Progressive reflections on the lectionary #73

Monday 14th July 2025

Luke 10:38-42 I have issues with Mary & Martha

This week I challenge the accepted tradition of seeing Mary and Martha as representing simple ‘binary’ opposites and suggest that there are problems with such readings, just as there are alternative reasons to say that, for Mary, silence was the ‘better way.’

It’s only a handful of verses, but the story in Luke’s gospel of the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and their difference approaches to hospitality when Jesus came to call, has an outsize impact.

When Martha, who is doing all the work of providing food etc. herself while Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, comes to Jesus to ask him to get her sister to give her a hand, Jesus responds: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are needed--indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." (10: 41-42)

Conventional readings allocate a basic good/bad duality to the story: “are you a Mary, or a Martha?” What this is taken to mean is something like - are you distracted by busy-ness, or do you prioritise prayer, meditation, contemplation and reflection?

This is not terribly good news for the vast numbers of people around the world who have to work hard all day just to make ends meet, nor is it even great news for the masses of harassed parents who find themselves hiding in the bathroom in the hope of ‘five minutes peace.’

Of course it’s good to make time for prayer, meditation and so on, I don’t dispute that and in that sense we can appreciate the point those teachers are making - but it ignores some key factors.

In the first place it ignores, completely, the question of gender roles, and gender politics in the first century church from which this story comes.

This is, after all, an unusual story in having two key female protagonists, but what was ‘Luke’ (whether a person or a community) aiming to do here?

Is this supposed to be a ‘true’ story from the life of Jesus, or is it a later parable concocted by the writer(s) of the gospel? If the latter, then what might it have been intended to convey concerning the role of women in the church?

Could Luke have been trying to make the point that, rather than take on the ‘diakonos’ role of servant leadership, women in Christian communities should be still and silent…?

The Bible, after all, is not only used as tool of liberation, it has also been well used as a tool of domination and oppression. Its authors brought to their texts their own sets of assumptions and prejudices. We should at least aim to ensure, I think, that our continued reading doesn’t keep up the trend of using the text oppressively.

There’s a certain reality to be acknowledged, that the story has these two women confined to the domestic setting, and that service in this context is about ‘doing’ - not preaching or teaching, but being the person who cooks, cleans and so on. Given these facts, we must ask if that is what ‘service’ was understood to be for the women of the early church. Were the patriarchal norms of the time upheld in church structures?

Perhaps that gives an alternative way of looking at Mary, who Jesus says has chosen ‘the better part’.

Perhaps the ‘better part’ for Mary refers to her liberated choice - which she chooses rather than continuing to be caught up in the patriarchal expectation that women should be serving, not sitting at the master’s feet like a man.

It’s not necessary for Mary to be bound to the yoke of responsibilities that male dominated society put upon her. Where women can choose, where they are in a place of genuine freedom, there is liberation.

The parallel between Mary’s silence and the silent resistance offered by many since to the demands of cultural expectation and gender roles is certainly striking. Mary’s choice to remain silent when others make demands on her, is notable.

So we might say that Mary’s choice to sit, quietly, at Jesus’ feet represents the breaking away from the normative gender roles of the time while Martha continues to struggle beneath (get distracted by) the weight of social expectations. According to that reading, Jesus gently subverts those cultural expectations - calling the Mary way, ‘better’. Not good and bad so much as liberated and oppressed.

But is Luke really saying that? Lest we forget - this story follows on from the story of the Samaritan who demonstrates what it is to be a neighbour by enacting mercy. Action, in that story is an important aspect of discipleship in Luke’s eyes.

It also comes after the sending of the seventy two, in which Jesus instructs his disciples to go to places and to stay if they are welcomed in - as the sisters do here. To complicate matters, there are even some textual variants of this story which have both sisters sitting at Jesus’ feet… imagine if we had the other option, what difference would that make to our reading of the story?

There are, of course, a variety of ways of reading the passage - perhaps it’s simply worth noting that a ‘better way’ can be many things - it’s not synonymous with the ‘good way’ - neither way has to be ‘bad’, one can be good, while the other is better. When Luke has Jesus say: “Martha, Martha”, after all, this is a classic marker of ‘calling’, not of rebuke. Luke has Jesus affirm Mary’s choice without condemning or dismissing Martha.

Talking about the need to prioritise prayer, stillness, and so on can be a ‘good reading’ but I think there are ‘better’ ones to be had. Action and contemplation don’t need to be polar opposites after all - they are both important and can be partners. Silence might be a tool of oppression, just as it might be a tool of resistance. Luke may have been wedded to the patriarchal norms of his time, or he may have been as committed to emancipation as Jesus.

For all its brevity the story we have is not simplistic as it is sometimes presented, it has layers of subtlety that need to be peeled away to appreciate it fully.

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