The Better Part
While this morning’s gospel reading certainly isn’t the most terrifying text in the Bible, and not even the most terrifying text in the New Testament, I have to admit that I always kind of dread when it comes up in the lectionary. It makes me a little uncomfortable to witness this interaction between Jesus and Martha. When I hear Jesus’s words, about how Martha is too worked up and is worried about the wrong things, it sounds kinda condescending and mainsplain-y to me. Does anyone else hear it that way? Hearing it that way makes me squirm a little because it makes it harder for me to forget that, while Jesus isn’t just some guy, he also is a man who was surrounded by all the cultural expectations and shortcomings that that brings.
So, maybe Jesus did do some mainsplaining. And I’m a little sorry if that’s not the way that you heard it before and now you can’t unhear it. But that’s a good reminder that we’re not always going to be entirely comfortable with all of what we hear in scripture. We’re going to hear things, or have heard things, that are unequivocally disturbing. And we’re going to hear things, or have heard things, that strike a particular nerve because of our own experiences and how we view a particular text. We may hear things differently—and that’s ok. That’s part of what makes biblical interpretation so fun. We bring our whole selves to the process, and I think that’s beautiful.
Reading this passage with that condescending tone in mind, it can be easy to think that Mary has it all right and Martha is getting everything wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. That might be true in the moment, but I think that there is a false binary present in the notion that a good disciple is like Mary and not like Martha. And I’m not just saying that because the folks who prepare Sunday Dinner or who provide mercy and hospitality in countless other ways here at Fairport lean more in the Martha direction. The Church is a place of activity. It’s a place of doing, of moving, of making a difference. Welcoming the stranger and providing hospitality is a part of our calling—whether they’re from down the block or halfway around the world. Would we still be living our call as a community of faith if we weren’t doing that? If we were just a social club? We have people to feed, goals to accomplish, deliveries to make, programs to organize. We should be busy, we should have many tasks, right?
So what, then, do we do with Mary. The do-nothing, the less busy one, the one not pulling her weight. Supposedly the one who has chosen the better part, whatever that means. Mary does a couple of things in this text for us. First, she forces us to redefine what we mean by hospitality. Tradition would have us see hospitality as making sure that the house is clean, the table is set, the good wine is brought up, and there is plenty of food for everyone. It’s the material hospitality that is vitally important, that makes sure that bodies are cared for. And it’s the kind of hospitality that is usually associated with women and with femininity. That’s what Martha provides. Mary provides her own kind of hospitality. She greets the guest, listens to what he has to say, makes him feel heard. While the text doesn’t say so, I find it hard to imagine that Mary would just sit there soaking it all in without saying anything back. She was a good disciple after all. So in my mind there’s an exchange taking place here between Jesus and Mary. Are they talking about anything serious? Is Jesus telling her parables in response to questions that she’s throwing at him? Maybe. Maybe they’re discussing current events, or the state of the fish market, or local goings on. This is hospitality in its own right, and it’s hospitality that is usually associated with men and with masculinity. That’s what Mary provides.
The other thing that Mary does in this text is she disrupts this idea that to be faithful is to be endlessly busy. She disrupts this idea that in order for us to be successful or for us to prove that we are fulfilling our mission we need to keep moving without stopping. We get this idea from somewhere that if we take time in between projects, somehow we’re not doing enough, even though Christ himself takes time to rest as he travels from village to village preaching and performing miracles. Even Jesus took breaks. He would go off for a while, by himself usually, to pray and just be apart. And yet we, often, end up living like Martha, whose value is, whether by societal expectations, personal expectations, or a combination of both, tied to her constant busyness. Constant busyness which we know, all too well, isn’t something that we see only in the church. We as an American society are terrible about work. Despite the insistence that no one wants to work anymore, which is a statement that has been thrown around as long as there have been workers, Americans work a lot.
While in the past five years the average number of hours that a full-time employee works per week has actually gone down slightly, the average work week for full-time workers is still over 40 hours a week. And that’s just paid labor which doesn’t include caring for children and other family members, it doesn’t include cleaning and housework, and any of the other necessary tasks included in the second shift—the work that traditionally falls on women. While there has been a push towards the prioritization of worker well-being more recently, a push that has been spear-headed by workers under the age of 40, Americans still perpetuate this harmful idea of the grindset or hustle culture—the idea that we ought to be working more in order to drive career advancement and greater productivity. It’s a culture that discourages vacations and taking care of yourself or others when sick. It discourages and even prevents new parents from spending time with their children. And now with the ability to work from home and be available 24/7, it discourages healthy boundaries and a life beyond work. And it leads to burnout, poor mental health, and further isolation from our communities.
It’s a modern embodiment of Amos’s criticism of those who can’t seem to wait until they can get back to business when the Sabbath is over, so they can keep on harming themselves and others by their practices.
You all may have thought you’d escape this week without a mention of John Wesley. At this point I really just want to see how long I can keep this streak going. One of John Wesley’s best-known sermons is his sermon on the use of money. You may be familiar with the Wesleyan adage that we ought to gain all we can, save all we can, and give all we can. We can unpack the second and third parts of that trio when we get to stewardship season. But I want to call out specifically the first part: that we ought to gain all we can. Wesley wasn’t opposed to us earning money. What he was opposed to was earning money at the expense of our own well-being and the well-being of others. That includes slavery. That includes over-working, although Wesley himself wasn’t always great about not overworking. That includes not buying and selling goods and services that are harmful to yourself and others. And it includes anything that might harm our own health and ability to rest, as well as others’ health and ability to rest.
Whether in body, mind, or soul, the ways in which we live and work ought not to harm us or our neighbors. So our call to live differently, our call to be different from the rest of the world, or at least the rest of our society, includes a call to resist the hustle, to resist the grind. It includes a call to now get consumed by all the many things that we have to do. And, it includes sharing one another’s burdens, a callback to my first Sunday. Rather than being in competition, rather than sectioning ourselves off or leaving others to fend for themselves, we are called to create space for one another to rest. There’s a whole community of people here—lean on one another. Hold one another accountable to resting, to not doing too much. If you’re Mary, maybe trade off with Martha once in a while. In a culture that ties our worth to our work, may we resist that impulse by sharing the load together, not trampling on one another. And not by trampling on ourselves. Sharing the load, resting in community, rejecting the notion that our worth is dictated by how much we do—that is the better part. Let’s choose that. Amen.