martha, grousing because her sister won’t help. Of course, that’s partly because all my aunt Martha’s good Croatian sisters were there in the kitchen with her until their dying days, and in my family Jesus would clearly have been sent down to the basement with the uncles, so the conflict would never even have come up.
But what is the conflict here, between Martha and Mary, where Jesus so clearly comes down on the side of Mary’s seeming inactivity, her nonparticipation in the hospitality that Martha was working so hard to prepare? As with so many stories in the gospel where Jesus is contrasting two people to make a point, it’s important to get the contrast he is trying to make exactly right.
What we are placing in opposition isn’t activity and inactivity, with the inactive life being somehow presented as more holy, more promising, more Christ-like. Martha, in many ways, is doing everything that is expected of her. She is dedicating herself to serving this unusual guest, and in fact is fulfilling her very serious responsibilities as a Jewish host, responsibilities that had many more religious overtones than what we usually think of as our little social obligations when we make things ready for a guest.
The message here is not that she should have done nothing, and maybe slowed her life down a bit. That’s not the contrast Jesus is hoping for us to see, so all of us who are consumed with activity of one sort of another from dawn until long past sunset can at least feel that that in itself does not make us inferior Christian disciples. This gospel does not ask us to stop being a parish of doers, to take life easier, to stop expecting a lot of ourselves. It does call us to be a parish of listeners. Martha’s problem is not activity. It is her distraction.
The parallel with the first reading, from Genesis, is a wonderful one, and helps us figure out the point. Abraham receives these three mysterious visitors, without names, the first sign from God that he is being singled out to be the first of God’s chosen ones. Abraham, when he sees the visitors, rushes around like Martha fulfilling all the demands of hospitality and welcome — bringing water, washing feet, making bread, choosing the calf. But what is most remarkable and mysterious is that he noticed the visitors at all. He was somehow just seated at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, and the visitors did not knock at the door, or seek him out, or give any sign at all to get his attention. All of a sudden, the reading says, “looking up, he saw three men standing nearby.” Had he not looked up and seen them, standing there for some completely unclear purpose, not approaching, not going away, would he ever have received the message that they were sent there to give him? Would they have gone on, perhaps, to someone else?
How do we develop this wonderful, sometimes miraculous ability to notice what is going on next to us even in the midst of our activity? Distraction and self-absorption aren’t cured by a vacation, or by taking it easy for a while. What leads us to see the visitor, and hear the message, and to recognize the guest, is to stop believing that we will earn our salvation or salvation for anyone around us, by the sheer multiplicity of our many efforts and projects and ambitions. Jesus calls us to be as creative and as hard-working as we can be. But the “one thing necessary” that Jesus talks about today is not our effort, but our awareness.
The problem with sheer effort is that so easily, we can think that the work on our desk is more interesting than the person on the other side of it, or that the plans we have made are much too critical to be open to interruption, or to a change in plans, to a child, or to a visitor. The cure for that disease is not to stop the work; the cure for that is to recognize, each day, each morning, each hour, that the visitor and the visitor’s message are always, in our scripture, the key to our future. We don’t earn what we get; it knocks on our door.
Noticing the guest, and wondering who it is who is right in front of you, is an art that we only master by praying, every day, to be good at it. So keep working hard. But try, every day, to look up from your work and to do the one thing necessary.