The Martha-Mary Double-Bind

Lectionary reflections for Pentecost 7 (C)

By Jane Carol Redmont

Readings for Pentecost 7, Proper 11, Year C, July 18, 2004

Amos 8:1-12 or Genesis 18:1-10a

Psalm 52 or 15

Colossians 1:15-28

Luke 10:38-42

Over the years, I have come to refer to this Sunday's Gospel as “The Martha-Mary Double Bind.”

Every time I read or hear the story, I think: “This is a bad resolution. If everyone went into the kitchen – including Jesus – we'd all have more time for contemplation and study. And the dishes would get done, too.”

It turns out my mixed reaction to the text is not an isolated phenomenon. A little detective work in the history of interpretation, both visual and verbal, yields many traces of this ambivalence in the Christian community.

We have Mary the contemplative and Martha the busybody do-gooder. We have Mary in more recent decades reinterpreted as the model for women in theological education – and we have an English group once opposed to the emancipation of women named the Martha Movement.

Biblical stories come to us with the history of their use, a history of their hearing, and not only with the history of their writing and, as it happens, the story of Martha and Mary has resonated in ears, hearts and minds in multiple ways. A wealth of interpretations attest to this, from paintings by Fra Angelico to church groups named for Martha to contemporary feminist readings of the story. The scholars and artists and popular storytellers do not agree with each other. They disagree in living color. We have Mary the contemplative and Martha the busybody do-gooder. We have Mary in more recent decades reinterpreted as the model for women in theological education – and we have an English group once opposed to the emancipation of women named the Martha Movement. We have a Martha Church adjoining an ancient hospital and dedicated to the care of the sick. And we have a ditty produced by a Reformation-era pastor,

Martha and Mary in one life                              

Make up the perfect vicar's wife.

We also have forgotten images of Martha, including frequent medieval paintings of her as “a proud housewife with a fettered dragon stretched out at her feet,” according to the German scholar Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, who has done her own detective work on the story. Move over, Saint George. And there is a Fra Angelico depiction of Gethsemane in which Martha and Mary sit awake in the foreground, vigiling, while the male disciples sleep: Mary reads a book with bowed head; Martha, head raised, is alert, her hands in prayer in the same gesture as Jesus.

Clearly, there is something going on here. Is Martha kitchen worker or dragon-slayer? Or both? Is Mary meek in silence or bold in learning? Are the two sisters competitors or partners?

If the history of the text's life after its writing is this complex and contradictory, you can be pretty sure there are some hot-button issues in there for the Christian community, issues traveling the centuries from the early church to the present day: ministry, learning, household arrangements, authority. For starters.

As for the text before its writing, it seems to have clues as well, not about whose role is more worthy or holy, but about who Martha and Mary may have represented in the Christian community, and certainly about the fact that there was some kind of conflict happening behind that story, in the early Christian communities that bequeathed it to us.

Note that these are not the Martha and Mary in John's Gospel, the same women portrayed very differently in the story of the raising of Lazarus. Martha – the edgy Hausfrau who gets put down by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke – in John's Gospel is one who calls Jesus to task, not the other way around. She is one to whom Jesus reveals who he is, and who boldly and openly acknowledges him as Messiah. Only Peter holds such a privileged position. 

And in that Johannine story, the women, and their respective places and roles in the community, are not in competition with each other, not placed in an impossible situation that leaves both of them incomplete and the structure of their lives unquestioned.

Luke's gospel has a lot of women in it, relatively speaking. This is deceptive. Luke does use examples of women, often in parallels with examples of men, like the man searching for the lost sheep and the woman searching for the lost coin. But there is a great deal of reassuring and praising women and not much of speech and action by these same women.

But we have here the Martha and Mary of Luke. Luke's gospel has a lot of women in it, relatively speaking. This is deceptive. Luke does use examples of women, often in parallels with examples of men, like the man searching for the lost sheep and the woman searching for the lost coin. But there is a great deal of reassuring and praising women and not much of speech and action by these same women.

This doesn't just happen when the author of Luke is running the show. Our lectionary crafters make a large part of the Genesis story (the part in parentheses above) optional: the part in which Sarah herself laughs, speaks, questions, the part that also mentions menstruation, pleasure and childbirth. At least in today's gospel story, we do hear Martha, who appears to be the head of the household, take some initiative – as does Sarah in the Genesis story, but only if we use the “long version.”

And this Lukan story wants us to take sides. Taking sides is often what we need to do: lukewarm is not a gospel temperature. But this story is not one of those cases where taking sides will be life-giving. Why pit the sisters against each other, or their ministries of domestic management and service on the one hand and attention to the living Word on the other? Of course we busy ourselves with too many things, today more than ever, and need to refocus our attentions. But the story as it meets us should fill us with holy suspicion: What is the cost of taking sides here? For whom will there be a cost? 

How can we converse with each other, with our homegrown traditions, and with Christ, in a way that will build a church in which all ministries are honored, and in which the very shape of ministry can change in response to the world's needs?

Jane Redmont prays and preaches at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Berkeley, California. She preached on this Gospel last fall at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and will preach on it this Sunday at the Common Worship of St. Innocent of Alaska Episcopal Mission and the Gualala Lutheran Mission in Gualala, California. Jane is completing her Ph.D. in theology at the Graduate Theological Union and is the author of two books, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today and When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life .  Jane is active in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and in labor issues. She may be reached at janered@earthlink.net .