Genesis 18: 1-15; Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42
In 2020 Netflix released a drama series titled “The Queen’s Gambit,” a fictional story about a young American woman named Beth Harmon and the arc of her life as she became a chess champion who faced off against some of the best chess players in the country. In the series finale there was a climactic showdown in Moscow, Russia, where she confronted some of the world’s best chess players. During those matches, a commentator remarked: “The only unusual thing about Beth Harmon, really, is her sex. And even that is not unique in Russia. There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and never faced men.”
Now, Nona Gaprindashvili, is not a fictional character. She is, in fact, a real-life chess champion, from the country of Georgia and the first ever female Grandmaster. She competed against many male chess players – many of whom were grandmasters themselves. Because this is an historical fact, Nona Gaprindashvili sued Netflix for $5 million dollars, for defamation and for an “erasure of history.”
I share this story, because I think today we might have to bring the same charge – the erasure of history – against Luke for today’s gospel story about Mary and Martha.
When Luke was writing this gospel, deep in the second half of the first century, the early church was taking shape and form. We get clues about its earliest iterations from the letters of Paul where get glimpses of the hymns and liturgies being used but also glimpses of the women Paul acknowledged as leaders of house churches, women recognized for their praying and prophesying in the assemblies, women who were evangelists, publicly proclaiming the message of Christ, women who were financial benefactors of the churches Paul began.
We get clues about the church’s later iterations, those contemporary with Luke’s communities, from the letters known as “the pastorals,” letters attributed to Paul but almost certainly not written by him. In these letters we see organizational structures becoming formalized – the establishment of the offices of bishop and deacon, along with the requirements that menmust meet in order to occupy those positions of leadership.
We know that later copyists of Paul’s original letters made additions to them, inserting things that contradicted Paul’s more positive acknowledgements – things like how women should be silent in church and subordinate to their husbands. Those pastoral letters similarly instructed that women not be allowed to teach or have any authority over men. All this is to say that many other New Testament texts written close in time to Luke’s gospel reveal to us that the early church was absolutely not of one mind when it came to ideas about women in ministerial leadership roles.
I’m willing to wager that many of you – if not most – when you hear this story of Mary and Martha, imagine Martha bustling about in a kitchen, surrounded by plates of food and piles of dishes; maybe mopping her brow – overheated and overwrought. And yet, there is actually nothing in the text that demands we understand her to be occupied with meal preparation. The truth is that the word that gets translated “many tasks” – Martha was distracted by her many tasks – and is also translated “all the work” – my sister has left me to do all the work – that word is the Greek diakenein, – which does mean “to serve,” but in the gospels and other New Testament texts, it almost always refers to some kind of ministerial service. It’s where we get words like “deacons,” “deaconesses,” and “diaconal ministers.” In Luke’s time it referred to the work in the churches – apostolic work, public proclamations about Jesus, evangelizing, house church leadership. It was the service Jesus called people to, feeding the poor, caring for the widows and the orphans, healing the sick – not at all restricted in meaning to serving a meal.[1]
If we can divest ourselves of the image of birds in the oven, pots on the stove, charcuterie boards on the counter, and dishes piled in the sink, we would more rightly read Martha in this passage as burdened by the ministerial service she is called to do, or maybe anxious because she is denied the opportunity to do it; we might more rightly read her as troubled because a Christian sister is not serving with her. And Luke, seemingly siding with those who would have women be silent and subordinate to men in the church, puts the authoritative word on Jesus’ lips; Luke’s Jesus reprimands Martha, chides her, diminishes the seriousness of her work, tells her she need not worry and fret about those things, and that Mary – sitting submissively, passively, silently has chosen the better part. And there it is – the erasure of history.
Now maybe you might be thinking that I’m taking this a bridge too far, suggesting that what we read here are Luke’s thoughts and not Jesus’s words. But this story has never set right with me. I just can’t shake the feeling that something is off. That it’s just not like Jesus to pit two people he loves against each other like that. It’s not like Jesus to scold and judge Martha for her actions. It’s not like encouraging, merciful and forgiving Jesus to create such a stark comparison, and then so strongly approve of one while denigrating the other.
This story also runs contrary to what is true about our most fundamental Christian confessions: Jesus the Christ ruptures binaries. The binary between God and human is ruptured in the incarnation – Jesus is both fully human and fully divine; the binary between life and death is ruptured in his resurrection of from the dead – and the promise of ours; the separation of believers – the dualisms of “us” and “them” however history, religious belief, or cultural practice and tradition defines one over the other – these dualisms are ruptured by Jesus’ teaching that all are children of one God and in the love of that God, all are one.[2]
It’s the dualistic privileging of one way of being over another that goes against the grain of everything else we know about Jesus, everything else we know about the spirit of Christ. The spirit Paul writes about in his letter to the Colossians: “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things.”
So, this story is more than an erasure of history, and a silencing of women; it mutes profound spiritual truth that actually puts the lie to the apparent dualisms of this passage – of Mary’s listening vs. Martha’s doing, of contemplation vs. action – and the privileging of one over the other. We are not required to wrestle with whether we are more like Mary or more like Martha, nor challenged to be more like Mary and less like Martha. We need not feel chagrined because of our own anxious fretting and worried doing, nor should we maybe feel too self-satisfied that we have chosen the better part by our affiliation with a contemplative community or our own contemplative practices. Luke may have wanted us to choose, but God who was pleased to dwell in Jesus does not.
Later Christians rejected Luke’s image of Martha and restored her as a model Christian. Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Dominican monk and mystic, preached that Martha was the more spiritually mature one, the one who had reached the stage of integrating contemplation and action, while Mary was the novice, a beginner in the contemplative life.
Our own monastic community of Benedictine sisters reveal to us the truth – living lives of prayer and contemplation from which have issued radical acts of hospitality, ecumenism, the restoration of creation, and justice – all reconciled, all are one.
Mary Oliver in her poem “What I Have Learned So Far,” reflects on how honorable it is to meditate, wondering why she should not sit then, every morning of her life, on a hillside in meditation. But then comes the question – “Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit to no labor in its cause?” She ends the poem with these lines – “Thought buds toward radiance. Be ignited, or be gone.”
I want to close with this final observation from episcopal priest, Barbara Brown Taylor who wrote this about the Bible: “I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. Neither I nor anyone else knows how these stories will turn out, since at this point they involve more blood than ink.”[3]
Apart from the trappings of his historical context, Luke nevertheless offers us a profound image to sit with – Mary, Martha, and Jesus in a tableau of three. A triad, a trinity, a symbol of wholeness. After staring closely at it, we might close our eyes and wait for its afterimage to appear on the insides of our eyelids. What we’ll see is the image of the invisible God, holding all things together, and in which the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What is the story here still taking shape for you? What does it reveal to you about what God is doing in this time and place? Where do you experience the truth in your blood? How does love for this encounter rise in you? Thought buds toward radiance. Be ignited…
[1] Much of my thinking about this passage was greatly influenced by the work of Barbara E. Reid, OP – Choosing the Better Part?: Women in the Gospel of Luke, (Liturgical Press, 1996).
[2] These insights come from The Reverend Elizabeth M. Edman in Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How it Can Revitalize Christianity, (Beacon Press, 2016).
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, (HarperOne, 2012).