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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