The One Needful thing
Luke 10: 38-42 Proper 11
18 July 2010
Once again today we have a very familiar Gospel lesson: the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of Mary and Martha. Jesus, you may recall, is on his way towards Jerusalem. The village of Bethany, where Mary and Martha, and of course, their brother Lazarus, lived, was not far away. It was Martha who first met Jesus and welcomed him into their home. We are not told by St Luke if this visit was the first that Jesus had made to this home or whether he was already well-known there. Luke seems to be arranging his material thematically rather than chronologically here. If so, then the visit might well have happened early in Jesus’ ministry. In any case, after greeting Jesus, Martha got back to work while her sister sat down at Jesus’ feet—the posture of the disciple—to listen to the Master teach. It is probable that there were more included in the company, but we don’t know how many.
As you know, it wasn’t long before Martha became upset. She came to Jesus to complain that her sister was not helping with the duties of hosting him and his company. Jesus, however, did not take her side. He gently rebuked her and said that Mary had chosen the better part—the one necessary thing. Martha was upset about many things, but Mary had chosen the best one—and it would not be taken from her. What did Jesus mean?
This story has sometimes been used in the past as an indication that the contemplative life has a higher value than the active life—that is, that the monastic life of prayer and worship is superior to the working life of lay folk. But I think that completely misses the point. Mary was not forever relieved of household chores. She had done them before and would certainly do them again. Martha, however, was missing out on something that Mary recognized as more important than setting the table and getting the food ready: Jesus’ teaching. Jesus would soon be on his way somewhere else and Martha would have missed the whole point of his visit—everything he had to say and to teach. Mary knew the value of the present opportunity and took advantage of it. What she learned from Jesus she would have as an inalienable possession.
I think that what we are given in this little vignette is a picture of what all too often happens to us. All of us have our work to do—all of the things that fill our lives, that are our responsibilities, that no one else is going to do. Then one day Jesus comes to visit, as it were, in the middle of our normal routines. Martha welcomed Jesus to her home and to her life, and then went back to her work as if Jesus wasn’t even there—or as if he were only one more element in her life that had to be managed and fit in to her to-do list.
Mary saw that Jesus’ presence demanded a different response. Normal routines must be suspended. You don’t just try to fit him in to your life as it already was. You stop and listen to him first, sit at his feet, absorb his presence and his teaching, and then eventually go back to work—perhaps doing the same things as before, but in a different way. Now you have a different understanding of what you are doing. You take your bearings from what Jesus said and did, which means that you do not automatically try to fit in with the way things are done around you, as if Jesus’ and his teachings didn’t matter. Mary chose the better way.
When Jesus visited the home of Mary and Martha, he had something crucial to tell them about their lives and work. He has something crucial to tell us about our lives and work. He shows us who God is and what he is doing in the world; he tells us the story of creation and redemption; he shows us the kind of plan God has for us and for our world. In short, he tells us about the Kingdom of God—the glorious future that has entered already into our world, which is the true goal of all of our life and its strivings. He explains that we cannot get anything in our lives exactly right if we do not connect it correctly to himself and his Kingdom. He expects that we shall stop and listen to him and then re-organize our lives of work and leisure, family and community, around the realities of the Kingdom.
But we often miss his visit. We, too, are preoccupied by many things when only one thing is necessary: Christ and his Kingdom. Of course, we must go back to work. Of course, we have our families and friends to live with. But we will work at our jobs, play with our kids, love our spouses, enjoy our friends, and serve our communities differently—if we have been really listening to Jesus. We cannot simply fit Jesus or his Father or the Kingdom of God into our little lives as they are, into the plans we have already made, into our routines as we have developed them—or into the plans and purposes which the world around us has developed without any concern for God and into which we are often caught up.
The world around us functions pretty much on its own—most of the time not paying any attention to God or his will for human society—as our lesson from Amos today demonstrates for us. We who have met and listened to Jesus are meant to take a different way. We believe that nothing we do can be done well or conscientiously if it is not done out of obedience to Jesus’ way of thinking and living. We believe that we are called to carry on his life and ministry here, representing God and his Kingdom in all that we do, as witnesses to our neighbors of the kind of world he is creating. How we shall do this in detail requires a lot of hard thinking on our part as we learn to develop the habits of mind and heart and body that will manifest the character of true disciples of Jesus. But for the most part, we already know what we have to do: become people of compassion and patience, humility and love, peacefulness and mercy, self-control and generosity. It will take a lot more than stopping to listen one time to Jesus, as Mary did, but it inevitably begins there. Paying attention to Jesus is certainly the one needful thing.