By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Luke 10:38-42
For those of us who have been in churches for any amount of time, particularly if we’re women, we might have found ourselves asked this question: “Who are you, Mary or Martha?” The traditional approach to this story—particularly if we’re women—is that some of us are the kind of person who gets distracted by all the tasks that daily life might require and some of us know what is important.
I’ve asked that question myself, set up that binary. It’s only lately that I’ve come to see the question as taking us down a ______ path. It’s only lately that I see this binary as downright dangerous. The question reduces this story to a morality tale that tells women not to fuss over the housework but to shut up and sit at the feet of learned men in our orbit.
It's only lately that I went back to the text to look up some words that have been mistranslated, two words specifically. If we change the words to ones that are more faithful to the original, the story shifts significantly.
The first word is the one that describes what Martha is doing in verse 40. In our text, we see Martha being distracted by her many tasks. Task is a word that makes me think of work that needs to be done, but work that isn’t terribly important in the longer run. It’s housework or maintenance, for example. Other translations have a similar ______. The NIV says, “But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.” The Message translation is even more specific: “But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen.”
However, the Greek word means something totally different. The Greek word for what Martha is doing is diakonia. It’s the word from which we get “deacon,” an important church position. You might say, “Well sure, that’s how we use it now. But was it used that way in the first century?” The answer is yes-- it was also used that way in the time that the Gospel of Luke was written.
It’s a word that is linked to ministry, particularly the ministry that serves others. It’s a word that’s used to describe those who by the command of God proclaim and promote religion among the people, a word used across the Bible, a word linked to:
1. of the office of Moses
2. of the office of the apostles and its administration
3. of the office of prophets, evangelists, elders etc.
So the work that is distracting Martha is likely not the work in the kitchen. She’s not back there fussing over the dinner that she’s planning to serve to Jesus, although she may be managing others who are cooking for the larger community. She’s not cleaning the house hoping that Jesus doesn’t see what a sloppy housekeeper she is.
According to many Bible scholars, the more accurate translation is that she is doing the work of the church. It might involve service, as the work of the church often does. But it’s not busy work. It’s not inconsequential work. It’s not “women’s work,” which is so often dismissed as frivolous or so lacking in skill that women and slaves are left to do it. It is “diakonia,” which leads several New Testament scholars to suggest that Martha is a much more important figure in the early church than centuries of patriarchal teaching given her credit for being.
We’ve often given that credit to her sister Mary—perhaps precisely because she sits at the feet of Jesus, listening intensely. Surely she takes that knowledge out into the world to share it. And what Jesus says about her also leads us to think that if women were in leadership positions in the first century church, surely Mary would be.
Our translation reinforces this belief. Listen again to that last sentence: “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” Did you catch the adjective? The better part—through the centuries, those words have been used to further belittle women’s work, the kind of work we unreflectively suppose that Martha has been doing in the kitchen.
But better is not an accurate translation. The word in Greek is “good”—listen again, and see how the meaning shifts. “Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
It’s not a competition. One way of serving is not better than another. However, Jesus may be saying that one mindset is better than another.
Jesus tells Martha that she worries about many things, and the implication is that all of the issues that cause her anxiety aren’t really important. It's a story many of us, with our increasingly hectic lives, need to hear again--maybe every day.
We need to be reminded to stay alert. Busyness is the drug that many of us use to dull our senses. For some of us, charging through our to-do lists is a way of quelling the anxiety. But in our busyness, we forget what's really important. We forget to focus on Christ and living the way he commanded us.
The story of Mary and Martha is often summed up as Martha does housework, Mary meditates at the feet of Jesus, and we should figure out a way to combine these approaches. In some ways, this interpretation gets to part of what the story teaches us. All of our busyness takes our focus away from God.
That’s true, regardless of the work keeping us frazzled. Maybe it’s the chores of daily life. Maybe it’s our caretaking duties. Maybe it’s the work that we do for pay. It’s also quite possible that church work, Martha’s work, paradoxically, takes our attention away from God. It would not be the first time we have seen Jesus in the middle of this conflict between God’s hope for us and religious politics and expectations.
We have been trained to see this story as a tale of two women, one frivolous and one serious. It’s far more likely that both of these women are early disciples of Jesus, and in fact, when we see Martha again in the Gospel of John, which was written later than the Gospel of Luke, Martha is one of the first to proclaim Jesus as Messiah in that Gospel, just a few chapters after the Samaritan woman at the well does the same thing.
It's far better to see this story as one which tells us how to serve, both others and ourselves. It's a story that reminds us to ask ourselves what is a good choice, and the good choice in one setting may not be the same in every situation.
Jesus calls to us, just as he called to Mary and to Martha in this story. How can we be more fully present to the presence of God? How can we learn to ignore all the work that calls us away from the good part, the sitting at the feet of Jesus, doing nothing else but listening?
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