"With Whole Hearts"--September 11, 2019
"Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and said, 'Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.' But the Lord answered her, 'Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her'." [Luke 10:38-42]
I used to think this was a story about picking the one right thing rather than the one wrong thing. It only lately dawned on me that the key difference is really choosing the one right thing over choosing a whole hodge-podge of things all at once, with the "one right thing" tucked in there somewhere.
In other words, it's not so much that Mary loved Jesus and Martha hated Jesus, so much as Mary gave Jesus her undivided attention, and Martha, as Luke tells it, is "distracted" from her attention to Jesus by a long list of other things she wants to do at the same time. And when the pot is boiling and the table needs to be set and Jesus (the revered rabbi and welcome guest, who has shown them honor by coming to their home) is also speaking, Martha is going to have to decide which of the many things competing for her attention will get her focus. Mary, by contrast, doesn't have to pick between many options, because she has emptied her field of view of all things but Jesus. She doesn't have to pick--or worse yet, try not to pick, and therefore give ALL the vying things in her life insufficient attention--because she has chosen to set everything else aside in order to be fully in the presence of Jesus.
So often, it seems to me, this is the struggle in our lives--we have a list a mile long of things we are sure we can balance in our lives, and then we wonder why Jesus seems distant, and why none of the other things we are giving partial attention to are coming out right. Well, it ain't because Jesus went anywhere--he stays put, and we are the ones who keep running off to other things, other pursuits, other ways to spend our time. Like the old saying goes, if it feels like God is far away from you, you're the one that moved.
Part of what makes this struggle so difficult for us in our culture is that we live in a time and place that not only tells us (untruthfully) that we can do everything all at once, but it tells us that's the true measure of success! We are constantly told we can tuck a little religion alongside the successful career climbing up the corporate ladder, while we also raise perfect kids, keep our yards perfectly trimmed, and have an ideal number of candlelit dinners along the way.... while we also get the kids to sports practice, volunteer for the PTA, stay up to date on prestige television, and have a couple of hobbies in there, too. Oh yes, and read our Bibles, pray, and not flake out on our friends, too.
Now, you know what is going to happen if you, or I, or any of us, tries to actually cut the pie of our available energy, time, and love all those ways. You can try to cut the pie into a million pieces like that, but then you end up with door-stop thin wedges for each compartment of your life, and you end up not being able to do any of them well--and that's only when all of the pieces can all live with their proportion. But take the balance and mess it up by letting one of the little pieces start insisting on more time, more attention, and more of your self, and all the rest wither even more! We struggle in this moment of our culture because we have all committed to playing a losing game right from the start--we are told we are successful if we can slice up our lives into tiny slivers and then end up feeling unfulfilled when none of them feel very authentic--not to mention how the million things we spend our lives on shrivel up like delicate flowers from lack of sufficient care.
Maybe we don't realize just how damaging it is to divide up our lives into all those pieces, and then trying to cram Jesus in among the other miniscule fractions of our lives. But an image from the Harry Potter novels brings it home for me. Late in the series of J. K. Rowling's novels, we are introduced to the idea of a "horcrux," a bit of dark magic that, Harry learns, allows a witch or wizard to split their own soul into pieces and imbue some of it into an object of some kind (which is then called a "horcrux"). In the world of the novels, the upshot would be that if something happened to your body, and you were gravely injured or even killed, you could somehow be resurrected because some part of your soul lived on in the horcrux. I won't go further into the plot points, but the image itself is an evocative one for me. In Rowling's novels, it is scandalous for anyone to do such a terrible thing as dividing their own soul into parts in an attempt to cheat death--indeed, such a thing is so vile and counter to the rules of nature that it requires murder and violence to perform the magic that makes a horcrux. Rowling's not-so-subtle point is that the business of splitting your soul up into pieces is a ghastly business that leaves us less than fully alive, rather than immortal.
Without being quite so melodramatic, I think that's the issue going on for Martha. It's not that she is "anti-Jesus" and her sister Mary is "pro-Jesus," so much as she is trying to have so many things going at once that she doesn't get any of them fully attended to, and Jesus ends up getting just a sliver of her focus. (I'll bet the pot starts to burn while she's trying to goad Jesus into yelling at her sister, so even the food risks getting ruined by trying to do everything at once.) Much like the imagery in the Harry Potter books, Martha discovers that you are not really fully alive once you start down the road of dividing your heart up and putting pieces in different things. Jesus can't help Martha as long as she sees his role in her life as just one among many equally valuable competing interests. It's not that he doesn't want to help her--it's that she's chosen to give him only the tiniest wedge of attention in her life. How could he get through to her at all, since she can't even given him her undivided attention when she's in the same room with him?
I know the objection here. I know it, because I have spoken it myself in my own Martha-esque self-defense in the past. The objection goes, "But if Martha sits and listens to Jesus, they'll all go hungry, because no one has made dinner!" And I get it, there is a meal to be shared here in this scene, and someone's got to cook the carrots and stir the hummus. But let me offer an alternative scene: what if Martha and Mary both, realizing that having Jesus in their home is the central thing to focus on in this moment, and instead of roping Jesus off in the guest parlor or living room (not that their home had a separate living room necessarily), what if they invited Jesus into the kitchen so they could listen to him, talk with him, and also prepare dinner together with him all at once? Now we've got the meal still attended to, but Jesus is no longer one tiny wedge of pie alongside a million other tiny wedges of pie competing for attention. Rather, everything gets opened up to Jesus, and now Jesus is a participant in all of Martha's world!
Could you imagine that sort of shift in our lives, too? See, it's not that Jesus won't let us have any friends or go to work or chop the carrots for dinner, and it's not that being a disciple means spending every hour of the day inside a church building or with our noses in a Bible or prayer book. Rather, it's about the whole of our lives as open to Jesus, and thereby recognizing that Jesus is present in every other endeavor.
But as long as we are living our lives trying to find the "right" way to slice the pie up in our lives so that we can "have it all" and also work Jesus in there somewhere between the cracks, we are going to always feel like we are giving everyone short shrift. We are making horcruxes of our lives every day without a single magic word--just the foolish attempts to divide our hearts up and give little pieces away to everything and everyone.
See, it's not just a matter of picking the one right thing instead of the one wrong thing--it's about knowing how to quit dividing our souls up into bits and instead to love the Christ who has come into our lives with our whole selves and with undivided hearts.
Lord Jesus, help us to stop dividing our lives up into pieces and to love you wholly.
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