Redeeming Martha

What we’ve gotten wrong about Mary’s sister (and lessons for reading the Bible more faithfully)

Weeks before Christmas, we hosted close family friends for dinner. The morning after a wonderful evening together, I woke up feeling embarrassed. I could think only of the meal’s mediocrity. The salmon was bland, the steamed broccoli overdone. Even the homemade rolls, which had smelled delicious coming out of the oven, managed to taste dry and chalky. I suppose the only consolation was this: it wasn’t the complete disaster of a dinner party I hosted almost fifteen years ago, where I watched a crowd of people—with forced smiles— saw their knives through the impossibly rubbery chicken breasts I served.

Embarrassment—over this recent holiday meal—managed to preoccupy most of my time of prayer the following morning. I was forced to ask God: Why did I have so much emotionally invested in dinner? What did my own sense of chagrin have to say about disordered desires, even sin? Hadn’t it had been a wonderful night of fun and fellowship with dear friends? Hadn’t we achieved the welcome we set out to offer? Who really cared if the salmon was mediocre and the broccoli slightly mushy? This became occasion for returning to the story of Mary and Martha, a story about many things and not least, about dinner.

Whenever the story of Mary and Martha and dinner is preached in church, I generally find myself feeling unconvinced by traditional interpretations. Yes, it’s true that I get defensive on Martha’s behalf (for obvious reasons to anyone who knows me). I want Martha to get some rightful credit. This is probably not the reaction I should most trust, but I still think that the common interpretation—of one bad sister serving, one good sister sitting—never feels fair or right. The easy argument that we should all be more like Mary seems overly simplistic, mostly because it never addresses the problem of dinner. Who’s going to make it for Jesus and all these hungry disciples if the only real discipleship must happen at Jesus’ feet?