Martha, Martha

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“In the course of their journey he came to a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister called Mary, who sat down at the Lord's feet and listened to him speaking. Now Martha, who was distracted with all the serving, came to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself? Please tell her to help me.’ But the Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and anxious about many things, and yet only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:38-42).

Our Lord is well taken care of in Bethany. These are His friends. The Gospel tells of the arrival of Our Lord and His disciples at the house of these friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Later, Our Lord is going to weep when He heard that Lazarus had died.

Bethany lies about two miles from Jerusalem, and Our Lord would stop there to rest in the home of His friends before going up to the holy city. He felt at home in that place, surrounded as He was by joy and affection.

That’s how we have to try and welcome Our Lord who is in the Tabernacle. He's the most faithful friend that we have. He deserves our loving attention more than anyone else—hopping in to say hi, saying hello and goodbye when we come into a place where He's reserved, having that spirit of little children who know how to greet their God who's present in the Tabernacle.

In this warm, friendly environment, these sisters Martha and Mary behaved with naturalness and simplicity, even as they revealed different attitudes.

“Martha,” we're told, “was distracted with much serving.” You get the impression that she may have been the elder of the two. Luke says, “A woman named Martha received him into her house.” She was completely taken up with the work of tending to the Lord and His disciples.

There would have been plenty of things to keep her occupied. Possibly it was a numerous group and they had arrived unexpectedly. Understandably, Martha wants to welcome Our Lord in an appropriate manner. But we know that at a certain moment, she lost her peace of mind, and she became frustrated due to her misreading of the situation.

Mary, on the other hand, “sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.”

Martha was distracted from her task of preparing the meal. St. Augustine says, “In her eagerness to get the supper ready for the Lord, she becomes preoccupied [by] a million and one little details. Her sister Mary prefers instead to devote herself to their guest. She forgets about her sister and sits before him, doing nothing else but listen to his word” (St. Augustine, Sermon 103).

With the help of divine grace, we have to learn how to live a unity of life, which consists of the union of Martha's and Mary's attitudes. Our love of God should be inseparable from our apostolic zeal, and our work should be well done for the glory of God.

We can also try to work with the knowledge that Our Lord is always by our side, by living a certain presence of God in the workplace.

Martha, showing a real sense of trust in her guest, complains to Our Lord, “Do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her therefore to help me.” These are strong words because Jesus is Divine Love Incarnate, and she's saying, “Do you not care?” She gets it all wrong.

For many centuries, these two sisters have been held to represent two rival lifestyles. According to this traditional interpretation, Mary exemplifies the way of contemplation, the life of union with God, and Martha is seen as the personification of an active life at work.

“But,” Blessed Álvaro del Portillo liked to say, “the contemplative life does not consist in simply being at the feet of Jesus doing nothing. That would be a disorder, if not pure and simple indolence” (Álvaro del Portillo, Homily, July 20, 1986).

For we must find God in our daily job, transforming, as we're told in Friends of God, “our professional work into the hinge on which our calling to sanctity rests and turns” (Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 62).

We should show our love for God through the exercise of the human as well as the supernatural virtues. So, a lot of our formation is geared towards growing in the human virtues of industriousness, punctuality, and order, as well as those of the supernatural virtues. It's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to have a deep interior life and at the same time to live a vibrant apostolate if we lack a serious commitment to our daily work.

As ordinary people in the middle of the world, we go to sanctify the temporal realities. That's where God wants us to be, in the traffic jams, at the crossroads of society, in our office, in the home, in whatever environment it is where God has called us to work. He wants us to be working there in a serious way, putting all the human virtues into practice.

For too long there's been a mistaken insistence on the supposed incompatibility between secular work and the interior life. The writer of On the Theology of Work says that nevertheless, it is there “in the midst of daily work” and by means of it, “not in spite of it,” that God wants to call most Christians to live lives of holiness. We are to sanctify the world and sanctify ourselves with a life of prayer that gives divine meaning to earthly tasks (cf. José Luis Illanes, On the Theology of Work). Hence, it can be very useful to practice what are called norms of always in our workplace, acts of thanksgiving, acts of faith, acts of atonement, and acts of hope.

On one occasion, while speaking to a large number of people, St. Josemaría said, “You must understand more clearly that God is calling you to serve him ‘in and from’ the ordinary material and secular activities of human life.”

He said, “He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theater, in the army barracks, in the university lecture room, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it's up to each one of you to discover it. There is no other way. Either we learn to find Our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we will never find him.

“That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and a location for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ” (J. Escrivá, Conversations, Point 114).

This involves combining the love of Mary with the ‘work ethic’ of Martha. Our Lord responds to Martha with that affectionate advice, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, and yet only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the best part, and it shall not be taken away from her.”

It's as though Our Lord was speaking to each one of us, as if He had said, ‘Martha, you are worried about worldly affairs, but you're forgetting about me.’ That's why we need reminders, reminders in our ordinary work of each day, with an image of Our Lady, with a crucifix, through an aspiration, to use human things and human reminders to help us remember that we're always in the presence of God and we have to give Him all the glory that it is due.

There's no separation between our work life and our prayer life. We have to try and turn our work into prayer.

He seems to be saying to her, ‘You are deeply concerned about important tasks, but you're neglecting the most important one of all, which is union with God, personal sanctity.’

How very relevant it is for every Catholic today to be reminded of that great message. We can be so caught up with important tasks or deadlines or urgent things that need solving that we forget about the most important concern.

If your worries lead you to lose the presence of God while you work, then those worries are not good for you, even though your work itself might be good and necessary. St. Paul says, “You run very well, but outside the course” (cf. 1 Cor. 9:24). It’s very important for us to be running on the right course.

Our Lord doesn't pass sweeping judgments upon Martha or Mary. He responds to Martha's question with profundity by pointing to what is most important in life, that being the presence of Christ in the house.

Our Lord could make the same message to us. Nothing can justify our forgetting Our Lord in our daily work, not even the most important of concerns. We cannot put Him who is “the Lord of all things” (Wis. 8:3) aside for the sake of “the things of the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:32). Are we so concerned about the harvest of the Lord that we forget “the Lord of the harvest” (Matt. 9:38)?

St. John Paul said, “We certainly cannot minimize the importance of prayer with the excuse that we are too busy with apostolate, with activities of formation, with works of charity, et cetera (cf. John Paul II, Address, June 20, 1986).

We need to have a unity of life which is so vibrantly integral that work itself will lead us to be in the presence of God. We'll be more aware that the fact that I can do this work, think, or use my hands or my feet, or I have this energy or this health to be able to fulfill this task is because God has given me that health or energy or ability or talent.

At the same time, those periods that we devote to prayer will help us to work better. We're told Our Lord “got up long before daybreak and went off into a desert place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). His prayer came before everything.

Blessed Álvaro also says, “We cannot expect to reach an ‘armistice’ of some kind between temporal occupations and the spiritual life, between work and prayer. Work feeds prayer and prayer feeds work. This is true even to the point where work in and of itself, as a service done in a professional manner for man and society, becomes an acceptable offering to God” (A. del Portillo, Work and Prayer).

To maintain the presence of God while we work, we need to resort to simple reminders, little things that will help us remember that our work is for God. He is there next to us as our companion, watching us as we work.

It may help us to recall that He is physically quite close to us in the nearest oratory or church. We’re told in The Forge, “From there, where you are working, let your heart escape to the Lord, right close to the Tabernacle, to tell him without doing anything odd, ‘My Jesus, I love you.’ Don’t be afraid to call him so—my Jesus—and to say it to him often” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 746).

A person who spent quite a bit of time with St. Josemaría told me recently how one time when St. Josemaría was sick in bed, he called this person to accompany him. He was telling him that from his bedside he was greeting Our Lord in all the different tabernacles around the place, close to where he lived and also far away, being right close to Our Lord in the tabernacle.

All worldly occupations, when engaged in with the right intention, allow us the opportunity to put into practice charity, mortification, a spirit of service to others, joy and optimism, and understanding, and an apostolate of friendship and confidence. That place where God has placed us opens this great panorama of opportunities.

We sanctify ourselves through our work and that's what really matters: to find Jesus in the middle of our ordinary, daily concerns, not to forget about “the Lord of all things.”

And when our daily tasks are in some way directly related to Him, we should make an even greater effort to live this unity of life.

We can offer our work to Our Lord before we start it, when we finish, and also in the middle, when we get distracted. Otherwise we'll end up doing what is in fact His work for ourselves, neglecting the Master.

Somebody asked Blessed Álvaro one time, “What does being ‘contemplatives in the middle of the world’ mean in our case?”

He said, “Let me answer you in a few words. It means seeing God in everything, with the light of faith, spurred on by love, with the firm hope of contemplating him face to face in heaven. It means seeking God in everything all the time.”

Martha got a bit lost, a bit distracted. She began to focus on the human. She began to focus on herself. “Does it not concern you that my sister has left me to serve alone?”

Three times she mentions herself in one sentence, and so this idea of the unity of life and finding God in the middle of ordinary things is very central to our Christian vocation.

In some ways you could say it's the purpose of our vocation: to discover God in all the earth's pathways while helping many others to discover Him too.

God, the Creator of all, assures us that although He may be hidden, He is there nonetheless in the middle of all our daily occupations.

St. Josemaría says, “Either we learn to find Our Lord in ordinary everyday life, or we shall never find him” (J. Escrivá, Conversations, Point 114).

Very often in the Gospel, Our Lord gives us a series of contrasts. Martha and Mary are a contrast—the right way to go and the wrong way to go.

In [the Encyclical] “The Church from the Eucharist” Pope St. John Paul said, “To contemplate the face of Christ, and to contemplate it with Mary is the ‘program’ which I have set before the Church at the dawn of the third millennium, summoning her to put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of the new evangelization” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Point 6, April 17, 2003).

St. John Paul liked to point to Martha, which we all are, and said that with the third millennium we all have to try and become Marys. It's a program that the Church sets before us, before the whole of humanity. He says, “To contemplate Christ involves being able to recognize him wherever he manifests himself, in his many forms of presence, but above all in the living sacrament of his body and blood” (ibid.).

And so, we could say, ‘Lord help me to see you, help me to find you in those ordinary things. Help me to realize it when you're saying something to me, you're pointing something out to me.’

“Our Lord loved to visit the home of Martha and Mary. He enjoyed their gracious hospitality.” He makes use of this occasion to show us these “two very different temperaments. Martha loved to serve, but in her anxious manner of waiting on Jesus, she caused unrest.” She had a bit too much serving.

“Mary, in her simple and trusting manner, waited on Jesus by sitting attentively at His feet. Mary seems to have known instinctively that what the Lord and Teacher most wanted at that moment was her attentive presence” (Don Schwager, “You Are Anxious” in Daily Scripture, October 4, 2022).

There are times when Our Lord wants us to stop what we're doing. When Our Lady went to visit St. Elizabeth, we're told she remained there for three months, but then she went home (Luke 1:56). Even when we're doing very good things there's a moment when it's God's will for us that we stop, we turn to other things.

“Anxiety and preoccupation can keep us from listening and from giving Our Lord our undivided attention.” And so, the norms of our plan of life always have to come first. That assures us of our unity of life. That’s the way that Jesus lived.

“Our Lord invites us to give Him our concerns and our anxieties because He's trustworthy and He's also able to meet any need that we may have. His grace frees us from needless concerns and preoccupation” (ibid.).

Our Lord wants that we would make a place for Him not only in our hearts, but in the daily circumstances of our lives as well. We honor Our Lord when we offer Him everything we have and everything we do.

In the Old Testament we're reminded that after all, “everything we have is an outright gift from him” (cf. 1 Chron. 29:14). St. Paul says, “What have you that you have not received?” (1 Cor. 4:7). He also says, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17).

That means even when things go wrong—when we break a plate or drop a glass or we make a big mistake—in those moments, instead of crying over spilled milk, we can offer to Our Lord those moments of humiliation or difficulty.

“When we sit or eat or sleep or entertain our friends and our relatives, we can also remember that the Lord is the guest of our home. … He wants us to bring him glory in the way we treat other people and to use the gifts that he has so graciously given to us. In turn, he blesses us with his presence and fills us with joy” (cf. Don Scwager, ibid.).

We're told in Scripture, “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). The reward of a clean heart is freedom and the opening out of our contemplative soul.

We see God not just in the next world, but in this one. We see Him in the ordinary things of each day.

And so, with the help of grace and those norms of always—thanksgiving, atonement, faith, hope, trust—we can achieve that presence of God in all our actions and achieve being contemplatives.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says contemplative prayer is nothing out of the ordinary in the spiritual life, nor is it something strange that only happens rarely and to unusual people. Contemplative prayer, we're told, is what God wants for every Christian.

The faith of the Church leads us towards an affectionate, personal relationship with the Blessed Trinity. “The Church believes as she prays. Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition” (Catechism, Point 1124).

Blessed Álvaro says we will not attain unity of life, contemplation, dialogue with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, if we don't put loving care into the times dedicated to talking to the Lord. That may mean that we have to be heroic in finding the time or being in the right place to do our mental prayer.

We're told in Friends of God (Points 306-307) that spending time “lovingly with each person of the Blessed Trinity” is contemplative prayer, a situation in which “words are not needed, because the tongue cannot express itself. The intellect grows calm. One does not reason; one looks.”

Contemplation is essentially “looking at God without needing rest or feeling tired.” The soul feels and knows that it is under the loving gaze of God all day long. People in love yearn to see each other. Lovers, says St. Josemaría, only have eyes for their beloved. It's natural; that's the way the human heart is.

We're told many times in Scripture that Our Lady “kept all these things carefully in her heart” (Luke 2:19,51). Mary lived a deep contemplative soul, no matter where she was or what she was doing, as she left her house in Nazareth to go to Bethlehem or to go to Egypt, or back in Nazareth at the foot of the Cross.

Mary, help us along that pathway of conversion, from being a Martha to becoming a Mary.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OLV