Martha, Mary, or Both?

By Audrey Stallsmith

Mary was the impractical sister who sat on the floor enthralled by what Jesus had to say, while her muttering sister was doing all the preparing and serving of the meal. I’m definitely more the Mary than the Martha type, as far as practicality—or lack of it—goes! 

But I also tend to be “troubled about many things,” especially about the Marthas’ opinions of myself. So, under the same circumstances, I probably would have allowed myself to be pulled away to help set the table.

Actually, I’ve had to be more of a Martha lately since I’m doing the cooking for my father and sometimes preparing Sunday or holiday meals for other members of the family as well. So I can see her point of view too. 

But I would prefer that my family members spend as much time as possible with our nearly ninety-year-old patriarch rather than helping me in the kitchen. Not to mention that those of us who aren’t natural multi-taskers have to concentrate, so the presence of other people just distracts us! 

Therefore, when I begin feeling like a Martha-type martyr, I can laugh myself out of it, with the thought that she definitely would have done a better job with the cleaning.  It’s harder for me to convince myself that it’s okay to be the Mary who occasionally has to let dirty pots and pans pile up in the sink while she’s trying to finish a writing project. 

Whether or not Mary was aware of her sister’s irritation isn’t clear. As I just mentioned, some of us creative types tend to concentrate on one thing exclusively while tuning out everything else! If Mary did hear those complaints, she must have realized that what Jesus had to say was more crucial. Unfortunately, the rest of us aren’t always that wise, and we make other people’s opinions of us more important than God’s opinion. 

In Are Women Human?, Dorothy Sayers writes, “I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary’s, of course, was the better part—the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt, He approved of her, too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God’s opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. . .”

We can hear bitterness in Sayers’ tone, because she too was a writer. And, for some reason, the arts never have been considered a “real job” by the majority of the population. Despite the fact that Sayers was doing the more important thing, in drawing people’s attention to Christ through her nonfiction—and making quite a success of her fiction at the same time—she probably was led to believe that she should have a more practical occupation.

But the writers, artists, and dreamers are as necessary to the church’s mission as the practical planners are. The latter, after all, often get distracted by the details and need to be reminded what their focus is supposed to be. 

Also, sometimes only dreamers are foolhardy enough to take the first step. I’ve done a lot of reading about missionaries while teaching a children’s missionary service. In doing so, I‘ve noticed that the first ones to a particular field often would become martyrs, since too little was known about the conditions and peoples they would encounter. But, in those days of much more limited communications, it was a necessity that somebody go to do the finding out.

Missionaries in those days generally had to immerse themselves in their new culture too, since they were almost completely cut off from their old one, except for letters which could take months to reach their destination. We can almost hear the Marthas exclaiming to them, “Are you crazy? You’ll be throwing away your lives!”  But, like Mary, those dreamers knew what was important.

Although missionaries these days can stay in touch with home much more easily, they seem to have more of a problem with commitment. Maybe keeping one foot in your old culture and one in the new simply tears you apart—or makes you feel guilty about all you are missing back home anyway. 

The rest of us often are torn too, between what we feel God wants us to do and what other people think we should be doing. Perhaps we writers and artists, who also often are accused of wasting our lives, simply need to keep our gazes on Christ’s face rather than letting ourselves get distracted by the complainers muttering on the periphery.