Mary and Martha and questions of boundaries and barriers

The story of Martha and Mary in today’s gospel has been thought variously to privilege prayer over action, the religious life over marriage and, even more dubiously, the spiritual over the material. But, in fact, the story of Martha and Mary continues the theme of last week’s gospel: it is about, first and foremost, boundaries and barriers.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus sent out the clear and, to the Jewish authorities, clearly unacceptable message, that salvation is intended for all and that goodness is as likely (if not more likely) to be found outside conventional expectation and beyond humanly devised boundaries. But here, in the story of Martha and Mary, the boundaries are between roles, and specifically, between male and female roles.

The problem between Martha and her sister wasn’t just the workload – that may well have been unfairly distributed; the problem, to which Martha was objecting, was that, by sitting at the feet of Jesus, “listening to his words”, Mary was behaving like a man, and specifically, enjoying the privileges reserved for men.

A caution, however, is needed: it would be not only anachronistic but wide of the mark to suggest that this homely story of sibling tension is a proto-feminist critique. On the contrary, it’s been proposed by contemporary feminists that if anything it reinforces male-female stereotypes by implying that the only way for a woman to get on in a man’s world is to act like a man.

The episode’s real point is much broader than feminism: it is a critique of social and religious conventions that inexcusably undermine and thereby truncate the God-given dignity of other human beings, as such. The social background is vital for getting its drift.

In highly segregated cultures, then as now, houses were (and still are) divided into male spaces and female spaces. The public rooms of a house were where the men met; the kitchen, and other quarters unseen by outsiders, belonged to the women and children. Men and women mixed only in very specific contexts, outside the house where the children played, and inside the house in the bedroom.

By sitting with the men who, by implication and custom, are gathered around Jesus to listen to him, Mary had crossed not only a boundary within the house, but also an equally strict boundary within society. So, when Martha complains, she’s asking Jesus to send her sister Mary back into the women’s quarters, where she belonged. But when Jesus responds by telling Martha that Mary has chosen ‘the good part’, he’s asserting, against all convention, her right as a human being to be a disciple, that is, to be one who, quite literally, learns from the Master. Her right is equal to that of any man.

But, again, Jesus is not invoking abstract egalitarian principles, but once more breaking through the all-too-concrete constructs of social convention that arbitrarily enforce confinement and segregation on certain parts of the human race, including, but not limited to, women. He’s affirming, in other words, our common humanity, rooted in the fact that we have a common Father and that we are all, without exception, made in the image and likeness of our Creator. All differences pale in comparison with these fundamental communalities.

Mary, in other words, stands for all who are unjustly disadvantaged or, even worse, deprived of their intrinsic dignity as human beings.

But there’s another, related aspect to this homely story. It’s no coincidence that immediately after this episode, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. The story of Martha and Mary has something important to teach about the essential nature of prayer: not prayer understood as an activity in which we engage at given, discrete moments, but prayer understood, first and foremost, as a dispostion of the heart, an abiding attentiveness to God that characterises our whole lives and everything we do. St Paul hints at this when he enjoins us to “pray constantly” and when he suggests that prayer isn’t something that we ourselves do, but something that’s done within us by the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit Himself prays within us”, he says, “with sighs too deep for words”.

And T.S. Eliot hints at the same when he says in Little Gidding: And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. Again, in one of the earliest lives of St Francis of Assisi, by Thomas of Celano (1185-1260), a young contemporary, it’s said of the saint that he didn’t so much pray, as himself “became a prayer”. (A ‘prayer’ and a ‘pray-er’: the pun works even better in English than in Latin).

We say our prayers, of course; but more fundamentally, we’re to become the prayer we pray, so that our whole life is an act of praise. The same is true, of course, of love: our acts of love come from a loving heart, a life of love. We pray from a praying heart, because we are pray-ers, and we love from a loving heart, because we are lovers. The connection between prayer and love is brilliantly illuminating of both.

So, the story functions on two different but related levels. By affirming that we all share a common nature and a common vocation, it critiques all those false, artificial boundaries that speciously segregate and hierarchise human beings. But it also dissolves the false dichotomy between the life of prayer and the life of action. In the end, it’s not Martha’s busy-ness, as such, that distracts her, but her blinkered preoccupation with her own busy activity. Mary’s just as busy, but her attentiveness is directed beyond herself to Jesus, the Divine Presence, in whose abiding company we find ourselves by the very fact of our existence. Martha might have found helpful these words from a popular 17 th century mystical tract, The Practice of the Presence of God, by an otherwise unknown French Discalced Carmelite lay-brother, Brother Lawrence (1605-91): The time of busyness does not with me differ from the time of prayer. In the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as much tranquillity as if I were upon my knees before the Most Holy Sacrament.