Good, Better, Best

Who are you: Martha or Mary? Is one truly the better path to follow?

So who are you? Are you Martha? Are you Mary? When confronted with this passage from Luke’s Tenth Chapter often the impulse readily available drives me to choose who I am most resembling at the moment.

Is there a lot of work on my plate? Have I been serving others recently? Did I host any dinner parties this week? Then, presumably I am Martha.

Have I been spending time in quiet? Did I stop to say my prayers before running around like a chicken with my head cut off? Am I living my life with my relationship with Jesus as the core? Then, presumably I am Mary.

We would all like to be Mary, right? No one tries to be the priest or the Levite who walks right by the beat-up-traveler—we all want to be the Good Samaritan. And, that story immediately precedes this one. We all want to be the one that stops to care for the broken-down-traveler, we all want to be the one who sits at the bedside of a sick, beloved friend. And yet, I think that one word in our current translation makes it almost impossible to see any merit in the other way—Martha’s way. Better gets in the way of a fuller understanding of what Jesus really said to these sisters.

Voltaire, the French philosopher who often attacked the Church, once said, “Better is the enemy of Good.” This seems so obvious, but we spend our lives pursuing better that we do not even count the blessings that we have around us. We charge ahead chasing after something better. One day we may very well wake up to realize that we have sacrificed the pursuit of goodness for the pursuit of betterment. Why do we do this and why is this so dangerous and what does this have to do with Martha and Mary? The answer lies in what Jesus really said.

When Martha came to complain to Jesus the original language tells us that his response went something like this: “Martha, Martha thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” What a difference! In this translation Jesus does not stand as a judge who is declaring that Mary is the better sister, instead he is clearly pointing to the truth we need only one thing: to be with God.

Mary was not proclaimed the better sister, she had stumbled upon the truth of our reality and the purpose of our being. She knew that being with Jesus was the way. Instead of trying to do more or be better or even to be good, Mary simply stopped. As we live in a world that gets more and more obsessed with more and more, we would do well to move from ways in which we compare ourselves one to another. In fact, it would be helpful if we stopped inserting the word better into Jesus’ mouth when he speaks to these two sisters. As we have been exploring in our Wednesday night series on the Prodigal Son, the Father in that story, like Jesus here, was not playing favorites. They both just wanted all to gather together in joy instead of competition.

As we live out lives of better though we find ways to one up one another all the time. On some level I believe we do this unconsciously. We have it programmed into us from the events of our rearing. The time when a parent, a teacher, or someone at church says, “You did great” or “That needs to be better” or “Why can’t you be more like her?” starts something in us that is hard to stop. God though yearns for us to live in his wide-open embrace that extends to everyone regardless of how much more or how much less we do than others. This is the great fallacy of better—that it actually exists and that it will somehow make you happier than you can be at this very moment.

Jesus taught that there is only one way: it is the good way. That way leads us to stop the warring, wrangling, and jostling for the prime spot. That way does not ask of us anything in return. That way simply calls us to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen, to rest in the embrace of Our Heavenly Father. This is not the better way it is the best way for it is God’s way and truly it is the only way.