NewCreation

Homily for 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And I'd like to start by apologising for this homily being so late to be posted. The good news is that I finally got my computer back after eight weeks, and it seems to be working. And the less good news is that I was completely exhausted after my return from Bogota to Madrid last week, and I've been scarcely functional this week. And this is a Gospel that required a particular amount of attention in the preparation, because the surface meaning and the various complications behind it needs such a lot of unpicking. In any case, let's try to do some of that this week, and I hope to be on better form next week. So today's Gospel follows on immediately from the account of the Good Samaritan. And theoretically, we are on the journey from the area around Galilee towards Jerusalem, where still, according to the Gospel, still much closer to Galilee and the Samaritan area than we are close to Jerusalem. And yet, here we have Jesus coming to the house of Mary and Martha — Martha and Mary — at Bethany. And Bethany, of course, is right by Jerusalem. It's within earshot of the Mount of Olives. I mean, it's really very close to Jerusalem. It's where Jesus would go to spend the night from Jerusalem during his last days. And it's where, in John's Gospel, Jesus goes towards the end of the Gospel to the house of Martha and Mary for the raising of Lazarus. So what's it doing here, geographically somewhere else? Well, we don't really know. What the Gospel says is: "As they went on their way, he entered a certain village" — so the village is unnamed — where a woman named Martha, which can mean either "lady" or "the bitter one" — there are two meanings for the word Martha — welcomed him into her home. So she is the lady of the household. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. Okay, so in the Aramaic version of St Luke's Gospel, which may be as old as any of the texts that we have, the suggestion is that the Mary in question was Mary of Magdalen, and that she normally lived in Magdala, which is a rich suburb of Tiberias, and had come to visit her sister, and that she was the woman who earlier in Luke's Gospel had sat at Jesus' feet and washed his feet with her tears and the perfume. In other words, the relationship between her and Jesus' feet is deliberately being emphasized here. That's part of the Aramaic background. There's nothing in the Greek to suggest that. But the relationship between the kind of presence that she had — you remember that of her Jesus said she must have been forgiven already because she loves so much — that here she was receiving whatever it was that Jesus had to give her. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks. Now, again, the text seems to point forward to the Acts of the Apostles, where you remember that the apostolic group doesn't want to get distracted by many tasks when it comes to feeding the widows: the Hellenist widows who are getting a bad deal compared with the Hebrew widows. So they designate deacons to engage in service — diakonia — which is the same word as is used here, so that they can spend more time listening to the word. In other words, there seems to be a reference to that story here. Martha was distracted by her many tasks, so she came to him and asked: "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." So there this appears to be a tale of potential rivalry between two sisters, one of whom apparently is sitting around doing nothing — sitting at Jesus's feet and listening to the word — and the other who is busy doing all sorts of things. Now, again, in the Aramaic version of Luke's Gospel, the ancient Aramaic version, apparently all the words both for the listening to the word and the being busy about many things are liturgical words. They describe the Levitical role in keeping the cult going. Those are the word references in this passage. So here in the domestic church, if you like, there are the two Levitical roles being performed by these two ladies, Martha and her sister. And in their midst is the Word. And of course, this fits beautifully with Moses's final blessing in Deuteronomy 33, when he gives a blessing to the people and tells them that the Lord will come. Let me see if I can find the passage. It varies according to the translations, but this is: "The Lord came from Sinai and dawned upon Seir upon us. He shone forth from Mount Paran. With him were myriads of holy ones; at his right a host of his own. Indeed, O favorite among peoples, all his holy ones were in your charge; they sat at your feet, receiving direction from you." Okay, that's the translation of the Hebrew which the NRSV screws up but the King James version gets right — the sitting at your feet. So this is the second version of sitting at your feet: we had Mary Magdalene sitting at the feet, and we have the blessing of Moses indicating the one who was to come, the Word, and sitting at his feet. feet and receiving direction from him was the appropriate thing to do. So the Lord answers her, and here's the difficult bit of undoing the rivalry between the sisters. "Martha, Martha" – now, there are very few places where our Lord refers to somebody twice by the same name. There's one occasionally he says "Simon, Simon" to Peter, but this is the standard way that the Lord Yahweh talks to people by repeating the name twice. This is the attention grab. This is when the Lord indicates that it's the Lord who's speaking. Thus the Lord says "Abraham, Abraham" to Abraham, and "Moses, Moses" to Moses. The double rapid address – "Saul" – when he undergoes his conversion on the road to Damascus. So these double uses are very indicative of: this is the Lord speaking. So there's no question of who it was who was in the home. It's definitely the one whom Moses was indicating. "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. There is need only of one thing. Mary has chosen" – and again, in the Greek it says "the better part." The Aramaic apparently is "a better part," and that's quite an important distinction – "which will not be taken away from her." Now, again, there appears to be a pun here, since "part" is portion or lot. It's the same word that was the Levitical lot for the sacrifice, but also it's a pun with the word for worrying. So "meris" is a portion and "merimna" were all the things that you're distracted about. So there's a word game going on there, and it looks as though Jesus is saying, "You've got your portions in a muddle." And apparently behind this there is a kind of a joke – which of course jokes don't translate between languages; that's part of the difficulty. The difficulty here is that what might be a witty remark in Aramaic cannot be wittily translated into Greek, far less into English. We are pretty good at our own witticisms, but they're not very easily transferable. So it seems – and of course this is speculative; I'm relying on my old friend Duncan Derrett and his extraordinary reading of this passage – that Jesus is effectively saying to Martha, "You want help with doing the waiting, but really I just want to wait upon you." In other words, "wait to be waited upon" is more the sense of Jesus's pun at this stage. He's saying that the whole point here is to allow yourself to be waited upon, not to do the waiting. And that of course fits in with other phrases in Luke's Gospel, where apparently the one who appears to be the guest is in fact the host. So this is a typical entry of Jesus into a home, reversing the role of host and guest. It's the apparent guest who is in fact the host, and this reversal happens frequently. Jesus talks about this: that this is what will happen. The disciples are those who allow themselves to be waited on. The master comes in and then sets them down at table and waits on them himself. So it's rather an odd thing, because we are so used to, if you like, a pious version of this, in which Mary is being told, "Yes, it's right to sit around and do nothing," and Martha is being told, "Don't get worked up about housework, about feeding me." And so we think, "Oh yes, the contemplative is right, the active is less good." It actually appears that it's much more a question of: "I am the one who wants to feed you — are you going to allow yourself to be fed by me?" It's the reversal of positions that's the key thing here. And it's a reversal of positions that's particularly important for those who get disturbed about liturgical things, wanting to get everything right and making everything look classy and beautiful and brilliant — whereas the real question is not the classiness, the brilliance, and the beauty, but whether the person concerned is being served, because it's the host who wants to be the waiter. And that's the real way you show love and respect for the Word: allowing yourself to be waited upon and transformed into a sharer of the waiter's Word, the waiter's richness, the food that the waiter is giving. So something like that seems to be what's going on. It says Mary has chosen the better part — the better part talking about the portion, the different sorts of portion, the non-worried portion — which will not be taken away from her. And the not being taken away makes perfect sense if one understands that she has become, if you like, a symptom of God's giving of the Word, speaking. She's allowed herself to be taken up into the being served, which is how God wants us to grow. If you like, what I call the secondariness — that is the real sign of discipleship — when we're aware that we are secondary to someone doing something for us, rather than being concerned about how we need to be in order to get something done for other people. This is, if you like, the rich account of Jesus teaching secondariness as being our portion and our lot, and the richness and creativity that comes from accepting secondariness. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.