Do you feel like maybe Martha was rather badly treated? After all she was the one who welcomed Jesus. (Lk 10:38-42)
When Abraham welcomed the Lord he got a son by way of recognition for his efforts. (Gn 18:1-10a) When Martha asks for a bit of help in the kitchen (and who hasn’t been in that position!) she gets told to quit making a fuss and get over it.
So Jesus is telling us the people who are doing all the practical stuff, they just have to step back and recognize that those who are doing their “spiritual” thing have made the better choice. And how would that work if everyone followed Mary’s example? Doesn’t sound very reasonable or realistic, does it?
Jesus made another comment along the same lines, when he told his disciples to stop worrying about things like how they were to get food or clothing (Lk 12:22-28). The birds and the flowers were fine, so what’s the problem! Leaving aside whether the birds and the flowers really have the ideal life, is Jesus really saying that we should just sit around waiting for rain and manna from heaven, or maybe meditating? Certainly Paul didn’t think so. His attitude was much more pragmatic – if you don’t work you don’t eat (2 Thes 3:10)
Maybe the challenge for us here is that we would like to think that Jesus is giving us instructions on how to live – this is what you should do, and this, and this… But is that really what he is doing? When he compares us with birds and flowers, that doesn’t doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Yes, it might be easiest if we had instructions from Jesus on what to do, like some Young Ladies Manual of Etiquette, so we could be quite sure to do “the right thing” under any circumstances. But that’s not the way he works. If he’s giving instructions at all, it’s more on the lines of “Go West young man” or “Follow your dream”, not – take I5, go 3.2 miles and take the intersection signed…
Jesus’ apparently harsh response to Martha isn’t an instruction to her, or to us, that we should spend all our time praying and not bother with the cooking. It’s a loving attempt to get her to reorient her perspective, to escape that horrible pressure of feeling that everything is on your shoulders, that it’s all your responsibility, and it’s really, really unfair that no one else is helping. And I don’t think any of us can claim we’ve never been there; maybe we’ve even spent a long time there.
That’s not a good or healthy state of mind. Jesus wants to break us out of it. And the answer isn’t to find someone else to offload on to, or even to blame. The answer is to recognize that even when we are stressed we have to let God come first, we have to find the space to look at Jesus, to say “Christ help me” (or yell it, that’s ok also).
The birds and the flowers don’t have any choice. We do. Our relationship with God is a choice. He will guide us and guard us, but he doesn’t treat us like robots who simply follow instructions.