Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: July 20, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Amos 8:1-12 | Psalm 52 | Colossians 1:15-28 | Luke 10:38-42

From Luke’s gospel alone, we don’t know much about Mary and Martha. He doesn’t give us much background, and the sisters don’t appear again in his writings. The only other gospel to mention Mary and Martha is John, where we learn that Mary and Martha have a brother named Lazarus who dies and whom Jesus subsequently raises from the dead. Later, the women throw a banquet for Jesus at their home to celebrate the return of their brother, and Mary uses an expensive perfume to anoint Jesus’ feet, for which she is chastised by Judas. Beyond that, the gospels provide us with little information about the sisters, and so we must attend to Luke’s telling of this story with care and attention to how it fits within the larger arch of his narrative.

At the outset, it would be good to name some of the ways this passage has been misread or misunderstood in the history of Christian interpretation.[i] One such misreading tends to pit Mary’s and Martha’s actions against one another, suggesting that “the better part” of sitting at Jesus’ feet chosen by Mary is somehow opposed to Martha’s service of hospitality. This oppositional reading has drawn lines between expressions of discipleship such as contemplation and activity, study and service, suggesting such activities as mutually exclusive and often in conflict with one another. Neither Luke nor Jesus suggests anything of the sort. The “better part” that Jesus names is not about drawing a line between the activities of devotion but about naming Mary’s singular focus of devotion – Jesus.

Another misreading of the text follows closely to the first and suggests that Mary and Martha represent vocational paradigms. But, again, this runs counter to Luke’s theological emphasis; after all, this story about Mary and Martha comes right on the heels of the Parable of the Good Samaritan where neighborly actions of love, care, and compassion are set out as the path to inherit eternal life. Not only that, earlier in chapter 10, Jesus sends the 70 out in mission to preach the gospel and heal the sick in the various towns and villages Jesus intended to visit. In his instructions to them, he tells them to take no provision and instead be dependent upon the very kind of hospitality that Martha offers to Jesus in our present story. And, in Luke’s second volume, we hear about the apostles’ decision to appoint folks to the specific tasks of hospitality and service to ensure the marginalized were fed and cared for. So, we mustn’t see the story of Mary and Martha as somehow creating an oppositional hierarchy of the activities of devotion.

A third misreading tends to use this story as a means of denigrating the status quo of gender norms and the expectations that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, so to speak. Of all the gospel writers, Luke is certainly the most explicit about the ways true discipleship is not bound by cultural and social norms and expresses the universality of both the gospel and the invitation to be a follower of Jesus. From the opening of his gospel, he creates a pattern of reversal that transcends cultural expectations and upsets the balance of the status quo. But this passage is not specifically about liberating women from gender role norms even if we can confidently conclude that Jesus’ praise of Mary legitimizes women’s access to discipleship.

If these common misreadings are to be avoided, how are we to understand the story of Mary and Martha? What is it, exactly, that Jesus is chastising? The clue I want to suggest is in Martha’s distraction. Luke tells us that Martha was distracted by her many tasks. It wasn’t that the tasks of hospitality to which she tended were bad or somehow inferior to Mary’s. It wasn’t that the tasks of hospitality were somehow opposed to the tasks of contemplation. It was that she was distracted from the devotional focus of those tasks. When she confronts Jesus (and, presumably Mary through Jesus), she centers herself: “…do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” She has lost sight of the object of her hospitality allowing the tasks to worry and distract her. And it is this that Jesus tends to in his response to Martha.

Last week, the vestry and I spent some time with this passage at the start of our meeting. We contemplated what it might have to say to us as parish leadership and what it might mean for the mission and ministry of our parish. It was difficult, at first, not to succumb to the temptation of pitting Mary and Martha against one another. Afterall, we were gathered on Tuesday night to do the “busywork” of parish governance. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that what Luke is trying to suggest here has nothing to do with “busyness” but with focus. Are we keeping Jesus and our devotion to him as the singular focus of our work? Are we indeed tending to the “one needed thing” that Jesus desires of us? Or are we centering ourselves and the tasks to which we must attend, allowing our anxieties to distract us from the “better part?”

This story of Mary and Martha is not an invitation to pit busywork against sitting at the feet of Jesus, labor against study, activity against prayer. Juxtaposed to the story of the Good Samaritan, this story elaborates on Jesus’ answer to the lawyer who seeks to know how to inherit eternal life. As we heard last week, Jesus’ initial response to the lawyer was to ask what is written in the law, and the lawyer quotes what we know as the two greatest commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. The lawyer then asks Jesus to explain the boundaries of the term “neighbor” and he offers the story of the Good Samaritan in response. The story of Mary and Martha attends to the first of the two greatest commandments – how to love God with all of our heart, mind, and strength – how to tend to the “one needed thing.” Both stories – the story of the Good Samaritan and the story of Mary and Martha are needed as examples of what it means to love God with all our being and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We live in a cultural context that prizes productivity and assigns us our worth based on how much we can produce. We’re employed under the rubrics of quotas and bottom-lines. When our worth and value as members of society are tied to being productive, it can be easy to fall into the pattern of anxiety and distraction. We need to accomplish the next task on our list, we need to get to the next meeting, we need to send that email or return that phone call. Even our rest and recreation are driven by the demands of busyness and accomplishment. It’s not that the tasks themselves are bad – often, they are morally neutral. But when the tasks themselves become the object of our focus, when we lose sight of Jesus’ call to tend to the “better part,” then we risk centering ourselves in the very anxieties that distract us from faithful discipleship.

Jesus tells us, as he told Martha, that the many things with which we are often distracted are unnecessary. Faithful discipleship is not counted by our busyness but by our singular focus on him. Is our relationship with God at the center of our work and our study?

Is Jesus at the center of our prayer and our activism? Do our lives feel fragmented and pulled in too many directions? If we answered no to the first two questions and yes to the second, then perhaps this story of Mary and Martha can serve as an invitation today: let us commit to return to our center, to linger at Jesus’ feet and savor the words with which he feeds us. How? By immersing ourselves in prayer. By allowing our prayer to fuel our service. By loving Jesus wholeheartedly. By loving others with abandon, and with mercy and compassion. This is the “better part,” the “one needed thing.” Amen.

[i] Loveday Alexander, “Sisters in Adversity: Retelling Martha’s Story” in A Feminist Companion to Luke, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 197-213.