pentecost 8 year c

Amos 8: 1-12 NRSV text
Psalm 52 NRSV text
Colossian 1: 15-28 NRSV text
Luke 10: 38-42 NRSV text

Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem. There is an urgency to what is happening: how will the message of the Kingdom be received? That is an important theme in this section, ever since the beginning of chapter nine. When he sends out the Twelve, he talks about hospitality and welcome (9: 4-5). In the immediate aftermath of the outset of the Travel Narrative, the group is met with rejection by a Samaritan village (9: 52-55). When Jesus commissions the Seventy, he addresses the issue of their reception and its significance (10:5-7; 10-15).

Why is this such an important theme? Look at 10: 8-9: “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you’”. The Kingdom is located in the person and the mission of Jesus. What Jesus does in sending out the disciples is to expand his mission. The Kingdom is equally now located in their person and ministry. They are to enact the Kingdom (cure the sick) and announce the Kingdom (“say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you.’”). And so Jesus is able to say, in 10:16, “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me”.

The issue of hospitality and welcome, therefore, is inextricably linked with the reception and recognition of the Kingdom. What is more, it is the reception and recognition of the Kingdom as it (literally) takes flesh in the mission and presence of the disciples. Luke is here anticipating the mission of the Church and the spread of the gospel to the Gentiles: to be the Church means to be the-Church-in-mission, constantly on the move, going to where people are and bringing the Kingdom to them. Furthermore, the Church that is faithfully engaged in mission is also a faithful sacrament of the Kingdom, and the connection that runs Church ð Jesus ð God is a true one – that is, it has a reality that people experience - rather than being some fanciful claim of a Church determined to talk up its role and importance.

The presence of Jesus as kairos
Jesus will, later in the gospel, weep over Jerusalem because the people failed to recognise their kairos - “the time their visitation from God” (Luke 19: 44b). Another way of saying that Jesus is the personal presence of the Kingdom is to say that he is the world’s visitation from God. The Greek word kairos is translated as “time”, but means something different from chronos – time measured in hours, minutes and seconds. Kairos is special time – God-infused time.

The challenge is to recognise in Jesus the kairos – the time of God’s visitation. It is the challenge to see the moment of salvation when it draws near in the person of Jesus (cf 12:54-56). The thief on the cross recognises it, even when no one else does. And here, in today’s passage, it is Mary and not Martha who recognises the kairos.

It is Martha who assumes the role of head of the house: it is she who welcomes Jesus into her home and provides him with hospitality. She is fulfilling the Law’s requirement to welcome the stranger – and she is entertaining more than angels unawares!

Martha, however, has failed to recognise the kairos. A kairos is a moment which must be seized with both hands. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way, or distract from it. There is nothing more important that requires attention and effort, because this is the moment of God’s visitation. This is how we should understand Jesus’ statement to her: “Martha, you are fretting and worrying about many things, yet there is only one thing – and one thing only – that needs attention” (10:41). It is in this sense that “Mary has chosen the better part”.

Jesus the boundary-breaker
Mary “sits at the Lord’s feet and listens to what he is saying” (10:39). The shock value of Mary’s action is that she has abandoned a woman’s role (the domestic duties that go with hospitality) for a man’s role (sitting at Jesus’ feet in public and listening). Mary has recognised the kairos – and nothing is going to stop her, including the social conventions of the day. Her response is to become a disciple (ie sit at Jesus’ feet), which was something reserved for men.

This is the sense in which Jesus commends Mary. He is not (contrary to traditional readings) downplaying hospitality or declaring the practicalities of keeping things going of secondary importance. He commends Mary for recognising the uniqueness of the moment. This is not just any ordinary meal: it is a meal at which Jesus is present.

But Jesus does more than simply commend Mary: he accepts what she does (“it will not be taken away from her”). What is it that will not be taken away? The opportunity to be a disciple! Jesus, like Mary, refuses the boundaries of social and religious conventions that shut people out. In this case, it was the traditional patterns of gender-roles.

The Kingdom shatters barriers. This is what brings Jesus into such conflict with the religious leaders of his day – the arbiters of how everything works; the gatekeepers; the power-brokers. For Jesus, the Kingdom is for everyone. For that reason, it is necessarily for the least first – for those who are prevented from responding, not by choice, but by religious and social convention.

Jesus has sent out the Seventy – a sign that this is the mission to the Gentiles. He has just told a parable in which a Samaritan is the exemplar of grace and love of God and neighbour. And now he is including women among those who are permitted to sit at his feet and listen. There is no place for hierarchies that assign different roles and worth to men and women. Not only does Jesus allow Mary to take on a role reserved for men; the same Lord will, in another gospel, wash his disciples’ feet. The discipleship group is becoming a living sign of the smashing of boundaries of exclusion.

Martha the driven woman
Jesus does not chide Martha for being concerned about doing the necessary work required for hosting a meal for a large group. Jesus is well aware of the fact that if no one does the housework and the cooking and the serving, no one will eat – and Jesus is no aesthete! Jesus, it would appear from the gospel picture, loved a party. He ate and drank with gusto, and had a reputation as a heavy drinker and a glutton (cf Luke 7: 34) – and of hanging out with extremely dubious characters! When he commissions the Seventy, he urges them to “eat and drink whatever is provided” – in other words, food and drink were high on Jesus’ agenda.

So Jesus is not inclined to stop his hosts doing the necessary to provide the table fare! What he chides Martha for is instructive. Look at the way in which Luke is concerned to emphasise the following: Martha is “distracted by her many tasks” (v40); “worried and distracted by many things” (v41). It is her fretting and distraction that drives her perfectly understandable irritation with Mary. Martha doesn’t signal Mary surreptitiously to leave where she is and get on what with her job: she confronts Jesus: “Do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me!”

A “kitchen quarrel” among the staff has become a major issue. It is Martha who has invited Jesus and prepared a meal in his honour: now her anger over Mary drives her to the place where Jesus is the problem! She effectively accuses him of causing her (Martha’s) problems by not caring enough, and failing to tell Mary to stop behaving inappropriately.

Now of course, there is a sense in which Martha goes straight to the heart of the issue: it is Jesus’ acceptance of Mary’s actions that it causing the problem. But what it feels like to Martha is, “Jesus doesn’t care about me. If he did, he wouldn’t do this”.

From what is Martha “distracted”? She is distracted from paying attention to Jesus! She has invited him to her house, and now her concerns about the logistics of the meal are taking over the original purpose of having him there, to the point where Jesus the guest of honour has become the problem.

Theologically, Martha is distracted from the kairos – from recognising and celebrating the fact that God is visiting. Psychologically, Martha is the person in every Church for whom service in the background is absolutely necessary yet also enormously problematic.

“Service” is an incredibly difficult concept – especially in a society in which divides roles according to gender. If women are expected to serve, then “service” has little to do with voluntarism. It has more to do with oppression and repression. What makes Jesus’ servant-role astonishing is that he did it from choice. Leaving aside for a moment the implications that this is God-taking-the-form-of-a-servant, what makes Jesus remarkable is that he did what he did as a man. This is interesting. It’s okay for Jesus both to do it, and to urge it on others – because Jesus is a man! Yet the Christian virtue of servanthood is meaningless for a woman in a man’s world. It has nothing to do with embracing humility (in the manner that Paul urges in Philippians 2:5-11, and where he refers to this as “having the same mind which was in Christ Jesus”) because there is no choice. If servanthood is a job, it is not a virtue!

The terrible thing about Christian patriarchy is that it assigns women the role of the servant, uses all the language of Christ-likeness and virtue to justify it, yet in fact imprisons them in a role of drudgery without allowing them the opportunity to do it in free service, as an offering of love! We need to recognise that the vestiges of this sort of cultural system are still alive and well in our own time – and linger longer in Church communities than they do anywhere else!

This is incredibly destructive. Women find themselves in a highly ambivalent relationship to service and selflessness. Rhetorically, it is held up as a virtue; in reality, it has been a means of keeping women as second-class citizens and squandering their God-given gifts and potential. How many Einsteins have never been allowed to make it out of the kitchen, I wonder? How many Barths, or Ghandis? Or simply how many gifted, competent women have lived second-rate lives, or had to agonise over the ceilings that keep them trapped and prevent them reaching their potential – and all because they are unfortunate enough to be born female in a man’s world?

Martha is probably one of those women. The way she resolves that tension is to devote all her considerable energies, intelligence and attention into making everything perfect. She has a love-hate relationship with being the hostess: she’s clearly always the first to put herself in that role (she, first of all the village, welcomed Jesus and his band) but seems to be one of the people who goes over the top. She gets a huge amount of satisfaction from being complimented on the way in which she carries out her role – being the server is her “job”, and she gets satisfaction from the recognition of others that she does it well. She loves hearing people say, “Oh, Martha will do it. Let’s ask her – if you want it done properly, you can’t do better than ask. And of course she’ll help – Martha’s incredible. Always ready to do the work!”

At the same time, she’s trapped. She’s trapped by her own needs and the expectations of others. Self-imposed over-attention to the minutiae of the task means that she always misses out. She’s fated to be the onlooker, while everyone – even her sister – somehow seem to be free to enjoy what’s happening. But all of this stems from the fact that she’s trapped in a system that condemns her to the role of servant.

That’s why what Jesus says ought not to be understood solely as criticising Martha and vindicating Mary. Jesus (in answer to her question) cares about Martha. He recognises that her complaint is just: he, Jesus, is rightly seen as the gatekeeper of roles that are rooted in religion. What Jesus does – implicitly rather than explicitly – is to announce that the messianic community (of which he is the gatekeeper, rule-maker and boundary-drawer) is different. The fact that Jesus accepts Mary breaking out of the prison of her role as a servant, and allows her the “male” role of disciple, is a re-drawing of the rules. Jesus is breaking down the barriers. The messianic community will be one in which women are as free as men to choose roles. Mary can choose to sit at Jesus’ feet – or she can genuinely choose to serve! And Martha, likewise, is free to sit at Jesus’ feet – to be one of the guests instead of one of the servants. Martha has invited Jesus to a feast at her house in which she is servant. The Feast to which Jesus has come to invite Martha is the Feast in which there is no distinction between male and female, for all are one in Christ. This is the Feast at which Martha will sit as honoured guest, and Jesus will serve.

Amen.