“Careful and troubled about many things.”

(Luke 10:38-42)

The gospels tell us the simple story of how Jesus met and helped many people. He healed the sick, made the crippled able to walk again, gave sight to the blind, and health to the lepers.

But our gospel story today is about two sisters who need Jesus’ help all right, but not for healing, nor for forgiving terrible sins they have committed, nor for raising their dead (though they will need Him to do that for them in time).

These two women, at this moment, need His help to reconcile their differences so they can live peaceably under the same roof. They need His help to open their eyes to new and higher standards of value. They need Him to show each how to compliment, rather than cancel out each other. They need Jesus to banish the spirit of jealousy and hostility and anxiety from their home.

Here is a household, a family where a spiritual ministry is badly needed from Jesus, and the gospel shows us how, with keen diagnostic skill and competent spiritual surgery and satisfying therapy, the Lord moved in and performed that ministry. But how?

The home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus at the little village of Bethany was one of Jesus’ favorite places. Oh, how he loved it! Often he visited there. These two sisters and their brother always made him welcome.

Now on this particular visit, Martha, perhaps the older and certainly the accepted head of the house, was bustling about preparing an unusually good, company meal. But Mary, perhaps the younger and certainly the less domestic of the two women, sat with Jesus, listening to His conversation.

Presently, Martha, tired and flustered from her bustling activity, feeling a bit peeved with Mary for leaving her with all the work, and feeling somewhat sorry for herself that she was thus imposed on, said to Jesus: “Don’t you care at all that Mary has deserted me in the kitchen, leaving everything for me to do? Speak to my sister and tell her to lend me a hand.”

“Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You are all upset and out of sorts with your elaborate preparations. Only a few things are really needed. Just one good dish would do. We don’t really need a banquet. Mary has chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken away from her.”

So, the gospel story spotlights this little vignette of home life, a mixture of love and irritation, of hospitality and rudeness, of simplicity and complexity, and of Jesus ministering spiritually in that chaos and confusion to human need. But how is Jesus helping?

Well first of all, Jesus is accepting the fact of individual differences and showing how in God’s economy each is needed. He accepts and is grateful for both Mary’s and Martha’s service. Martha is the symbol of strenuous energy, and Mary, the pattern of sweet contemplation. In the Kingdom of God, both are needed.

There is here no choice of one as right and condemnation of the other as wrong. That’s what Martha wanted and did not get. Macauley remarked: “One may think Mary’s the better employment, but would prefer the table of Martha.” God has made His sons and daughters, oh so different. But each, in His sight, is beautiful and necessary to His great purposes. Because He accepts us we must learn to accept each other and, in spite of our wide differences, live together in mutual respect and helpfulness. Would that our nation, torn by bitter racial strife, would allow Jesus to minister to our spiritual need at this point.

The spirit of Durer’s praying hands is the spirit of the ministering Christ upon the home of Mary and Martha and upon the common household of all mankind. To some are given the deft touch of the artist to create beauty and to some are given the gnarled fingers and strong hands to perform the world’s work. One without the other is not complete. But it takes the ministry of Jesus in our hearts and homes and national affairs to bring us to an acceptance of both our gifts and limitations and the gifts and limitations of others, so we can grasp a common purpose for all to the glory of God. Only then can He crown the rancor and chaos and violence of our togetherness with beauty and order and peace.

And yet again, Jesus here ministers to the spiritual need of Mary and Martha and to our own need by refusing even love the license of blackmail. It was not always Jesus’ enemies who put Him on the spot and tried to trap Him with captious questions. Here in beloved Bethany in the home of trusted friends, a devoted woman all worn out with her sincere attempt at serving Him, tries to force His hand, make Him feel uncomfortable and bend His influence to serve her petulant mood. “Lord, don’t you care a bit that Mary is doing nothing to help me? Tell her to get up and help me put dinner on the table.” There is even the implied rebuke that Jesus is contributing to the delinquency of a loafer.

But Jesus will not be pushed. He will not let loving, efficient service blackmail truth and right and justice. No matter how much we love someone, no matter how faithfully that someone has served us, we can never allow that one in a petulant, peeved mood, to force us to action compliant with that mood, for to do so is to play the fool, to do less than justice to the one making the hot-headed request, and to do violence to the eternal right.

How will the man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? asked Plato. “Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity, can be multiplied a thousand fold in its effects upon the citizens.”

“Martha, Martha,” said Jesus, “you are all upset with your cares and anxieties over serving.”

Then Jesus moves on in His positive ministering to the spiritual needs of that Bethany home by revealing that service in itself is never enough. Martha is hard at work. That work was important and necessary, but so was Mary’s quiet and devoted attention. Some have thought that Luke placed this incident in the house of Mary and Martha in the same chapter with, and immediately following, his incomparable parable of the Good Samaritan to underscore the lesson that beautiful as Samaritan service is to one’s neighbor, it is never enough in itself. For service must be linked with worship. The pendulum of a healthy, religious life must swing regularly and steadily from one to the other, from work to worship. Martha must not always remain in the kitchen, nor Mary sit only at the Master’s feet.

Certainly this incident shows that it is possible to become so distracted with so much serving as to endanger one’s own soul. And even more — to undercut the effectiveness of the service itself. That was what poor Martha was doing.

Have you ever been a guest in a home where the hostess is in such a fluster over the occasion that all the family is walking on tip-toe because of her out-of-sortedness; and you, the guest, become so uncomfortable, because of the trouble your presence is causing, you wish no one had ever invited you in the first place?

Too elaborate entertainment becomes a pander to pride, rather than hospitality for one’s guests. The purpose of hospitality can be perverted, and instead of honoring one’s guests and enjoying fellowship with them, it can become the platform for host and hostess to strut and parade themselves upon. A maid returning to her former, less ostentatious employers from a temporary position with high society folks, explained her decision by this remark: “There was too much rattling of the dishes for the fewness of the victuals.”

Worship — sitting at Jesus’ feet, is needful to restore the proper perspective. This is the one thing above all else that is needful, to hear the word of the Lord. Man needs both bread and words. Always there have been some benefactors who have given man bread and some benefactors who have given man words by which to live. Is there any doubt about which is more needful? Man must have meaning, or the gift of life itself is worthless.

At the climax of Thornton Wilder’s play, The Skin of our Teeth, a character reveals that meaning was preserved for him through the hard trials and desperate crises of history by thinking of some great word of wisdom and hope in the dark, lonely watches of the night. Nine o’clock was Spinoza, and ten o’clock, Plato, and eleven o’clock, Aristotle, and when twelve o’clock struck, he always thought: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Yes, “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

This word we hear only in worship, and that word restores meaning to life and strips away the anxieties and frets. “The voice that speaks this word to us, though it speaks in our hearts, is not our voice. It comes from heights and depths we cannot fathom. And the words the Voice speaks are not our own. They are the words of One who is as far as He is near, in whom alone our little, partial, thwarted lives find meaning and wholeness.” (Interpreters Bible)

Finally, Jesus here affirms the impregnable position of those who choose the better part of linking worship with work, of sitting at the Master’s feet to receive His word and then rising to perform it. “Martha, Martha, Mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken from her.” Jesus is saying that He will neither take it away from her, nor permit Martha to take it away, and even affirming that the world cannot take from her that better part. For the Marys of the world know that peace which the world can neither give nor take away.

Jesus never leaves in undisturbed contemplation those who come and sit at His feet and receive His word. For His word always concludes with the exhortation: “Arise, let us be going.” Until we hear this, we have not met and conferred with the Son of God. So, from the Mount of Transfiguration, he hustled down the adoring Simon who wanted to build a shrine and linger over long in meditation. The epileptic boy awaited His healing touch in the plain below right then and they must go. From Gethsemane’s spiritual struggle, he rouses the napping disciples: “Arise, let us be going,” and down they go to the cross and the arduous work of redemption.”

But always, there are those who have the promise of the peace of Christ, the strong untroubled peace of God. For always, the best part of that better part is the joy and peace which comes when our choosing of the better way leads us for Christ’s sake to choose a better part for others through sacrificing ourselves.

Lin Yutang tells with deep emotion of the thirst for learning in his poor, boyhood, Chinese home. His father, a Christian minister, stirred in all his children a burning ambition for learning and service. “One incident,” writes Lin Yutang, “influenced my life very deeply. My second sister, gifted and good, wanted to go to college. But education in China in those days was for sons, seldom for daughters. My father could not afford to educate both. Instead, at 21, she married, for Chinese girls were not supposed to reach that age and not be married. We came down on the same riverboat, she for her wedding, I, to go to Shanghai for my first year of college. After her wedding, she took forty Chinese pennies from the pocket of her bridal dress and gave them to me and said, with tears in her eyes: ‘You have your chance to go to college. Being a girl, your sister can’t. Do not waste your opportunity. Make up your mind to be a good man, a useful man, and a famous man.’ “Two years later, she died of bubonic plague,” writes Lin Yutang. “The forty pennies were soon spent. Her words have remained with me.”

When, in the middle of the night I wake and cannot sleep and begin again the fruitless wrestling with my peculiar personal problems, how often the thought comes: “Suppose my father, when faced with the difficulties that ringed his life round: financial disasters, the inevitable misunderstandings and failures of those he had counted on, and all the other harassments of life that are the common experience of man — suppose he had given up the struggle or deserted those who depended on him or failed in any other way to stand his ground with honor — suppose the harder, yet nobler part he had refused, where would I be now?”

So, I know again, the best part of that better part which cannot be taken away is the strong peace and sturdy joy of those who grasp for others and not for self that better part.