This is the third of four Lenten addresses on the theme Contemplation, Activity and Resurrection in the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the second here, and the fourth here.
“Martha received him into her house”
Martha: Love-in-Activity
“And a woman named Martha received him into her house”. Our lives are busy lives, probably far too busy. Our busyness becomes our burden and our justification. We are busily miserable and miserably busy all at the same time. The world, without and within our souls, conspires to make us busy and we acquiesce to its demands. We all fall prey to the hideous notion of ‘justification by busyness alone’. Leisure, in its proper and more ancient sense, is intolerable and inexcusable for this possessive spirit of busyness. And yet, there is something not only inevitable but necessary about some of our busyness. Martha in Bethany presents us with the true and the false form of busyness. There is something here to affirm and something here to eschew.
The problem is not so much that we are simply busy, but what our busyness is about. What end does it serve? Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, speaks of the contemplative life as a negotiossium otium – “a most busy leisure”. Like the true form of outward activity, that “most busy leisure” has a focus. It is centered. Martha shows us the false and miserable form of busyness not because of what she is doing but because of the manner in which she is doing it.
She is “distracted” or “anxious”. What does that mean? It means that she is uncollected, uncentered, and without a proper focus. The word itself suggests that her eyes move about from one thing to another, turning this way and that, almost in a frenzy of activity but without any clear sense for what end, for what purpose. The most miserable form of busyness is busyness for busyness’ sake.
No doubt, it is easy to lose our heads and our hearts in the daily busyness of our lives. The danger is very great and very real. We can end up by being defined by the endless round of the mere doing of things. Our activity becomes ceaseless and aimless and thoroughly meaningless. We may not even be aware that it is happening. That is a tragedy. When we lose our center, we lose our purpose and our direction. We lose ourselves. Our lives become unsettled. We become unglued. We get bent out of shape.
On one level, to be defined by the endless variety of things to be done is to be wholly determined externally – by the things outside yourself. You are carried along by the tide of events which sweep over you and then swamp you. They swallow you up and you drown. In that sequence you become inwardly indeterminate and entirely determined by what is outside of you. It becomes your center which is no center. You are defined by the circumference of circumstance.
It is a false state of the soul. It does not belong to the truth of ourselves to be so determined. Why not? Because even in the most extreme instance the soul has determined to be so determined. It has acquiesced in the situation and allowed events to define oneself. To be recalled to that deeper sense of the self even in the midst of losing ourselves in an endless busyness is the grace-note which returns us to ourselves. Like the prodigal son we “come to ourselves” and remember where home is and how far we have wondered from it. “I will arise and go to my father, and I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son?” We are recalled to ourselves. Here Christ sounds the grace-note to Martha simply by presenting her with a picture of herself.
“Martha, Martha; thou art careful” – full of cares – “and troubled about many things”. How accurate and right to the point. He simply notes her state of anxiety. He observes that she is thrown into a state of commotion. Why is that? Because she is troubled about many things. She is simply uncollected because she is full of cares – careful in the old sense of the word. In the many things of her serving she has forgotten for what end she serves. She has lost sight of the one thing needful – the main course, as it were, has been lost sight of in the busyness of too many dishes. One dish is enough. “One thing is needful”.
Jesus recalls her to the “one thing needful”. The many things distract us. The many things of our everyday lives must serve the one thing needful. The many things belong to the one thing. Our weekday lives give place to our Sunday worship. They exist for the sake of Sunday and not Sunday for the sake of the week. That Sunday serves to keep us on track during the week is, no doubt, much to be hoped for, but that does not mean that Sunday serves the week any more than the church serves the world, any more than Mary serves Martha, any more than Jesus serves the many interests of Martha distracted. No. Jesus addresses what is false in this busyness and restores Martha to what is altogether true in her activity, even necessary, insofar as it serves the “one thing needful”.
Charles Williams wisely remarks in relation to Dante’s Inferno that “Hell is always inaccurate”. It is the state of radical distractedness where one has “lost the good of intellect,” where one has lost one’s way in the dark wood of worldly confusions and the inanity of mere busyness. We have all felt the force of this. We see this everywhere, perhaps in our own lives and perhaps in the lives of others around us and dear to us. It manifests itself in various ways, in a thoughtlessness leading to indifference, in the failure to intend the consequences of actions, in the rage against the dying of the light, in the destructive fury against the seeming meaninglessness of life, and so on. It is the state of willed indifference or willed nothingness. Few can really live in such a state of the soul. None can live it truly. It does mean something. It means to will a lie. The point is that something is essentially willed, whether it is to be determined by an external busyness or to be radically indeterminate. But it will not do.
Jesus’ response to Martha’s agitation answers both aspects of this state of affairs. There is one thing needful and all else must be subordinate to it. Martha’s activity serves Mary’s contemplation. That, I suppose, goes down really hard. Yet it does so only if we think of Mary’s role here as something useless, idle and good-for-nothing. We can only think that if we have made an idol of our busyness. Christ’s words, in some sense, smash that idol.
We began with the “one thing needful”. We began with contemplation. We began with a prayerful meditation upon the purposes of God fulfilled in Christ Jesus. We began with that attention to the Word of God indicated in Mary of Bethany sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to his teaching. The activity of Martha precedes the activity of Mary and while it seems to precede as giving precedence to what Mary does, there is also I think an important sense in which Martha serves the “one thing needful” too. How? “A woman named Martha received him into her house”. Martha receives Jesus into the house of Bethany. That reception of Jesus serves the real business of listening to Jesus. To receive him means to be open to his will and purpose.
In our day, we need very much to recover what Bethany presents us with here. Augustine puts it quite nicely. He says, “attend to what Mary heard; In the beginning was the Word; attend to what Martha served; And the Word became flesh”. Attend to what abides forever, the eternal Word of God, and serve what abides forever in the midst of the things which pass away. The true character of Christian activity in the world lies in serving what Martha truly served – the Word made flesh – but always with an eye and an ear towards what Mary attended – the Word of God which was in the beginning, the Word which ever was, ever is and ever shall be.
Our Christian activity cannot be seen apart from the way of contemplation. It derives its purpose from attention to God’s purpose in contemplation. It can be said to take two basic forms: holy duties and the works of corporal mercy.
Holy duties belong to the state of our lives as Christians. By the Christian state of our lives, I mean whether we are single or married, whether we are widowed or orphaned, whether we are fathers or mothers, daughters or sons, clergy or lay, whether we are at home or at work, whether we hold public or ecclesiastical office, and so on. The works of corporal mercy are traditionally seven in number: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, and burying the dead.
In the holy duties of our daily lives, in whatever station we are set, the measure of Christ is brought to bear upon our lives. The obligations of office and family are also holy duties, which is to say, that we are to do them out of the love for Christ, out of the knowledge of Christ’s love for us. In the works of corporal mercy what is principal is the service of Christ. We are to be serving him in the service of others. Christians are not, properly speaking, servants of the world, but the servants of Christ in the world. No doubt, we need to recover a fuller sense of just what that means. It does not mean that Christ is collapsed into the world or into the church such that the concerns of either are immediately and absolutely identified as the concerns of Christ.
It means that the world finds its purpose in Christ according to his work in creation and redemption. The Church serves as a holy vessel of sanctification by bringing that Word to the world, by recalling the world to its purpose and end in God. These great and holy themes need constantly to be recalled and continually to be contemplated. What else, really, are the works of corporal mercy except the activity of the Body of Christ serving the Body of Christ out of love for the Body of Christ? Serve what Martha served; attend to that service of Christ in the service of those for whom he died and rose again.
The hands of Martha reflect the heart of Mary. The world’s problems of hunger, war, plague and pestilence are not going to be solved by human invention and ingenuity or by re-engineering the political system, the social system or whatever. These problems will not go away simply by throwing money at them or by walking away from them as if wishing them away. Christians face what remains an uncomfortable and inescapable fact. There is poverty, brutal and severe; there is poverty in the affluent society, complicated and intractable. It is not going to go away. It will always be there in one form or another. About such things, there can only be a more or a less.
Our Lord said, “the poor you have with you always”, but he also said “you can do good to them if you will”. What, then, do we will? The contemplation of the cross gives us the freedom to do what we will according to what is given us to do. We may enter into the works of corporal mercy, not according to some set of worldly expectations, whether activated by the politics of the left or the right but according to the freedom of Christ who laid down his life for you and for me, for the poor and the destitute. To face these problems radically is to see them in the crucified. Christ has borne all the sufferings of the world. The very meaning of each and every suffering is known and borne by him. Indeed, suffering only has meaning in him.
In these works we are of little earthly use if we have not grasped the limits of the finite and seen the limitations of human charity. We are of little earthly use if we have not glimpsed something of the abyss of suffering and death which Christ has freely borne. To recognize these limitations and to know that abyss brings us to the infinite charity of God as the only and true source for our actions. “All our doings without charity are nothing worth”. My charity and your charity is of little worth, indeed, nothing worth, if that divine charity is not in us. That charity has a name and is altogether real. It is Jesus Christ.
Out of the sense of the “one thing needful”, we may find a freedom to love and serve Jesus in the poor and in one another. It is Christ whom we serve. We do not serve our brother and sister well unless we see them in Christ. The truth of our brother and our sister rests in Christ, in their need, in their hope and in their glory. We serve Christ with the heart of Mary in the hands of Martha.
In a wonderful scene in the eighteenth chapter of The Book of Genesis, the Lord appears to Abraham in threefold aspect at the Oaks of Mamre. This rich and suggestive scene forms the basis for the Icon of the Trinity in Eastern Orthodox Churches. With exquisite oriental courtesy, Abraham extends the ancient rites of hospitality and with Sarah prepares a meal and serves them in the shade of those oaks. “Then he took curds, and milk, and the calf which he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.” (Gen. 18)
The shadows of the cross are present in the shade of the Oaks of Mamre. Abraham serves the Lord of threefold aspect. He attends to the service of the Lord. Such is the service of Martha. He stands by in attendance at the feast as one who looks on but does not partake in the fellowship of the meal.
The feast under the shade of the oaks of Mamre foreshadows the Lord’s Supper in Jerusalem. There Christ not only serves but invites us to the fellowship of his table, to sit with him and listen to his words. So, too, are we invited to the Holy Eucharist, as guests and not just as on-lookers.
The meal with Martha prepares in Bethany precedes the Last Supper in Jerusalem. Is she to be like Abraham, as one who stands by in attendance, as one who serves but does not enjoy? Martha in her distractedness, it must be said, would not be able to share in the enjoyment of the feast. In her very distractedness, she removes herself from the fellowship of the meal. She distances herself from the point of her service. In her anxiety about a multitude of things, she would not be able to enjoy the “one thing needful”, the very thing which is the truth of her service and the end for which she serves. Christ gently recalls her to that proper service. You see, Jesus would not have her or us simply as by-standers at his table. His words to her are his invitation to us – attend to the “one thing needful”, by way of her activity and by way of Mary’s contemplation.
Martha’s service seeks truly the enjoyment of him in the fellowship of a meal. She has received him into her house that she may serve him and enjoy his fellowship. She enters into the purpose of his coming. What she serves is there for her to enjoy, but only if she is recalled to the true service of Christ. That service, moreover, is its own enjoyment of him. The hands of Martha do not intend Martha’s distractedness but rather the collectedness of Mary’s heart. That collectedness belongs to the ordering of all our busy activity. Then, our service can be our enjoyment too; our service, our perfect freedom.
Perhaps, something of all this is summed up in the beautiful words of the twelfth century Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx.
In this wretched and laborious life, brethren, Martha must of necessity be in our house; that is to say, our soul has to be concerned with bodily actions. As long as we need to eat and drink, we shall need to tame our flesh with watching, fasting, and work. This is Martha’s role. But in our souls there ought also to be Mary, that is, spiritual activity. For we should not always give ourselves to bodily efforts, but sometimes be still and see how lovely, how sweet the Lord is, sitting at the feet of Jesus and hearing his word. You should in no wise neglect Mary for Martha; or again Martha for Mary. For, if you neglect Martha, who will feed Jesus? If you neglect Mary, what use is it for Jesus to come to your house, when you taste nothing of his sweetness?
Let us pray that we may receive Jesus into the house of our souls, serving him in the needs of our neighbour and tasting the sweetness of the Lord in contemplation. Then, our souls will be filled with the fragrance of his presence.
Fr. David Curry
Comm. of St. David of Wales
March 1st, 2016