SHE DOES NOT SEEM to have stepped out of her place. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Commentators on Luke 10:38-42 almost always remark on the way Martha talked to Jesus. They see in it a sharpness they find surprising or off-putting.
I don’t know. As someone who drove through the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s with an “Uppity Women Unite” sticker on her VW bumper, that’s not what I’d be inclined to think. I think Martha gets a bad rap. For one thing it’s clear that she’s a householder — the home she invites Jesus into is her own home. Newer scholarship sees in that the suggestion that she is the leader of a house church. A pastor, as we might say. Certainly she was the theologian in the family. (Mary may have sat at Jesus’ feet, but she did so silently. It was Martha who argued with him.)
No matter what you think of Martha, you don’t have to be a pastor to empathize with her. All you have to be is someone who is anxious about your “service,” your ministry. Someone who is concerned about the world God loves. About peacemaking and widows and orphans and what to do with our enemies. Like Martha, many of us are anxious not for piddling reasons — not out of vanity or because we are house-proud — but for legitimate reasons. We are anxious for the wrongs of the world to be put right, to see peace flooding in, to dry tears, to correct egregious errors. “Lord do you not care?” we say.
Of course interpreters of this text have long assumed that Martha ticked Jesus off with the way she spoke to him. But this is Jesus we’re talking about. Do you think Jesus was so easily provoked? “Lord, do you not care… ?” Those are the very same words the disciples got away with during the storm on the sea! Surely it must be okay to mount that kind of a prayer: “Lord, do you not care… ?” That we have been left alone here. That the job is too big for us. That our future seems to be hanging by a thread. That we cannot even agree on whose lives matter.
It must be OK to pray that kind of prayer, don’t you think? I think of how Annie Dillard describes the liturgy as “words people have successfully aimed at God without getting killed.” Surely those words are among them.
So why then does Jesus not reach out to comfort Martha? Why is what Mary is doing “the better part”? Luke’s story suggests it is because hearing God’s word is essential to doing ministry. You might even say there is no doing apart from hearing. Apart from the word of God, doing will wear you out, run you down, leave you anxious and make you sick. Openness to the word of God — drinking in, praying over, studying the word of God — is the life-giving thing, the one essential thing. It is the thing that makes ministries of all kinds possible.
God fuels and funds our doing with God’s word. That’s the short and long of this story. Just do not let anyone tell you that Jesus prefers his disciples to be mystics or contemplatives or even people who have the right theological ideas. Jesus loves mystics, contemplatives, prayer warriors and — thank goodness — theologians. But he does not privilege them. God gives God’s word so that justice, peace and healing may break out on earth.
Maybe when Martha spoke to Jesus she did step out of her place. And maybe even as Jesus answered, he smiled. Maybe he pulled out a chair for her and with a wave of his hand invited her to rest her weary bones. In her place.
JANA CHILDERS is dean and vice president for academic affairs at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
