| Readings: | Genesis 18:1-10a Colossians 1:24-28 Luke 10:38-42 |
| Date: | July 20, 2025, Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C |
Today's story of Jesus' visit to his friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus is one of the most well known Gospel stories. But based on many comments on this story that I read this past week or so, I think it might also be one of the most misunderstood. For example, I saw someone selling a poster on Pinterest that said, "Lord help me be like Mary today; ask Martha to come over and clean my house!" And there were lots of other comments from people, generally divided into people who claimed to be on Team Martha and others on Team Mary. As far as I can figure out, the controversy comes from a simplistic and misguided understanding of what Jesus is trying to get Martha to see.
Like so many Gospel stories, it is important that we understand the context of today's reading. In Luke's Gospel, it comes after Jesus sending out the 72 disciples to heal the sick, cast out demons, and preach, that we heard two weeks ago, followed by the story of the Good Samaritan we heard last week where Jesus clearly teaches that it is the Samaritan who stopped and took action to care for the man beaten and left at the side of the road who acted like a neighbor. And then next week, after we hear Jesus teach his disciples how to pray, we will hear Jesus follow up with a story about a man whose neighbor knocks on his door late in the evening to ask for some provisions to feed someone who came to visit him. In this parable, Jesus is also very clear about the need to respond to our neighbors' needs when they ask, rather than delaying until it is more convenient for us. In other words, given this context, Jesus is definitely NOT telling Martha that she would be better off if she stopped working at making Jesus and his disciples at home in her house, and just sat and listened at Jesus' feet like Mary. And he is not telling us that we all need to live the lives of the contemplative. So what is Jesus trying to get Martha, and us, to understand?
There is also a cultural context that affects this story. Jesus and at least his twelve disciples have showed up at his friends' house. In that culture of Jesus' time, it was a seriously obligation to show hospitality even to strangers, let alone friends, by inviting them in and in most cases, providing a meal. And in that culture, those tasks were expected to be done by the women of the house. We see this plainly in the first reading when Abraham goes into his house and instructs his wife Sarah to whip up a full farm to table steak dinner for the 3 strangers who have just appeared at Abraham's door. So Martha is not just doing busy work, she is fulfilling what would have been an important and serious obligation for the women of the house when they get visitors.
So over the centuries, many commentators point out that Jesus is not chastising Martha for being busy providing hospitality but rather that she is focusing on her sister Mary's action or inaction, and has become angry that Mary is not helping. And now she asking Jesus to justify that anger. This is not a story that tries to pit Martha and Mary against one another as a model for the best way to be a disciple. In fact, many ancient and medieval sermons presented Martha and Mary as two halves of the ideal disciple. In other worlds the ideal is not someone who takes action versus someone who lives a totally contemplative life but the ideal is someone who takes action based on contemplation. As Origen said commenting on this story in the 3rd century: Action and contemplation do not exist one without the other. And in the fourth century Basil the Great described the twins of action and contemplation as being in a relationship the way the sea needs the land and the land needs the sea.
Here are two more insights that might help us to understand this story and to incorporate it into our live. The first is what St. Ignatius of Loyola termed being contemplative in action; in other words to be both prayers and doers. But in doing, we are to follow what Jesus is trying to get Martha to see, and that is to keep our eyes and hearts fixed on Jesus as we do what needs to be done. We are to marry prayer and service, to be prayerful as we work. Another insight we have is from what St. Augustine said, comparing Martha and Mary to the Church. He characterized Martha as the pilgrim church working toward perfection in the world at this moment, and Mary as the heavenly Church to come. He said, "What Martha did is what we are, but what Mary did is what we hope for."
So my prayer is that we come away from reflecting on this Gospel story with an understanding that it is not that we are either Marthas doing all the work or Marys absorbed in prayer and adoration but that we learn to work in such a way that it lifts our hearts and mind to God, and pray in such a way that it helps us understand more clearly what needs to be done, and inspires us to get up and do that.
Let us be contemplatives in action.