Martha and Abraham
it's not hospitality that's the problem
Martha is a Gospel character who is often getting short shrift.
Especially when viewed through a capitalist-industrialist lens, Martha represents a Protestant work ethic that never quits, and Mary represents a Josef Pieper-type of elevation of leisure. Thus, Mary is praised for doing nothing, and Martha becomes an anachronistic symbol for the distraction of the digital age.
The Sunday in July that is Martha and Mary Sunday (about a week before Martha’s feast day), the priest who gave the homily I heard chided Martha for always “running around, wanting things to be perfect,” as we do when preparing for holidays with family. Instead of being a symbol of service and hospitality, and the virtue of such, Martha got relegated to a symbol for a season that didn’t exist in her particular time: the Christmas rush.
I was struck by his derision, because Abraham is actually the character in the readings who is running around, preparing a banquet for his visitor— who is God (the words “needing it to be perfect” are attributed to neither character). And Abraham is not chided in anyway for slaughtering a kid and instructing his wife to quickly knead flour into bread—he is, in fact, rewarded for his generous and virtuous hospitality by being told he will have an improbable son.
It’s, of course, entirely possible that the pericope of Martha and Mary demonstrates the eternal truth that we can get hung up on the letter of the law and not its spirit—if hospitality is about relationship, the goal is not just to serve, but to sit at the feet of the one served.
But, I think, we misread Martha if she’s just “another serving female who is nagging someone,” just another “high strung woman who can’t relax.” Martha is participating in the ancient tradition of hospitality: treating her guest (the Lord) with honor, giving the best of her life, her food, her service to the visitor.
The part Mary has chosen is to be a guest with Jesus — to sit at his feet, to listen to him and be with him. Mary has chosen the role of the disciple, and since there is no male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free in Christ, it is open to her as well. But Mary is not virtuous because she is taking the traditionally male part of relaxing as guest. Abraham behaves in the “womanly” way the priest attributed to Martha—busy, bustling, rushed—and his actions are a model of virtue Paul elevates in Hebrews 13.
The long-held tradition of interpreting Mary as the contemplative life and Martha as the active apostolate makes the most sense to me. Augustine sees in Martha the pilgrim Church on earth, and Mary an image of the unity of heaven. But Luke’s story of the two sisters seems most powerful to me as yet another variation on the constant theme in Luke: that, ultimately, one thing is needful. The life of a disciple is being called to one single act of trust in God, the provider of all good things, the gracious host and honored guest.