St
Luke’s,
When I was in
It's much the same point that Paul makes in our
second reading this morning. Christ is, he says, the centre of the universe.
It's an important statement and as a concept it's central to
much of what we find in scripture, particularly in the first testament. Indeed
what we find in our reading from Amos is a description of precisely what
happens when you forget that God is at the centre of everything - it all turns
pear-shaped.
While there might not seem to be a lot of
connection between Amos and today's Gospel reading, I want to suggest there's
actually more than we might think, inparticularly
when it comes to what revolves around what.
What does it mean to be a disciple? It's a good
question, an important question, a question I want us to keep in mind as we
look more at the concept of vision, and it's also the question that lies at the
heart of today's gospel reading, the story of Martha and Mary.
Everywhere I've been, every time this story pops
up, I've found people feeling that they're personally being rebuked by it. They
hear Jesus' words to Martha as a direct criticism of her diligence and hard
work on behalf of him, and they see themselves in her.
There are a lot of Martha's in the Church, and
it's just as well, because where would we be without them? Where would we be
without the faithful Martha's who do all the work and cater all the functions,
and look after all the jobs that need to be looked after, while the Mary's just
sit around acting all spiritual?
Yet it's Mary, Jesus says, who chooses the
better part in this story. Martha, for all her efforts, is the one who ends up
standing corrected. How fair is that? It's easy to feel sorry for Martha. She
gets a hard time here after all. But it's even easier to miss some of the
points that go some way to explaining why that's the case.
For starters we need to recognise the important
of context in this story. There's its cultural context – the world in which it's set, a world where the role of women was very clearly
understood and the requirement to provide hospitality was all important. Then
there's the religious context where, again, clear expectations are placed on
hosts and hostesses and there is an expected and understood role for and
reaction to rabbis. And finally, and most importantly, there's the literary
context of this story and its place within Luke's Gospel.
If we look at that context we discover that this
story sits at the centre of three sections of teaching by Jesus about what the
life of a disciple involves. The first is the story of the Good Samaritan. In
that story Jesus responds to the legal question, who is my neighbour? This was
no ordinary question. It had been debated for hundreds of years, and in reality,
still is. Jesus answers that question with the story of the Good Samaritan and
ends with the instruction, go and do likewise. If you want to be my disciple,
in other words, you need to treat everyone as your neighbour, up to and
including those who are least likely and likeable.
In the next section, at the beginning of Luke
11, Jesus' followers come to him saying, John's disciples get taught how to
pray. We want to be real disciples too, so you need to teach us how to pray.
It's classic really, and I don't want to dwell on it too much because then I
won't have anything to say next week, but suffice to say Jesus does teach them
to pray and in doing so he teaches some more important lessons about what the
life of the disciple involves. But what about today?
Today we're in between those two sections, or pericopes to use the technical term. So how should we read
this periscope? Is this story in this place just by accident? Are Martha and
Mary just a kind of intermission between these two bits of instruction? Or do
we actually find in this story the lesson around which both the other lessons
in this series revolve - a reminder to all who pay attention of precisely what
is most central to the life of a disciple? I choose that answer.
The basics of this story are obvious but still
important. Jesus is on his way to
As soon as he arrives two important cultural
imperatives come into play. Firstly, there are the requirements of hospitality,
all important in first century Palestinian culture. Secondly there's the right
and proper place of women in that society. Seen and not heard isn't quite right,
more like heard and seldom seen. This was just the way things were meant to be.
Just precisely what Luke and / or Jesus might be
trying to say about these cultural expectations has been well described by one
writer as “wildly ambiguous”. Depending on how you want to read it, Jesus could
be identified here as a proto-feminist or a neo-conservative or a cultural
anarchist or all of the above, none of which changes the fact that Martha, the
oldest sister, immediately does precisely what she should do. She picks up her
responsibilities as a woman and a hostess and begins to prepare Jesus a meal,
while Mary, on the other hand, does not.
Some have made a big fuss about Jesus once again
going against the cultural expectations here, but let's face it; it's Mary who
really stirs the pot. Mary, who should and would have known better, chooses,
quite deliberately it seems, to completely ignore the expectations of her
culture, her religion and her sister, and instead assume, quite literally, the
place of a disciple, sitting at Jesus' feet, as disciples did, and paying close
attention to his words to the exclusion of all other actions.
Martha, on the other hand, also wants to pay
attention to Jesus. She's not completely uninterested in what he has to say,
she wants to listen as well, but she also knows that someone has to get the
dinner on and she's distracted, we're told, by her work, as well as annoyed at
her sister.
The Church is full of Martha's, and if this
story was a biblical island with little or no connection to the stories on
either side of it then we'd all be in trouble as a result. Fortunately it's
not.
The Church is full of Martha's, and that's a
very good thing, as the story immediately before this one makes clear. The
point of the Good Samaritan is that the life of a disciple is a life of service
to others, even undeserving and unlikely others, and , today's story goes on to
say, it's a life of listening and learning and knowing that sometimes that's
the more important task.
I want us to celebrate the Martha's in our
church. I want to congratulate them and thank God for them because they're the
ones who get things done, but I also want to congratulate and thank God for the
Mary's, and I want to encourage both to be a bit more like each other, because
it's not an either or, but rather very much a both.
I want to encourage those who come to services
and pay attention to sermons – very important – and commit to the prayers and
worship; I want to encourage them to also get involved in some of the other work
around the parish. Pick up a task or two, and if you're not sure what's
available, ask. There's always plenty of work.
And I want to encourage those whom we can always
count on to roll their sleeves up and do the dishes, those who turn up to
working bees and to run the stalls at the fair, I want to encourage them to
also spend time in here, listening, praying and worshipping the Christ who is,
as Paul writes, at the very centre of our universe, because that, at the end of
the day, is really what we're all about.
What does the life of a disciple involve? To love others, yes, but even more importantly, to love God, to
listen to God, to pay attention to God. May we find the true strength
and perseverance it takes to truly sit at Jesus' feet.
Amen.