With brilliant pastoral attentiveness, God incarnate (Col 1.15) shows reflection and action entwined (Luke 10.38-42)
Introduction
It’s hard, at the best of times, to balance reflection and action. One is too easily seen as being at the expense of the other. When disappointment is in the mix, resentments can grow with devastating results. Wise and kind teaching can bring us back from the brink of dysfunction and destruction. Honesty about this is important on a domestic scale; even more so on the scale of church community. How much more does it matter when governing a whole country.
Context
The Chilcot report displays, on a chilling scale, the results of strident action without adequate reflection. Racism ripples through America and England. Would-be party leaders variously receive bricks through windows and death threats and veiled criticism for not having children. Jealousy poisons our political discourse. What can an ancient childless couple and two sisters, friends of Jesus, teach us about self-awareness, wisdom and hope?
Reflection
You look around the room from the kitchen door and see people’s conversation energised and earnest, and someone takes a little canapé from a neat row, fine slivers of gherkin and red peppers, tied in a roll of smoked salmon with a single blanched chive. They hardly pause, but you see their slight surprise at just how lovely they look, how delicious it is, then the conversation continues with renewed intensity. You are invisible, the care you put in to making them is briefly felt, but not credited to you. You smile and slip back into the kitchen to attend to their next course so they can attend to each other. It’s all about them.
How different it feels on another occasion when you clatter around because you can hear the buzz of conversation and are tired, fed up, and if you stop for a moment, you’d admit you are irritated by your friends’ happiness. The disappointments from your day job are now pouring resentment into this safe place of friendship. You put the food down with a sigh because you want your friends to know you’re hard done by. You want them to feel a bit guilty that you’ve been so busy. Rejection at work means you crave affirmation.
On the good day, the attentive service is all about them. On the bad day, it’s all about you.
We see a fascinating spectrum of attentiveness in our readings. Abraham is attractively boyish in his eagerness to please the holy guests, running to and fro. He was attentive before the guests arrived. His immediately running in the heat of the day shows his default-setting: longing expectation that God will do something. His eagerness to please is partly about them, making them feel genuinely comfortable; yet it is also about him, wanting the honour of their fleeting divine company. He is intensely irritating to his wife, having the audacity to give her a recipe (v.6b) – ‘I have made them before, thank you, Abe.’ In her understandable bitterness, though, she is no less attentive than her husband, critically listening and (if you read on) laughing sarcastically. She should not be patronised.
Years later, two women will both attend to Jesus in their differently generous, differently needy ways and be rewarded for doing so. Mary and Martha were clearly significant figures in the fellowship of Jesus and the nascent church. They fill more than a chapter in John. Here in Luke, Martha’s attentiveness is ambiguous. She does not call Mary out to reprimand her. She rebukes Jesus, not for the last time, so it is clearly not primarily about the justice of who is doing the work, but the justice of who is getting Jesus’ attention. ‘Martha,’ he says, not once but twice, placing her firmly at the centre of his attention, giving her time for her breathing to calm, and shoulders to lower a touch, before he shows he is perfectly capable of attending to those listening to him, and simultaneously seeing into her busily beating heart.
The ROOTS Sermon ideas are right to say sitting at Jesus’ feet is a posture of submission. We may add, though, that it is also the posture of a trainee Rabbi learning from their elder. Mary is learning the faith, perhaps ready to pass it on. The communities of two Gospel writers clearly want to remember these sisters, who may well have gone on to be significant teachers of the faith. Accepting the literary integrity of two separate books, we can still bring their two perspectives on the pair alongside each other.
If, in Luke, Mary leads Martha back to Jesus, in John 11 it is the other way around. There, Martha rebukes Jesus saying ‘if you had been here my brother would not have died.’ Then she does press on to have a rigorous doctrinal conversation with Jesus about the end of time. She seems to be holding back any hope of immediate relief (11.24a) but is firm in her long term hope. Mary, whom John shows later anointing Jesus’ feet in extravagant gratitude, is too hurt to speak to Jesus at first until Martha comes back and persuades her. The one who sat devotedly at Jesus’ feet is, perhaps, the one who is more passionately hurt that Jesus has let her down. The one who clattered around the kitchen is cooler, more practical. She clearly has been listening to the teaching all along and is not to be patronised (John 11.24-27). We could say that Martha is the one who’d value an in-depth discussion group on the Creeds, while Mary would prefer a time of meditation with lots of Taizé chants. On the death of their brother, though, somehow Martha’s apparently less intense approach allows her to stay in cordial contact with Jesus when catastrophe strikes. That day, she leads Mary back to him. Neither is to be patronised. Both are needed.
These spectrums of attentiveness all help us to calibrate our own, and to be honest about how we are reacting to God and each other, and how sometimes we think we’re reacting to one when it’s really to the other. They help us to appreciate each other. When we study the frantic scramble for political leadership and see loathe-some jealousies in racist attacks, first by American police, then by a vengeful, disappointed soldier in Dallas, but also much closer to home in post-Referendum derangement, we are witnessing and nurturing the worst kind of attention-seeking that pretends it is attending to someone else’s faults.
Jesus’ kind critical word to Martha is to banish the sense that it is ‘either–or’. God’s attention to Mary is not at the cost of God’s attention to Martha. Indeed, Colossians 1 establishes the same incarnational truth as John 1, that all things visible and invisible are held together in the fleshly Christ. The practical and spiritual are forever fused and entwined. Do not set one against the other. Do not ‘estrange’ one another. Learn from one another.
Of course, our psychological self-appraisal, worthy as it is, could distract from the big story of God’s perfect attentiveness to us. God puts himself in our hands; God comes to receive our hospitality. God asks for our attention in order to give us hers. Here is the most glorious grace, the biggest surprise. Even as we’re learning to say ‘it’s all about God,’ God is saying ‘It’s all about you.’
Prayer
God, you teach the busy to reflect and the reflective to act with compassion. Perhaps the Chilcot report has shown us what we already knew: that un-reflective fantasy can become deadly; that very busy people should not be given weapons; that the wrong thing can be done for the right reasons and the right thing can be done for the wrong reasons; that political leadership is an impossibly heavy burden.
In our fraught political discourse, poisoned by jealousies, we pray for the elusive gift of wisdom. We pray for the balance of personalities as well as of parties in our Parliament.
Heart broken and angered by deeply inhospitable behaviour, from Minnesota and Dallas, to Polish community centres attacked in England, to pub conversations and political speeches simmering with resentment, we pray for difference to nurse excitement, not resentment.
Amid such uneasiness, make in your church places of hospitable reflection, and reflective hospitality for every neighbourhood.
Amen.
Questions
- How far does your church reflect the character of Martha and the character of Mary? If either character seems embattled or undervalued, how might they be released to flourish together?
- What steps do you suggest we take to create the conditions in which wisdom may grow in the realm of British politics?
Action
If you are one of the church caterers, hugely in sympathy with Martha, say a prayer of thanks for one of those you have never seen with a tea towel, but who seems to be able to pray with enviable intensity. Hold them patiently in your prayer until any faint resentment you harbour turns to thanks.
If you are one of the prayers, and have never done the dishes at Church, say a prayer of thanks for those who have made your coffee and tea week by week. Hold them patiently in your prayer until any faint hint of superiority you feel turns to thanks.
Any of us, out and about, in cafes and shops, on buses, at work or school, can pay attention and notice who is Martha and who is Mary. We can pray discreetly and thankfully for the balance of their lives, and that they may balance each other.
Young people
The European referendum result will affect you more than most of the people who voted. If you were in charge, what three things would you do to make sure we are attentive neighbours to Europe in your lifetime?
David Warbrick is vicar of All Saints Kings Heath in the Anglican Diocese of Birmingham. He says that his canapés are probably rather better than his sermons, and that perhaps he should spend more time at Jesus’ feet.