“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Say what?
Let’s do a replay here and try to tune in and listen to Martha for a bit, shall we?
“I can’t believe it, Rabbi is coming to have supper at our house! Can it be any more stressful? I started getting ready as soon as I heard, and I stayed up all night picking up, scouring and vacuuming the house. I guess it looks OK, except that the kids left their bikes in the driveway and sandals all over the mudroom, but we can let the guests in through the front door. But the supper situation is a disaster! The good silver is stained, the drawer where we keep our good napkins has apparently been visited by mice (judging by their droppings), all the glasses have a layer of dust on them yay thick, and it’s all kitchen dust that is greasy and doesn’t come off easily. Not to mention that we don’t have enough matching plates and that the chairs are rocking.
And I haven’t even started telling you about the the food proper – I think the roast is still bloody while the potatoes are getting cold, we forgot to get half the ingredients for the Waldorf salad, the salted mushrooms went mouldy from waiting too long for a special occasion, the cake fell apart as I was taking it out of the springform pan, and the cream clotted and separated. How in the world am I going to bring all this together? Kitchen is a war zone.
Well, here they are. I am ready to cry and wish I could fall through the floor right now. Not to mention that I look like a fiend with red blotches all over my face, steam coming out of my ears, and there is nobody to offer the guests a glass of wine. I wish my face into a welcoming smile, but it refuses to cooperate and even I am not convinced. And to add insult to injury, what does my little brat of a sister do?” Rhetorical pause… “Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Look at her, lollygagging with a beautific smile on her face! When is she ever going to learn some responsibility!”
“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”
“Do you really mean that all my labour, angst and agony mean nothing to you? It is for you that I am going way out of my way to make and serve a nice dinner. You might as well have just slapped me on the face with your response.”
“And I do need this slap to snap out of my little personal hell that I have created for myself. Do you really care about how neat my house is? Did it have to be a high-maintenance roast and cake? A three ingredient stew served with a genuine smile would have been just the ticket. A nice dessert of figs and grapes that are growing right in the backyard would have gone down nice and sweet as an accompaniment to nice conversation, and it wouldn’t have needed a French overture that accompanies the cake. So whom am I working myself into a tizzy for? You? Or my pride as a housekeeper? Do I want to please you, or do I want to get recognition, both for the result and the hard work that I am doing?”
With this reflection, Martha fades back into the obscurity of the two millennia separating us.
St. Gregory the Great say that mystically, the two women signify the two dimensions of spiritual life – active and contemplative. The latter is more valuable since the active dimension will cease with the passing of this world, whereas the contemplation will persist into eternity. That’s deep.
On a shallower end, here is my humble interpretation. First, to state the obvious, Mary is listening to Jesus and his priceless teaching. The value of this is infinite and only through this she will be saved. This is hard to miss.
What is easier to miss, and why I feel compelled to share this with you, is the fact that Mary is listening. Let’s for now erase the power differential between Jesus and Mary, and see them as two people. She is siting at His feet trying to understand. I am sure at times she finds his words grating and wants to get her back up – after all, she is not perfect and therefore His words are not all sunshine and light. Yet despite this, she is trying to enter Jesus’s world and offer Him the gift of her understanding and acceptance. Being God, he has no need of either Mary’s understanding or Martha’s feast. But as Man, the gift of understanding is infinitely sweeter that any material gift that can be given, no matter how elaborate and costly. It requires genuine love, respect and humility to abandon your ego and truly listen to and understand another being whose worldview is different than yours and therefore rubs and grates.
I’ll end with the question – How often do we take organic brownies made from scratch as an adequate substitute for understanding and acceptance? Say, of our children, husbands and parents?