The Mary and Martha story in Luke is so familiar. We make typologies of the characters. And often avoid its significance.
For Sunday
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11C
Collect
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 10:38-42
“But Martha was distracted by her many tasks”
Reflection
For all the many times I’ve read this story, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated that Martha is distracted.
This dispute between Mary and Martha is so rarely framed as a matter of distraction. Not in any of the sermons I’ve heard.
Our attention is more naturally drawn to the conflict. We are pulled into the feeling Martha has of being “put upon” and “always having to be responsible” because her “good for nothing sister” is “always” doing things like “living in the moment” and not “holding up her end”.
A friend who was an engineer once told me that this is the most hated passage by engineers because the thoughtful planner who does all the work is chastised for doing what they do best. And Mary gets the praise for doing nothing.
We can certainly sympathize. Especially as we start to label each other as “Marthas and Marys”. The ones who do the work to prepare the thing and the ones who entertain and live in the moment.
For a lot of people, especially for those who have such sympathy for Martha, this is not a generous moment from Jesus. It is a strangely obtuse one. One that they genuinely wish they could understand. Because they don’t actually like getting mad at Jesus here.
Of course, none of this is real.
It is a symptom of distraction. Which is so appropriate.
As I have been reading about ADHD and how distraction and attention work: for both the neurotypical and the neurodivergent: we get Martha and Mary as a remarkable example of how our attention can race away from the material at hand and toward the shiny object. Even for those who don’t have ADHD.
For Martha, and her legion of supporters throughout history, we are missing the part of the story in which she just wasn’t listening. She was operating on assumptions, refusing to communicate, bottling her frustration until it burst out in rage and condescension.
Meanwhile, Mary, often treated as the neurodivergent character, utilizes her superpower of hyperfocus on Jesus to be present with him; which is precisely what he wanted.
We are sometimes so oblivious to just how much process is a distraction for all of us. And that doing the right thing really is as simple as sitting with Jesus.
Problem in the Text
This week’s video deals with that problem of why we don’t want Jesus to prefer Mary.