“Martha was distracted with much serving” (Luke 10.40)
Every so often, we come across a passage in the Gospels which seems to strike us as not quite right. How many of us on listening to the parable of the Prodigal Son, have thought, didn’t the elder brother have something of a point when he wondered why the fatted calf was prepared for his sibling, who had “devoured their father’s living with harlots”, when he had always done what was asked of him and never received so much as a kid-goat that he “might make merry with his friends”? As an elder brother myself, I can certainly vouch for that. And the same is, I suspect, true of the account proposed for our reflection today, namely the story of Christ at the house of Martha and Mary.
There are two reactions: either we think that it’s obvious that Mary has chosen the better portion, since she is listening rapt at the feet of our Saviour; or, we want to take up the cudgels on behalf of Martha, who is having to do all the work while everyone else gets to listen to Jesus, despite the fact that they’ll want supper afterwards, and who else is going to lay the table, and what about opening the wine, never mind warming the plates, and where’s the little wedge of cardboard that goes under the table-leg, and so on, and so on. Rudyard Kipling gave voice to this sense of unfairness in his poem Sons of Martha, putting it like this:
The Sons of Mary seldom bother,
for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother
of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once,
and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons,
world without end, reprieve, or rest.
But the point that S. Luke makes, and indeed a point that our readings for today make when taken together, is not that it is wrong to worry about hospitality and material things. We have heard in two of our readings the accounts of two separate divine visitations. In both, the Lord is welcomed, but the outcomes are very different. When Abraham is visited by the Lord at the oaks of Mamre, it is entirely proper that he runs from his tent, despite the heat of the day, and puts himself, his wife, his staff and his goods at the disposal of his visitors. He, like Martha, whose name means “the Mistress”, is in charge of the household, and performs those tasks of selection and direction which are his to perform. The problem with Martha is in her distraction: as the Authorized Version has it, she was “cumbered about much serving”. Instead of achieving a proper balance between what she was doing and how she was to do it, she had strayed into form at the expense of content, into doing at the expense of being. Mary, having Our Lord in her midst, and sitting at his feet, had recognized that listening to his word is – or should be – the most important thing in our lives.
If we want to say, as the hymn puts it, “come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest”, the story of Mary and Martha serves to remind us that there is a proper balance between being and doing which we have to achieve in order fully and worthily to receive our risen Lord. And Martha does eventually learn, and so there is hope for all of us! When she again encounters Jesus after the death of her brother Lazarus, as John’s Gospel tells us, yes, it is she who goes out first to meet him while Mary stays at home, telling him “If you had been here, my brother would not have died”; and yes, she engages him in this, somewhat forthright, conversation. But despite all this, it is to her alone that Our Lord speaks those words which have touched and will touch so many of us: I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And after this, she goes and tells her sister Mary that ‘the Teacher is here and is calling for you’”. John underlines that she says this, perhaps uncharacteristically, “quietly”.
Mary and Martha are often used as examples of the contemplative and active sides of Christian life respectively: that is, Mary is like those who are called to the religious life of prayer and contemplation, and Martha like those who are called to be Christians in the world of work, of activity, of apostolate. But as in all things there needs to be balance. Perhaps paradoxically, it’s in a monastic context, in the Rule of St Benedict, where this combination of action and contemplation is made explicit: in Chapter 35, which is On the Weekly Servers in the Kitchen, Benedict writes
Let the brethren serve one another, and let no one be excused from the kitchen service except by reason of sickness or occupation in some important work. For this service brings increase of reward and of charity. But let helpers be provided for the weak ones, that they may not be distressed by this work; and indeed let everyone have help, as required by the size of the community or the circumstances of the locality.
But there is another aspect which I want to bring to our attention. Those of us who prepare ourselves to make our confession according to old-fashioned books like The Manual of Catholic Devotion will know that “have I been distracted at Mass” is one of the questions we are to ask ourselves. Martha was “distracted with much serving”, and there are all kinds of things which can distract us at Mass, both in the sung festivity of Solemn Mass on a Sunday, and also in the quieter, more reflective atmosphere of a weekday Low Mass. External observations and internal thoughts put just as much ‘white noise’ between us and Our Lord as the clatter of pots and pans.
So what can we do about it? Fallible and weak human beings that we are, the achievement of perfect concentration on these Sacred Mysteries is not something given to us all all of the time, and nor should we expect it to be. But what we can do is to try to focus our attention on a part of the Mass, and really try to pray along with it. In that moment, we can make Christ the centre of our lives and perhaps see, in that fleeting minute, how the whole of our lives ought to be.
One of the privileges I have as a deacon is to assist the priest at the offertory. As part of that, I prepare the chalice with the wine to be consecrated. The wine is poured in, and a drop of water is added, while I say quietly “by the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share our humanity”.
Here, I think, and this is especially true at a said Mass, is one of those moments where we can work at that active contemplation. We know that throughout the Scriptures, and especially in Revelation, water represents the peoples of the earth. So, in mingling water with wine, we have a representation of the union between the faithful and Christ our Head. Then, at the offertory, our sacrifices, as weak and frail as they are, are united with the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass; they blend with the wine and are consecrated with it, and so we receive a share of the Sacrifice of Calvary in which the Precious Blood and Water of Life pour forth inexhaustibly for our redemption.
July is traditionally designated the ‘Month of the Precious Blood’. So, what better time could there be than to apply our minds to this great mystery and to this great task. This is only one way in which we can add our drop of water to the wine of Christ’s sacrifice. In this way, we can come to be released from those worldly cares which can obscure our concentration on Our Lord and ultimately, as the Gospel teaches us S. Martha did, we can come to realize that a life of true sacrifice is a life of true joy, and a life of true service is a life of perfect freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment