Article
- Date:
- Sunday 21st July 2024
Year B, The Eighth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- 18.1-14
Luke 10.38-4
If the world was full of Marys there would be no dinner but if the world was full of Marthas there would be no dinners. Every house needs a Martha but the whole world needs as many Marys as it can get.
There is always a balance to be struck between the immediately practical and the long term reflective but I think that most of us would agree that in our contemporary world the balance has tipped far too far towards the practical and away from the reflective. In our communications even the world of email seems old fashioned and leisurely compared with social media; in our politics, in spite of obvious complexity, we want simple, immediate solutions; and in our personal lives too many of us are busy. This leads, respectively, to intemperate speech, illusory progress and burn-out.
This is an odd place for Christians to have reached, we who are encouraged to be charitable in our speech, honest in our endeavour and prayerful in our pilgrimage.
So, let us peep into the household of Lazarus. The sun is setting. Jesus is sitting with Mary. Martha is making dinner and banging the pots so that nobody can be in any doubt of her activity and her feelings. This picture appeals immediately to our sense of fairness. I mean, the least Mary could do would be to set the table. Martha comes in with a dish of salad and there's Mary looking soppy. She bangs the dish down on the table and goes out. At this point, whose side are we on? I suspect that if it wasn't for Sunday School teaching we'd probably be backing Martha. We have all, particularly women, put in the domestic hours while the rest of the family lounge about, fighting over the remote controller.
But the point is that this is not a snapshot of the household of Lazarus, this is a parable about the holy life and, seen in that light, the perspective shifts. As I have already noted, we do tend to rank being busy over being thoughtful but the real danger arises when being busy is not the means to an end, not the performance of a service, not a sacrifice but is, instead, a means of bolstering our importance and our self-importance.
There are two major considerations related to the Great Commandment, the indivisible two in one, of loving God and neighbour, that I want to address.
First, loving our neighbour. It stands to reason that when we make decisions, the easier they are, the more often we get them right but I think it is also true that most of the time when we get them wrong it is because we are in too much of a hurry, failing to think through consequences. If we have one moral fault above all others I suspect it is unkind speech, not thinking before we say something harsh either because we are judgmental or because it draws attention to us or makes us seem clever. We also tend to rely on a past track record to resolve a current difficulty; the human trait of pattern recognition is very strong in us but we should remember the maxim that generals tend to fight the last war, not the one in front of them. Then again, sometimes we have to choose the better of two evils or recognise that two good outcomes are in conflict. We have been lured into the delusion that liberty means autonomy when only a moment's thought will make it clear that we are all inter dependent.
As for loving God, a weekly, or even twice weekly, dose of liturgy, just isn't enough. If we want effective transaction with the immortal, the essence, on our part, is peace and quiet. If we need seclusion to enjoy a good novel or to solve a philosophical problem or to face a personal dilemma, how much more is it the case that we need quiet time with God.
Going back to the parable, for a moment, my bet is that Martha was a woman of high morals and charitable intent who took decisive actions and often got things wrong, who spoke too soon, who hurt people when she didn't mean to; whereas Mary probably upset people by appearing to put things off, who wanted to see many sides of an issue, who was slow to agree to an outright proposition. On this last point, and relating to a sermon I gave here some time ago about mercy killing and abortion, the absolutists on either side of an issue are fond of warning against the thin end of a wedge in making ethical decisions; but all of us, on all issues, are somewhere along a spectrum between extreme points.
In my church we used to have a Guild of Marthas and Marys responsible for church cleaning: the Marthas did the work and the Marys paid the bills. This is profoundly misleading. The way it should have worked is that the Marthas did the work while the Marys prayed for them and the rest us. It also fixes roles too firmly. I would wish that the Marthas and Marys should change places now and again. What Marthas do is necessary but what Marys do is a necessary precondition because prayer, although routine in character, is generative and creative, it opens the space for better ways of being and richer ways of believing.
Without our dinner we will go hungry but without contemplation we will starve.