The Better Part

Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s house on the farm in West Texas was a sight to behold: roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, black-eyed peas, green beans, corn, squash and cantaloupe fresh from the garden, hot biscuits that never touched one of those paper tubes you hit on the side of the kitchen counter, three kinds of pickles and two kinds of preserves, and for dessert, peach cobbler with ice cream. And that’s just ordinary Sunday dinner. If the preacher was coming, my grandmother pulled out all the stops.

When I was a child those meals seemed to appear on the table by magic. Now, of course, I realize how much work they must have taken to prepare. Opal Loveless, my grandmother, churned her own butter, "put up" all the pickles and preserves herself, and baked everything from scratch. So far as I can remember, the women in the family were the ones who helped in the kitchen, while the men sat in the living room or in a shady part of the yard, talking about the weather, commodity prices, and the eternal folly of the "gov’ment."

There was one drawback to Sunday dinner. My grandfather, who raised a few cattle, would inevitably comment on the provenance of the beast being consumed. "Yep," he’d say, "That’s a roast from Old Bessie’s calf. You remember her: the heifer with the black patch over her left eye."

It was enough to make you want to stick to the black-eyed peas.

I wish I’d asked her when I had the chance, because I’d love to know what my grandmother thought about today’s gospel story. She’d have know it by heart, of course. She’d have told it to the kids in her Sunday School class at the Coahoma Presbyterian Church any number of times. She probably had a flannel-graph figure for Mary and one for Martha, and, of course, one for Jesus.

I can see her placing the figure for Martha in the kitchen with those red, rough hands of hers that had peeled tons of potatoes and snapped mountains of beans. The fingers that had kneaded and rolled out miles of dough and cut out untold thousands of biscuits would have put the figure of Mary, sitting comfortably at Jesus’ feet, amongst the male disciples.

"Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to (get off her duff and) help me."

That seems a more-than-reasonable request, given the division of labor in households of the ancient Middle East, and in the households of my grandmother’s generation and the generations before her. The difference between Martha and Opal was, Opal wouldn’t have bothered Jesus. She’d have marched right into the living room, apron in hand, stood Mary up, tied the apron on her, and led her back to the kitchen.

Still, the words Jesus spoke to Martha must have stung Opal a little. "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her."

I have yet to preach from this text without one or two people saying to me on the porch after the service, "You know, I empathize with Martha. Wasn’t Jesus being awfully hard on her?"

I can’t answer that question without prejudice. I come from a long line of Marthas. Let me say that I don’t think Luke tells this story to make us Martha’s feel any more guilty than we probably already do.

There are lots of valid ways to hear this story. I’ll mention only two.

The first way is to hear this story is as the partner to another story Luke has just told. Immediately before this episode a lawyer had asked Jesus to define the word "neighbor," and Jesus, you’ll remember, responded with the story of the Good Samaritan.

Following Jesus is more than talk, Luke might be saying, it’s also action. Don’t just stand there, do something. Pick a victim of violence out of the ditch, bind up her wounds, and look after her needs. Faith without works is dead, as James would say. Or as Jesus put it, "Go and do likewise."

Next comes the story of Martha, the doer, verses Mary, the listener. Jesus commends Mary for choosing "the better part," for being still and for listening to what Jesus is saying. Put both stories together and the message is this: there must be a balance in the Christian life between contemplation and action, between being and doing.

If we took the Good Samaritan as our only model for faithful living, the Lord would end up with a church full of burned-out social activists. If we took Mary for our only model, the Lord would end up with a church full of contemplatives who are of no earthly good to anybody.

I’ll never forget the day several years ago when a homeless family showed up in my study asking for food and a place to sleep. "We tried some other churches," they said. "They told us to come to you because you’re the church that helps people." Those were their exact words.

I’m proud to serve a church blessed with plenty of Martha’s, but I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of worry and distraction that goes with being a Martha. Sometimes we forget that the chief end of human life is not to attend committee meetings. Unless you and I are nourished by the whole gospel, our doing will keep us busy, but it might not keep us faithful.

Coupled, then, with the story of the Good Samaritan, this story about Mary and Martha is a summons to seek balance in the Christian life.

Here’s another way to read this story. Read it as evidence of a radical gender equality that flourished in the very earliest days of the church’s life, but was soon squashed by male leaders.

Look at Mary, sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to him. "Sitting at the feet" of a teacher is a technical term for the task of an official disciple. Paul reports that he "sat at the feet" of the great Rabbi Gamaliel. This is not the proper role for a woman of Jesus’ day.

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas is a collection of supposed sayings of Jesus that was not included in the biblical canon. (In a moment you’ll see why). It too has a story about Mary. In this story the disciples object to the presence of a woman among them. Jesus replies, "See, I shall lead her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living spirit. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the rule of heaven" (saying 114).

Scholars see this as one of many pieces of evidence of a rising tide of patriarchy that drowned out the gender equality that marked the earliest years of the church’s life. The way Luke tells it, Mary has taken her rightful place at Jesus’ feet as a full disciple. There’s nothing in Luke about her having to become a male in order to do so. It didn’t take long, however, for male leaders in the early church to re-assert an authority derived not from the example of Jesus, but from their own male-dominated culture.

That kind of thing still happens, of course. I believe it happened a few years ago when "messengers" to the Southern Baptist Convention declared that wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands.

Those who voted for that amendment to the Baptist Faith and Message believed that they were applying the teachings of the Apostle Paul. This is the same Paul, of, course, who wrote to the Galatians that in Christ "there is no longer male or female," the same Paul who wrote to the Corinthians, " . . . the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does."

I’m am confident that there are plenty of Southern Baptists who are just as embarrassed from time to time by their Convention as there are Presbyterians who are embarrassed by our General Assembly.

If Jesus had said to Mary in Luke’s version of this story, "Mary, run along and help your sister like a good little girl," his words would have fit right in with the cultural standards of his day and the agenda of some modern Christians. But that’s not what Jesus says. He says, "Mary has chosen the better part."

The gospel says a great deal about "grace" and about being "subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." Taken as a whole, however, it calls women and men alike to same order of discipleship. "Gracious submission" is to Christ, not to a fallen culture’s notion of how men and women should behave.

Read this way, this story is an endorsement of the full participation of women in the life of the church. I wonder if my grandmother read it that way. I asked her once why she declined to be ordained as an elder or deacon in her own congregation. Did she think the ordination of women was unbiblical?

"Law, law," she said. "Not a bit. I just think that if women get ordained, they’ll take over everything and we won’t get a lick of work out of the men." My grandmother was not only an astute Biblical exegete. She also knew her practical theology.

In the final analysis, this story does not condemn Martha for her sincere efforts at hospitality or for seeking some help in the kitchen. Neither does it commend Mary for leaving her sister in the lurch. What it does do is warn us not to be "distracted by many things" so that we miss the heart of the gospel.

The heart of the gospel is grace. The heart of the gospel is Jesus himself.

                    He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation . . .
                    He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together . . .|
                    For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
                    and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things,
                    whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

As she grew older, my grandmother stopped making her own butter. She bought margarine in those little plastic tubs. Then she started using those biscuits in a tube that you whack on the edge of the counter. Eventually she got to point where she couldn’t cook at all. At her funeral we sang:

                    For all the saints who from their labors rest,
                    who thee, by faith, before the world confessed,
                    thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest. Alleluia!

As busy as Opal was sometimes, she never really lost sight of "the better part," the heart of the gospel, the "image of the invisible God," her Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I think, she and Martha are conducting seminars in heaven on women’s liberation while the twelve disciples are cooking Sunday dinner.

On special occasions, however, I hope she still does the peach cobbler. I’m looking forward to that.