Mary & Martha-Glenn Conjurske
Mary & Martha
by Glenn Conjurske
Mary and Martha were sisters, linked together by all the ties of nature, and all the ties of grace also, for they were both godly. “Jesus loved Martha, and her sister.” Moreover, these sisters are so linked together in the Bible that we can scarcely treat of one of them without the other—-can scarcely think of one of them without thinking of the other.
Mary was a child of God who was often censured by her fellow-saints, and as often defended and commended by her Lord. This is a matter of no small importance to us, for in her censors we may see the mind of man, and in her Advocate the mind of the Lord. This being the case, it may be we may see our own mistaken thoughts in the censures of her fellows, and the correction of those thoughts in her vindication by her Lord.
We first see Mary censured when she and the Lord were guests at the house of Martha. “Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, 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.” (Luke 10:38-42).
Observe now, “Mary hath chosen that good part.” She was not altogether oblivious to the fact that there was a dinner to be cooked—-lodgings to prepare—-needs to be met. Surely she knew all that as well as Martha did, but how could she for this lose the opportunity to sit at the feet of Christ, and hear his word? She chose, therefore, to let go the one, for the sake of the other.
Her choice was ill taken by her sister. While Mary sits at the feet of her Lord, feasting her soul upon the heavenly wisdom which fell from his lips, her placid soul basking in the heavenly sunlight, and her heart burning within her, Martha labors to prepare a feast for their bodies, “cumbered about much serving,” “careful and troubled about many things,” and no doubt troubled more than all over the fact that Mary has left her to serve alone. She long stews over this, casting many a fretful glance from her kitchen to the placid scene of which the Lord was the center—-first at her negligent sister, then at her delinquent Lord, who encouraged the conduct of Mary—-till at length she can bear it no more. She leaves her kitchen and comes “to him,” for she has no intention now to call calmly and kindly upon her sister to help her. She is agitated—-irritated—-and will make her sister feel her delinquency. She will cast a reproach upon Mary for her neglect, and in the ears of the Lord and all the company too. “Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me.”
“My sister hath left me to serve alone.” Thus she reproaches Mary. She does not merely rehearse her hard place, nor her need for assistance, but will lay the blame for it all upon Mary. “My sister hath left me to serve alone.” But this is not all of it, nor the worst of it. She must reproach the Lord also. It is to the Lord that she says, “Dost thou not care?” And with her final stroke she reproaches them both together: “Bid her therefore that she help me”—-commanding him (whom she had but a breath ago called “Lord”) to mend his own neglect, by mending the neglect of her sister. Need I say—-”How like a woman is all this”? This is all the language of emotion, and no doubt of warm and pent up emotion too, for she certainly did not speak such things the moment Mary sat down at the feet of the Lord—-though it was doubtless then that she began to feel them. It was while Mary heard his word that Martha was cumbered with serving. The tense of these verbs is imperfect, teaching us that this state of things had continued some while, Martha no doubt becoming more and more peeved, till she must give vent to her feelings in words.
But how little she gains by this fretful burst of feeling. The Lord is hardly thus to be moved, though we have all no doubt employed such tactics upon him at one time or another. She receives no sympathy from him, nor any redress either, but a reproof which must have stung her to the quick. There is something singularly expressive in his “Martha, Martha.” Wrongly charged with delinquency by her, he meant to make her feel her own delinquency, and what could better accomplish this than “Martha, Martha”? We think it safe to say that there is always some emotional content in the calling of a person by name in conversation—-the more so if it is a person well known and loved. Salesmen and advertisers endeavor to impose upon the gullible by this very tactic—-only they do it without one whit of sincerity, nor any emotion but the love of money. When a friend calls a friend by name in conversation, there is some emotional content in it, something which expresses emotion, whether of tenderness, or censure, or sympathy, or some other thing, and a name twice repeated is always a mark of strong feeling. The Lord’s “Martha, Martha” was certainly of this sort, and was no doubt a word which Martha felt.
But this was only the introduction. He gives her no countenance, no redress, but reproves her altogether, and altogether vindicates her sister whom she had censured. “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.” I observe that he takes no notice of the reproach she had cast upon himself. All his care is to vindicate Mary. Neither does Mary speak a word in her own defense. What need of this when her Lord is her Advocate? Had Mary undertaken to defend herself, feeling would doubtless have run high, and we had seen arguments enough on both sides, and probably reproaches also. The Advocate of the accused prevents all this, and Martha is put in her place, while Mary is established in hers.
Yet we do not see Martha leave off her serving, and humbly take her place by the side of her sister, to sit at the feet of Christ and hear his word. She is too deeply involved in her service for this. She could not extricate herself if she would. The potatoes would boil dry. The turkey would burn. Methinks she hastens back to her kitchen to give vent to her tears, though they are not the tears of penitence. Her fretful glances out the kitchen door have ceased now. She keeps her back to the door, to hide her tears. “Nobody appreciates me, not even the Lord. Nobody helps me. I toil alone over the hot stove in the kitchen, while they all sit and talk, and nobody cares. And the Lord, instead of reproving them, encourages them, and humiliates me before all the company.” Every fresh thought of that reproof must bring fresh tears to her eyes. This was doubtless hard to bear, yet we remark that if she had not first openly reproached the Lord and her sister, the Lord had never humbled her as he did.
And here we must step back and draw some lessons from this scene. There is many another child of God who is too cumbered with serving to sit at the feet of the Lord and hear his word, and yet if the Lord causes them to feel this, they find themselves too involved to mend the matter. They have too many commitments, too many responsibilities. Too much depends upon them. They cannot extricate themselves, not even to sit at the feet of the Lord. They must either give up their place of service altogether, or neglect the one thing needful, and how many are willing to do the former, for the sake of the latter?
We observe also that the child of God who is most busy in serving is not necessarily in the best state of heart. It was Martha’s business to do, Mary’s to be, and Mary was certainly in the better spiritual condition of the two. No reproaches against her Lord proceeded from her lips, nor any accusations against her sister either, while she who is “cumbered about much serving” has hard thoughts in her heart against her Lord, and against her sister, and reproaches in her mouth against them both. The heart of Mary is placid and serene, that of Martha chafing and annoyed.
We would not pretend for a moment that Martha’s doing was not pleasing or acceptable to the Lord. It surely was, but Mary’s being was more so. It was the one thing needful, which Martha had neglected. What did it matter if the guests had no feast that day? Methinks no one had censured Martha if she had discreetly excused herself from serving that day, that she might sit with them at the feet of the Lord, to hear his word. Had they not a better feast, from the lips of the Lord, than any which her hands might prepare? What did it matter if the Lord had no feast? He had meat to eat that she knew not of, and it was a small matter to him whether his stomach was full, while he could open the treasures of heaven to such a soul as Mary’s. We think Mary gave him a better feast than that which Martha prepared.
Mary chose the one thing needful. Martha neglected it. And here I must turn aside to note that the “one thing needful” is certainly not salvation, as it is commonly treated in tracts and sermons, and even in the commentaries of those who ought to know better. There is no question of salvation here. Both of these women were godly, and surely saved. The one thing needful was to sit at the feet of the Lord and hear his word—-to make this our first business, before and above all service for him.
And this we regard as of peculiar importance in the present day, when every novice has the “preaching fever”—-yea, and the writing fever too—-and all who have scarcely begun to learn anything of the word and ways of the Lord are bent upon ministry of one sort or another. We think there is much more of the flesh in this than there is of faith. All this may stand upon no better foundation than pride. Martha’s service was seen of men, and doubtless approved of men, while Mary appeared to be doing nothing, and was reproached accordingly. But while Martha was doing something, Mary was being something, and this was more acceptable to the Lord than the other. Moses was not doing anything in the back side of the desert for forty years, but he was being something, without which he would have been altogether unfit for the doing which God had in store for him.
These things, I say, are of peculiar importance in the present day. Six or eight hundred years ago things were at the opposite extreme from where they are today. The contrast was sharply drawn between what was called the active life and the contemplative life, and the latter was much glorified above the former. Yet it was the monks and nuns who so glorified it, and we think these were not half so active as they ought to have been—-nor half so contemplative either, for that matter. But today the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, largely, we think through the influence of D. L. Moody, whose whole life consisted of work, so that no ordinary man could keep pace with him. The result of this, of course, was that while his work was very broad, it was not very deep. We think the title of one of his books—-To the Work! To the Work!—-well expresses the effect of his ministry on the church. Every raw convert must be put immediately to work, and this was doubtless usually at the expense of the one thing needful. John R. Rice and the Independent Baptist movement in general have taken up the same banner, and doing has become all, while being is little regarded. Winning the most and building the biggest is all their thought, while being seems never to have entered their minds. We do not shine in the eyes of men for being. Our church statistics are not published in The Sword of the Lord for being. Mary receives no praise from the guests for the fine dinner. All her praise comes from her Lord, and with that she is content. That she seeks. That she chooses. Martha’s serving is quite consistent with pride and self-seeking, and with hard thoughts and hard words against the Lord, and against her sister who was better than herself—-quite consistent, too, with her neglect of the one thing needful.
Some, however, will doubtless escape the force of all this by contending that the real fault in Martha’s serving lay in the fact that it was all mundane and temporal. We think otherwise, for these reasons:
1. If this was the real fault of Martha’s serving, why did the Lord not tell her so? Nay, why did he plainly tell her something else? “One thing is needful,” he told her, but gives her no intimation that that one thing was that her service be rather spiritual than mundane. Quite otherwise. He tells her that the one thing needful was “that good part” which Mary had chosen, to sit at his feet and hear his word.
2. If Martha’s serving be not representative of the spiritual “work of the Lord,” then such work does not appear in the passage at all, and the whole contrast is between sitting at the Lord’s feet to hear his word, and mundane serving, with no reference at all to preaching or any sort of spiritual service. Such an omission, if a fact, would really cripple the whole account.
3. Further, it is every bit as possible to neglect the “one thing needful” for the sake of preaching or winning souls, as it is for mundane service. Much of the work of the Lord necessarily consists of mundane things.
4. The determining consideration, however, is this, that there are many things in the Gospels of a purely temporal nature, which are nevertheless to be applied to the spiritual sphere. Such are, for example, the feeding of the five thousand, Peter’s walking on the water, and many of Christ’s healings. A spiritual application of these is so natural as to be in fact irresistible, and all the best preachers and expositors have always used them so. Moreover, in some of the Gospel accounts the spiritual and the mundane are so mixed together that we are compelled to apply the mundane part in a spiritual sense. “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” In the first clause we have the mundane washing of physical feet, in the second, spiritual fellowship. The second clause renders it impossible to confine this washing to the physical realm. This is spiritual washing, and those who find nothing more here than the washing of physical feet have missed their way altogether.
Martha was “careful and troubled about many things,” “cumbered about much serving,” that serving being representative of the service of Christ in general, whether mundane or spiritual.
But “Mary hath chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from her.” These words not only reprove Martha, but instruct Mary also, teaching her to keep her place at his feet. Mary no doubt needed this, for it was now doubly difficult to keep that place, under the reproach of neglecting her duty and doing nothing.
But we must remark that there are two sides to every question, and there are doubtless Marys enough who stand in need of a nudge or two to get up and help their sisters, for it is nothing but laziness which keeps them at the Lord’s feet. Self-importance may keep some there also, for some there are who seem to suppose that the servants of Christ have nothing to do but give them personal attention and personal instruction. We do not mean to imply that serving is not important, or that we ought to spend our lives doing nothing but sitting at the feet of the Lord and hearing his word. We would not press the Lord’s words too far, as though this were the only thing needful, in any case, at all times. The Lord does not call it “the one thing needful,” but only says, “one thing is needful.” It was the “one thing needful” to one in Martha’s place, who was accustomed to neglect it. Among the many things about which she was careful and troubled, this was the one thing needful to her. Without this the heart is left barren, and the passions unsubdued—-as Martha’s reproaches testify—-and so the service itself must lose much of its value in the eyes of him who looketh not on the outward appearance.
But granting that there are two sides to the question, and granting that Martha was not wholly wrong in her serving, yet we must firmly resist the popular notion that neither of the sisters was more wrong nor more right than the other: they were only different. “We need our Marthas, and we need our Marys.” Such a notion is the fruit of that soft and shallow thinking which is afraid to censure anybody, which knows nothing but love, love, love, and which really knows but little of truth or righteousness. If Mary and Martha were merely different, though equally right, why does the Lord censure Martha, and defend Mary?
Perhaps they were different. Some folks may be naturally active, and others naturally contemplative. The restless, active soul must then deny himself and sit at the feet of the Lord, as much as ever the placid dreamer must deny himself when it is time to work. The facts are these. Mary is commended for sitting at the feet of the Lord, but she is not reproved for not serving. Martha is reproved for neglecting to sit at the feet of the Lord, and she is not commended for her serving. Even the Lord’s reference to her serving contains a mild rebuke, for “Thou art careful and troubled about many things” can hardly be taken as anything else.
Yet humiliating as the Lord’s censure doubtless was, Martha seems to remain just what she was. We see these sisters in a similar situation again in the twelfth chapter of John, and again we read, “and Martha served.” It was natural enough for her to serve on the former occasion, when she received the Lord into her own house, but here they were in the house of Simon the Leper, as we learn from Matthew 26:6. Yet still Martha must serve. “There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.” We can hardly doubt that Mary was another, for she has hardly forgotten the good part which she has chosen, nor the Lord’s assurance that it shall not be taken from her. Yet Mary’s heart is burning with love, and she would serve also. She sits now and hears his word as in times past, but the look in her eye is distant and dreamy. Her mind is abstracted. Her sitting at the Lord’s feet and hearing his word has had its effect, and her knowledge of his mind goes beyond that of even the apostles, who “understood not” of his death, for “it was hid from them.” (Luke 9:45). She has long understood and believed in the coming death of her Lord, and she has “a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly,” which she keeps for his embalming. The Lord tells us this when called upon to defend her, saying, “against the day of my burying hath she kept this.” She knows the time draws near. Her heart overflows with love, and she yearns to pour out that love upon him, not merely upon his dead body. Her revery proceeds to a purpose, her purpose to a plan. She rises up therefore, and leaves the room, leaves the house, gathers up her skirts and trips nimbly to her own house, wasting no time, we are sure—-yet for this she will leave her place at his feet. She shortly returns with her precious treasure. “Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.”
For this she is reproached as before. “But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?” Again her Advocate steps forward in her defense, and shows us that he understands her heart and mind as well as she understands his. “When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.” Here was high praise. Mary’s service was spiritual, and highly regarded by the Lord, though censured by her fellow-disciples. John records this censure as coming from Judas, but he was not alone in it. The other gospels tell us that “some” thus reproached her, and “his disciples” also. “And they murmured against her”—-another imperfect tense. They spoke not one word, but many. They carried on a session of murmuring. “The word,” says F. C. Cook, “is strong, used by St. Mark only, and always to express extreme indignation: it implies that they were rebuking her, and that vehemently.” And so it often happens. The most spiritual, whose service is the most acceptable to the Lord, are misunderstood and maligned by their fellow disciples, rebuked and reproached, advised and counselled.
And indeed, Mary’s service appears foolish enough. Martha’s service was practical, to meet an obvious need. Mary’s was entirely superfluous, like that of David’s three mighty men, who broke through the ranks of the garrison of Philistines, merely to get David a drink of water, for which David had no need. Their purpose was not to meet any need of their captain, but solely to express their devotion to him. This was all the purpose of Mary also, and all that her fellow-disciples could see in it was, “Why this waste?” There was no need. If there had been a need, a drop or two of the ointment would have been sufficient. Why pour out the whole of it, and break the box besides? For no other purpose than to express her devotion, and this service was highly commended by the Lord.
Martha’s service is always to meet the needs of men. Mary aims always at the heart of her Lord. Martha’s service is good. Mary’s is better. Can the Lord be well pleased, can he be satisfied, if his bride is nothing to him but a servant? Martha must be censured even in her service. Mary receives nothing but unqualified praise, and that of the highest sort.
But though Mary aimed only at the heart of her Lord, yet her service was not without its effect upon her fellow-disciples. “The house was filled with the odour of the ointment.” And “Not that ‘house’ only,” as Burgon remarks, “but the universal Church of CHRIST, has been filled with the fragrance of her action.” Mary aimed at nothing of this, but it was the natural effect of what she did aim at. Once in a while—-surely not often—-we may meet with an old saint of God who has made it the business of his life to sit at the feet of the Lord, and hear his word, and we soon find that his countenance, his conversation, his presence irradiates the odour of the ointment of heaven, “very costly.” He may not be cumbered about much serving. He may be an invalid. It is not what he does, but what he is. Who that knows anything of the heritage of the saints has not read accounts of some servant of the Lord going to the room of some invalid, to encourage the sufferer, only to find the room filled with the fragrance of the ointment of heaven. The poor invalid could not do much, but he could be something, and this was acceptable to God, and profitable to men also.
Glenn Conjurske