Monday, July 15, 2013

7/21/2013 – 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Luke 10:38-42 – Mary and Martha

         One thing I appreciate in people is a good sense of humor.  If we can laugh at ourselves sometimes and not take ourselves seriously all the time, it makes some of the difficult things we go through in life a bit easier.  Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is one of my favorite Catholic authors.  He wrote a book a couple of years ago entitled Between Heaven and Mirth about our Catholic faith and humor.  I thought about one of the jokes from that book when I reflected upon our Gospel reading today about the contrast between Mary and Martha.  There was a Eucharistic Congress that brought together a lot of priests from many different religious orders and different backgrounds.  They had just starting praying Evening Prayer together, when all of a sudden, the lights in the church went out with a blown fuse.  There was a group of Benedictine priests there, and they continued praying all of the prayers from memory in the darkness, not missing a beat.  The Jesuits priests there stopped praying, and began an intellectual discussion amongst themselves about whether or not the blown fuse would dispense them from the obligation to pray the Evening Prayer.  The Franciscans stopped praying as well, and started to sing a song of praise for the gift of darkness that God gives to us as a part of creation.  The Carmelite priests fell into a silent Centering prayer, concentrating on the silence and on their slow, heavy breathing.  The diocesan priest present got up from his prayers, went down to the basement of the church and replaced the fuse, which got the lights back on and allowed them to continue with the Evening Prayer.  Wouldn’t you know it, the diocesan priest was the one who had to solve the problem at hand. 
            I think that often when we hear the story of Mary and Martha, we think about how we should be one of them and not the other.  Most often, our tendency is to see Jesus as affirming Mary's choice to join the disciples in her desire to learn from him, to see him disparaging Martha's attention to the household chores, seeing Martha’s works as less important matters.  But, in many ways, I think at times we are all called to be Mary in our life of faith, and at other times, we are called to be Martha.  As a parish priest, I am called to have a rich prayer life, to have spiritual readings and spiritual formation as a part of my priestly vocation, but I’m also called to run a parish in all its many facets: to visit the sick, to help educate the children and youth in the ways of the faith, to manage the financial affairs of the parish, to write homilies and to attend to any crisis that might arise.  As Christians, we’re all called to find the balance between Martha and Mary in our daily lives, in the way we live out our faith.
            Jesus often disrupts the status quo in his teachings.  He often challenges the conventional way of looking at things.  Again and again, we hear in Sacred Scripture of the importance of hospitality and of welcoming a guest, of sharing a meal around the table together.  In fact, Jesus often made it a point to welcome people who normally wouldn’t be welcome in Jewish society – the sinners, the Gentiles, the tax collectors, the outsiders.  So, taking this into account, we might expect Jesus to affirm what Martha is doing by the way she is welcoming Jesus into her home and trying to make him comfortable.  Martha is distracted and frustrated in trying to get all her tasks done, especially without the help of Mary.  Should Jesus make her feel even worse in praising Mary for not pitching in, saying that she is choosing the better part?  But remember, a lot of what Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is meant to shake up our sensibilities and help us look at the world in a different way. 
            Perhaps Jesus is trying to shake us up to make us realize that the Kingdom of God indeed is at hand, that we are to recognize and proclaim the presence of God’s Kingdom in our daily lives.  In other sections of the long journey that Jesus takes in the Gospel of Luke, we hear him tell the people that there should be nothing to distract them from recognizing the reality of the Kingdom.  There is no time to rest, no time to bury the dead, no time to say goodbye to family and loved ones, no looking back to see what they’re leaving behind.  There is great urgency in the message Jesus brings in the Gospel today.  Nothing is to distract us from our journey of faith – not even the hospitality that is an important part of the customs and traditions of Ancient Israel. 

            That being said, I think that we are to recognize and respect both Mary and Martha in today’s Gospel for who they are and the gifts they both bring.  We are to recognize the times that we are called to be Mary or Martha in our lives of faith, to see the gifts that the Marys and Marthas bring to our parish and how they both enrich our faith.  Within the presence of both these elements, we certainly could not function as a healthy, vibrant community of faith. 

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