Wisdom Through His Blood - Thoughts on Mary and Martha

Amos 8:1-12; Psalm 52; Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42

There were two men talking at the house in the city.

“I’d like to interview her for my account”, the Greek said.

John replied, “I will take you to her house tomorrow morning early.”

And the next morning, they walked the three miles over the Mount of Olives in the early summer sun. At the top of the mount, they looked westward and down to Jerusalem, where the golden spires of the white stone Temple glistened beside the dark tower of the Fortress Antonia where Roman soldiers, like ants, marched about.

Down the other side, they came to the inn. A couple of lepers passed by on the other side of the road.

John said, “This place has grown up a lot since I was last here. She never let the weeds get this tall and everything was kept neat and in good repair. I hope she is ok.”

They looked around. Vines ran up trees and the sides of the house. Weeds and flowers grew randomly in the coolness under the big cedar trees. A stone bench along the path had fallen over. It looked like no one paid attention to the place anymore. John began to worry. Was the owner still alive?

They knocked at the door. A goat came up to them, looking for a treat in their hands. In the distance, children called to one another. The whole place looked and sounded deserted, not at all like the Greek had expected. But there were no festivals this week in Jerusalem – it was early summer. Between the heat and the demands of farming, few people traveled far from home.

“Let’s walk around back and see if we can find her. She may be in the garden,” John said.

They walked around the house. More goats were grazing in the lush grass under the tall cedars. A dozen fig trees were planted on the back, while the side was filled with an olive orchard. A hawk screeched over head as they walked through the high grass. A handful of pomegranate trees lined the path. Grape vines were twined around posts.

And then they saw her.

Bent over, using a wooden stick, she was digging around some beans. As she straightened up, she saw them.

“John! How good to see you!” The delight on the woman’s tanned face was clear as she spoke in Aramaic. She looked to be mid-forties in age – gray, slender, but strong. “You’re looking good for an old man! What are you, forty, now?”

“Yes, Martha. I’m forty-one. I’ve brought a friend who wants to hear your stories about the Master. This is Doctor Loukus, a brother in the Way from Troas in Greece. “

Martha turned to Loukus, effortlessly changing into Koine, the common Greek trade language.”I’m so happy to meet you! Another brother! It seems like the Way is spreading far and wide.”

“It is, Martha. It’s been what – 10 or 15 years since the Master left us?”

“It’s been eleven years. I know exactly how long its been. Why don’t you go into the courtyard by the well and I’ll get you some lunch.”

The two men walked into the courtyard and sat on a couple of benches in the shade.

John whispered to Loukas. “If she does like she did in the old days, we’ll have a seven-course meal here in a few minutes.”

A few minutes later, Martha joined them with a pitcher of warm goat’s milk, some pure white cheese, dates and fresh figs. A very simple lunch. Loukas raised an eyebrow to John. John shrugged and said, “Let me pray to God…”

After John gave thanks to God for the food, and they began to eat the snack, John asked her. “Do you remember the first time the brethren stopped by here with the Master?”

“Of course I do.” Her eyes went off into space…

“It was a cold morning. I’d just milked a couple of the goats, when Lazarus comes running around the house, and tells me that a band led by his old childhood friend Yeshua was coming. OH, I was so-o-o-o angry that no one had thought to run ahead. Here were about 30 people coming in and no notice, and Yeshua was such an important man.

“Of course, we’d heard about Him from the other travelers. People talk, you know. We’d heard how He’d just sort of appeared out of nowhere and started teaching and healing people and there were already rumors flying that He might be the Messiah. Of course, we’d known His family for years – His mother and father used to stop by here on their way to Jerusalem at each of the festivals. I guess that’s how Him and Lazarus became such good friends. Where was I?”

“Oh yes. Well, at that time, I prided myself on always having the best food on the road. I had a few minutes notice, so I had one of the servants get a fire going in the brick oven, and I made several huge pies,” she turned toward Loukas. “ I make this wonderful pomegranate pie, with raisins and honey and just a little extra barley flour put in it for a thickener…” She whispered conspiratorially.

“Well, I made those pies, and I had a servant kill a pair of lambs and meanwhile I’m grinding the peas into paste for the pine nuts and I look around and Mary is no where! Lazarus, of course, is welcoming our guests, and there is Mary, out among the men! I tell her I need some help in the kitchen and she comes in for a minute or two – I think she cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl – and then she disappeared again! And I had a reputation for big, fancy meals at this inn!

“So the lambs are roasting, the pies are baking, I’ve got six different vegetables cooking, and I’m trying to pour everyone water and there’s Mary. She’s just sitting at Yeshua’s feet, just rapt in attention at every word He says, while I’m trying to get food together for three dozen people on short notice!

“So I marched into the courtyard with a pitcher of water, turned to Yeshua and said, ““Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“That’s what I told Him. I guess I was a bit angry that day – but I was so-o-o-o busy! Well, he just smiled up at me from his seat and said,

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

“and Mary just grinned at me!”

“That must have been very frustrating for you”, Loukas said.

“It was. And it took me a while, but I learned from it.” Martha sat there, remembering for a while. Her face filled with emotion.

“What did you learn? “John asked gently.

“It took me a couple of years to realize – I guess It didn’t really hit me until He was executed – I watched Him die - and then came back to us for that glorious month. I guess it was some wisdom I learned through His blood. Wisdom through His blood…

I really hadn’t realized it. But I had the Son of God at my house for supper that day. And I spent hours worrying about the food and the cleaning. I could have heard His voice speak; I could have asked Him questions; He could have told me what my life was all about. But I had so much pride. I felt that cleaning my house and cooking so many different foods was what I was all about.

“Now, I wish I’d spent more time asking Him questions about the Scriptures. I wish I’d spent more time listening to what He had to say. I wish I’d just spent more time looking into those beautiful kind eyes that had seen the Universe while He made it! Instead, just like He said, I was worried and upset about THINGS!

“Even that glorious Sunday morning after He was executed, I was in a hurry. I went to the Master’s tomb with the other women, and when He wasn’t there I hurried back home. But Mary knew that He was special all the time. She took time to wander in the garden, looking for Him, and so she got to see Him first that wonderful morning when He came back to us alive. I could have seen Him that morning…but I was in a hurry...”

The woman looked much older as she bowed her head. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“Since then, I’ve kind of let this place go, I’m afraid. I’ve tried to spend more time talking to Him and Father, and less time worrying about less important things like the meals and the property.

“Where is Mary, and where is Lazarus?” John wanted to change the subject.

“They’ve left for Cyprus. It wasn’t safe for Lazarus after the persecution began. I got a letter from them a couple of days ago…They’ve found a good place and they want me to join them. You were lucky to catch me here. I’m planning to pack up and leave next week – I’m leaving the inn to the lepers, for they need it more than I do….I’ll miss this place.”

Loukas nodded his head, “Yes, I thought I saw a couple lepers this morning during the walk. “

“Yes, there are several in town. In fact, another time Yeshua came to town, He ate at Simon the Leper’s home one evening. I catered the dinner. It was a couple weeks after He raised my brother Lazarus from the dead…”
...

We’ll leave those three sitting in the courtyard of the Inn of Bethany. Church tradition has it that Martha and Mary and Lazarus did move to Cyprus, where he became the first Bishop of a church there.

Martha’s sin was simple and yet it is widespread. It is the sin of busyness, the sin of focusing upon the world, the sin of materialism. The world is around us and every day we look around and see our homes in need of repair, and our pride tells us to keep the house neat. And so we paint – not because the house needs painting, but because we saw a new color scheme in a magazine. We buy new furniture, not because our old furniture is falling apart, but because we grew tired of the old furniture. We fix the fence – a fence that no longer keeps cattle in or out, because we don’t have cattle, but because someone might make fun of our broken fence. We get a new car – not because our old car is irreparable, but because the vinyl on the seats is getting old, and because there is a bit of rust around the bumper, and because we no longer have a car payment, so we can afford a new model.

We mow our lawns. Would someone tell me why we mow our lawns? Is it because three hundred years ago, some British Lords started keeping their lawns short so they could play cricket during the summer? And we just love the idea of a big, green lawn, and so most of us spend one, two, or even six hours a week keeping our grass short. We spend thousands of dollars on lawn tractors just so we can have neat, green lawns and that means we have to work harder and longer during our day jobs, spending our life’s precious hours and days keeping grass short.

My brother-in-law wanted green grass, really green grass, and so he fertilized his lawn. That lawn about killed him that summer as it grew three times as fast as before! He never fertilized it again! He had learned his lesson!

This time of the year, we start to look for clothing sales. We go shopping, looking for new clothes because we were in the habit of buying new clothes for the kids every July and August because they were growing, but the kids aren’t around anymore, but the sales are still there and so we buy more clothing for our closets that are stuffed full and then we take our old clothing and bundle it up and take it to the mission, and there are so many people doing this that they bundle up our clothes and sell it to a company in Canada by the container-load and they ship it to Africa and India and Bangladesh because we have to wear new clothes to show everyone else how good our lives and incomes are.

We buy things for our homes and then we dust those things. I had an uncle with dozens and dozens of Hummel figurines he had found at yard sales and auctions. He proudly said his Hummel collection was worth forty thousand dollars. Every week, he and his wife dusted that collection. One day my uncle was diagnosed with leukemia. A year later he was dead. My aunt sold the entire collection for about a thousand dollars the next year.

And we work to buy these things. We work our forty-hour jobs, we work extra hours, and then we come home and we work on our houses in the evenings and the weekends. Because we’ve always bought new cars and new clothes and new furniture, and we had to spend money on vacations, we have to stay busy, busy, busy and the dust collects on our Bibles since we don’t have time to sit down and read through the Gospel of Mark over the next two evenings, something I can read to you aloud in an hour or two.

Is it because our parents pushed us to stay busy? Was there a Martha in our house, upset if you spent time sitting down, reading? Was there a Martha who took you away from time with your toy cars or your dollhouse, who kept you from wandering the woods where you liked to listen to the bird calls and see the pattern of bright and dark on the leaves as God breathed on the tree limbs and made them move back and forth? Did you grow up feeling guilty if you weren’t moving? Are you afraid you’ll starve to death if you aren’t working, working, working?

For you see, it is possible to be like Mary and sit at the foot of Jesus. It is possible to re-arrange our lives so that, as Jesus said, “few things are needed – or only one.” It is possible to plan our life so that we stop buying, we cut our cleaning load in half, we cook three things for supper instead of seven. We cut our laundry by a third when we told our children to each pick a towel and to use that same towel to dry off two days in a row. After all, they just took a shower and are clean, right?

It is possible to mow only half of our property, to pay off our debts, to train our children to focus upon less extracurricular activities and more God, to become more like Mary and less like the young Martha. We simply need to decide that we will do it. We decide what is important – and what is not important. Hopefully, our choices are God’s choices.

I know how it is. When we lived in Atlanta, Saundra and I took turns working twelve hour days, from 9 am to 9 pm at our business. Our vacations were two or three days long. We ate fast food most days. The business – the busyness – had become my god.

We moved to Ohio in May of 2003, and that summer, almost every evening I sat on my new front porch and watched the Muskingum River run by as the sun set, the sky turned golden-orange, and the birds sang. And that was where God was able to talk to me about life and what was important – and what was not.

And so I changed. And five years later, I had a new kind of busyiness. I worked full-time as a teacher at Parkersburg Catholic High School. I taught two evening courses at WVU-Parkersburg. I had a full-time seminary load and pastured two small churches, so my busy was God’s busy, I was always in the Word of God, I was talking about God in the high school, I was preaching on weekends and leading Bible studies, and I spent every Thursday evening watching a movie or some television with my wife and kids.

And now, my life is filled with God, but I work hard to not be busy with trivial things. I talk to people about God, I write sermons about God, I read books about God, and I sit on my back porch when the weather allows and I look at the clouds in the sky that God made, and think about God. My wife and I travel to the hospitals together and we enjoy life, because we know that we are always learning more about the kindest, gentlest, most loving Being in the Universe, the Creator, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are always learning more about who God is. And that is the only important thing in this life.

For you see, when we look at the other story about Mary and Martha and Jesus, the story where Lazarus died and came back to life…It was not the strident, accusing statement of the powerful Martha standing in Jesus’ face “LORD, if you had been here our brother would not have died!” It wasn’t that statement that really moved Jesus to bring back Lazarus.

It was the plea of the weak Mary on her knees saying the very same thing, except in a different way: “Lord, if you had been here our brother would not have died!” It was Mary’s plea on her knees while she was at His feet that really moved Jesus, that tore Him up, that led Him to walk to her brother’s tomb. It really helps, you see, to have watched the Son of God up close, to know His character, to know what is important to Him when our loved one is lying in the tomb.

So let’s clean out our closets and cupboards and lives and throw some stuff away. Plan to hold onto our cars another two years. Buy some wildflower seeds and scatter them over half our yards and plant only perennial flowers. Let’s give away our knickknacks. Tell the kids that they only get a single extracurricula activity this year. Let’s go home from work a half hour earlier and stop scheduling so many things on Sunday. Wear our clothes another year. Stop buying coffee and use the money to pay off our debts. Simplify our lives so we have time to breathe and sit at the feet of Jesus.

“Few things are needed – or only one.” Will you, like Mary, choose what is better?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnjeMwxFuBA

Johnny Diaz lyric video “Breathe”