Mary, Martha’s sister has shown up in a previous story. At the Pharisees house where Jesus also went for dinner Mary was not only sitting at Jesus feet, she was crying on them, and washing them with her tears. She was hanging on his every word, but she was also pouring expensive perfume on his feet. Mary is apparently sensuous along with brainy.

Today, we find Mary seated again at the Lord’s feet, attending to his words. Martha may be listening to Jesus, but she also has a really big “to do” list. She is fretting, the scripture says. She was distracted by her many tasks. And she could use a little help in the kitchen. She utters a line that appears to be straight out of a book on co-dependency. She looked at Jesus and said “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to get on with the work by myself? Tell her to come and lend me a hand.” She was overworked and underappreciated.

Preachers have long chided Martha for her “fretting,” but I think there’s a lot more going on here than previously exposed. What if her statement was a projection of her own inner turmoil? I’m an analyst after all; you’ll permit me to explore her deeper realities.

What if this story is an archetypal expression of the feminine dilemma? Where there is always tension between serving others, and serving oneself. A woman is taught from an early age to make sure that everyone in the room has been provided with a beverage before getting her own. The role of feeding and tending sometimes directly conflicts with the desire for contemplation, study, and solitude. Martha tries to address this conflict within her. Maybe she wants to be doing what Mary is doing. But she can’t sit around and relax without feeling responsible for the household and the food on the table. Martha may have been envious of Mary’s closeness to Jesus. Jesus reinforces her dilemma by adding what appears to be a shame-weighted statement “Martha, Martha, you are fretting and fussing about so many things; but one thing is necessary. The part that Mary has chosen is best; and it shall not be taken away from her.”

We really don’t know what the “better part” means here. If women believed this text there’d be a lot more men in the kitchen, or a lot more take-out meals. How will the kids get bathed and who will read them the bedtime story, and who will clean the laundry?
I don’t see Jesus getting up and going to the kitchen here, do you?

Let me be clear, I support Mary’s role as the one who learns at Jesus feet. I value learning, I study the life and teachings of Jesus, I have twenty two years of scholarly pursuits and plenty of degrees and student loans…I get it that Mary’s mind is a fine, fine thing, and that Jesus honors her for her attention to his teaching. But at this point in the story I frankly have to side with Martha. I just want her to pour the large pot of food she’s cooked up on their laps and take a long walk by the Mediterranean Sea.

When I read this text my inner feminist gets riled up. Why doesn’t Jesus excuse himself and join Martha in the kitchen? If Martha doesn’t get the dinner done what will they eat? They can’t exactly order out for pizza for heaven’s sake. This story slays me the way the Cain and Able story slays me. It seems they were both doing their best and God took one of their offerings and rejected the other. We can all understand Cain at some level. We don’t excuse his violence, but we understand his rage. We can understand Martha. When the world appears to be unfair and we are burdened down with trying to hold some of it up, to do our part, and we are told to do something different, or that it’s not enough, not the BEST CHOICE, that just slays us. And we hate our sister or brother who seems to be getting honored for just sitting around doing NOTHING.

My inner martyr thinks she has a right to complain. The martyr role can be played out by men as well as women. Many men are also conflicted about their dual roles in making an income and wanting quality time at home. A male speaker at a recovery group said, “I spent my life doing what I was taught to do, give up myself, keep on giving, and then resent my partner for it.” For some people, Martha is a good reminder that if you give until you drop, you will not find love, and intimacy, you will have nothing internally to give and your relationships will fail. A drained and resentful partner is a terrible thing to encounter. Jesus is perhaps trying to save Martha from those distractions that limit her ability to encounter others intimately. We all need reminders about that.

Some preachers have suggested that since Jesus says Martha’s name twice, it indicates that he wasn’t scolding her so much as caring for her. No matter how I inflect my voice when reading it, it still sounds like a dig to me. It just makes us uncomfortable to think of Jesus scolding and shaming someone. An amazing aspect of this story is that Martha seems to maintain her relationship with Jesus despite this moment of tension.

Martha appears again in John’s Gospel story at the death of her brother Lazarus. Martha runs out to greet Jesus when he arrives at their house. She says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here my brother need not have died.” I suspect she’s pretty angry. Talk about a lack of attention to details. Why didn’t Jesus put Lazarus on his “to do” list, instead of staying four days after he’d heard that Lazarus was ill. They had sent for Jesus days earlier. Martha can’t help but wonder what Jesus had found more necessary than coming to save her brother Lazarus. “And you think I had my priorities messed up,” she says, in essence. You go girl.

Jesus offers no explanation, but plenty of hope. In listening to his words, Martha is transformed. She responds to him with a statement which stands out in all of the New Testament. She says, “You are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world.” When Peter says something similar in Matthew’s gospel it is called a “confession” and it is so highly honored that Peter is chosen to be the founding father of the church. What if the Christian faith had been founded on Martha’s confession, which is chronologically the first? Boggles the mind, doesn’t it.

Peter is handed the golden scepter and authority to build the community of the faithful for centuries ahead. Martha takes her fork and her cooking pot, and heads back to the kitchen. We can understand her pain, appreciate her astounding faith in Jesus despite all of these dynamics, and admire her for her tenacity.

The church of Peter- the patriarchal church has used both Mary and Martha as marvelous projections of dominant cultural beliefs about women. In the words of Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel (19)

“This story gives rise to our different feelings about the two sisters from Bethany, and these different feelings can be found time and again in the Christian tradition…Mary became the type of the contemplative…Christian. …She…attains supreme wisdom. She leaves behind all that is earthly and ‘soars above nature,’ She loves Jesus and gives herself totally to him….From Luther down to the present-day commentators Mary has exemplified someone who is good and righteous before God because she listened to the word.”

Martha’s confession goes nearly unnoticed. “There are no hymns about Martha. Because she went into the kitchen to prepare a meal for Jesus, her guest…she has been made the patron saint of housewives and cooks, and has been given a saints day.” Which, by the way, is next Sunday, July 29th. (Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel)

Martha doesn’t slip into oblivion. In the middle ages chapels were named for her. Carved statutes depict her as earlier goddesses were often seen, with her feet upon the head of a dragon. There are stories of her slaying dragons where she stuns them with the power of the cross, calms them with her very spiritual power, and according to early mythology, “wraps them up in her girdle.” I knew those things were good for something.

The archetypal Martha is based on a handful of Bible verses, but preachers have had a field day in describing and depicting her. She is the warrior mother we long for, who can fix the bathroom ceiling fan, change a diaper, make supper, and exterminate small menacing spiders without a hair on her head out of place or a bead of sweat on her brow. She is the woman of action, contrasted by Mary, the devoted scholar, who is so holy she doesn’t even think about eating. If Martha is the Holy Mother, Mary is the smart and adoring female.

Mary is the idealized sensuous woman who sits at the feet of her male partner and listens to his every word in rapt attention and delight. We don’t get the true picture of a whole woman or a whole man until we combine these two, until we affirm contemplation and action, service and self-care. Jesus said that we are to love the Lord with all of our hearts and minds and souls. He also said, feed my sheep.

A preacher and hymn writer during the reformation sought to end this complicated morass by saying that, “Martha must be a Mary and the true Mary must also be a Martha.” (Wichern from Moltmann-Wendel [22]) At some level this makes good sense. The integration of the desire for service and the desire for scholarship is essential not only for women but for men. When to act and when to sit back and relax. When to engage the mind in apprenticeship and when to take apart the engine just for the fun of seeing if you can put it back together? Being and doing are yet at odds in most of our lives. It’s summer, do you lay in a tent and watch the stars, or stay home because fitting four kids into a van, cooking meals of the fire pit, and dealing with one of them who won’t go to the potty for a few days because it’s “Yucky,” is just too exhausting. The spiritual yearning is to go into the mountains; the reality is that it’s hard to sleep on the ground with rocks under your back. And we are all so busy. Most of the time. We are so busy we don’t know how to stop being busy, even when we can, or when our health demands it. We are all asking “what is the better part?”

In the 1300’s Meister Eckhart, Catholic mystic and poet, preached a sermon in defense of Martha. In this sermon he turned the previous veneration of Mary on its head and elevated Martha to a higher standing. He made a case for Martha that changed the way the church looked at the contributions of women for centuries to follow. He described Martha as ‘mature.’ She is creative, he asserts, and says of her “What a wondrous involvement both outwardly and inwardly: understanding and being understood; seeing and being seen; holding and being held; that is the last stage where the Spirit perseveres in rest, united to beloved eternity.” (Moltmann-Wendel [29])

Wow, I’m not sure what he means, but if that’s what Martha is I’ll be glad to use her as a role model. It seems he points us, as the scripture does, to balance. The life in service is a good life. The life in contemplation and in study of scripture and prayer is a good life. We don’t have to exchange them for each other. But there will also be times when the pressure to be all things to all people will get to us. Like it got to Martha on the day Jesus dropped by.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine bequeathed her silverware to her women’s group. “Just in case something should happen to me.” At first I thought that this was an odd gift. But the more I thought of it the more beautiful the symbol became. It seemed uniquely female. Men might be careful to leave papers, photos, shop tools, pictures, but rarely would they make a priority of what to do with silverware. These are the tools of women’s trade, of more symbolic value than their silver or the weight of the cloth lined box they come in.

My mother left me the bulk of the family spoons. There are four generations of baby spoons in the collection. They aren’t pristine, though they are beautiful. You can tell they’ve been used. It all begins with feeding for mothers. The umbilical cord, the breast, the first spoon. Millions of meals later we’re still setting out utensils. I’ve been doing that for roughly thirty four years – let’s see at 365 days, less a few meals out, I add up about 12,000 meals I’ve put out silver wear for, and that’s just my own meals. Add to that the silverware I’ve set out for a husband, a daughter, other family, visitors and meals with friends. It’s possible that by the time I die I will have placed down, collected up, washed, and restored over one hundred thousand pieces of silverware.

I will have had more hours with my hands on silverware than on pens, my briefcase, client case notes, my writing journals, bed sheets, fry pans or pansies. There’s something intimate I experience placing my mother’s wedding silver on the table at the holidays. It’s no small thing that I have been touching, placing down, using, and washing ordinary flatware for years. It’s an intimate act, a loving act, no less powerful than Mary washing Jesus’ feet with her tears. So in some way my friend’s gift of silverware to her women’s group makes good sense. It’s like she’s saying “let me keep feeding you.” You are always welcome at my table. She feeds us, and will feed us beyond her lifespan, at the banquet in the great unbroken circle. In the sweet by and by. Meanwhile we keep feeding ourselves and others – it’s our job.

Has Mary really chosen the best part? With all due respect to Jesus and the gospel writer’s memory of the story, I think she has chosen a different part. No better or worse than Martha’s part. So next Sunday I’ll do something in honor of Martha’s saint day – I’ll fret about something, I’ll busy myself. Maybe I’ll invite friends over, hand them all aprons and expect them to join me in the kitchen. Amen!