How easily today’s first reading and the gospel story could be expressed, perhaps glibly, as "Don’t be so practical" or Don’t be so impractical."
While the first reading describes something of the transcendence of God and his tenderness with people in want, it is the gospel reading that I wish to reflect upon with you.
Someone once described the story of Martha and Mary, supposedly squabbling, as "a rather cute little story." There are some significant features about God that lie within this story. As you know, Martha is doing the very practical things — getting an appropriate meal read for their special guest. Jesus the prophet had come to their house for dinner! Meanwhile, once he is there, Mary leaves the Jewish religious and cultured ways to Martha and turns to being a person of the Good News. She is what Martha would call "impractical." She is simply listening to him speak. Jesus, obviously mindful of the conflict between the sisters, chooses sides: Mary has chosen the "better part." She is letting Jesus do what he was sent to do: he is obviously "preaching the Good News."
Recall last week’s gospel story. Do you remember? It was the story of the Good Samaritan. Obviously the Samaritan did the practical thing. He helped the man in great need. He did what anyone would want to do who had previously taken time to listen to the Gospel Jesus preached. Martha is righteous — remember the scriptural meaning of "righteousness": doing the will of God — because she is following her religious traditions. Luke gives us the picture of Mary as a representation of how we should live once we have been touched by the life of Jesus: listening and then getting up and responding to the message of the Gospel.
What St. Luke is presenting to us is not a family squabble or a sisters’ struggle. Please catch this: Luke is presenting a call to a radical way of life. Here is what he means. So often, don’t we, all of us, easily listen to what we would like to hear. We love hearing what confirms what we believe is the best thing for ourselves. But, once we begin to page our ways through the words and stories of the Evangelists, I am sure that all of us find stories or exhortations that just do not fit into our personal lifestyles. What we believe or what we want to do just do not fit into the picture that Jesus is presenting. How often do we think about the teachings of the Church, built upon the Gospels, as out of tune with where society is at the present moment. Many times what Jesus is saying in the Gospels is not what we want to hear.
If we do not abandon the practice of listening to Jesus, listening to him in our prayer time ... time not when we are reciting good and encouraging prayers ... but time when we just stop and "listen" to him speaking to us ... then we begin to feel ourselves in line with his thinking. His teachings and the teachings of the Church are not a foreign language to us or instructions that seem quite impractical.
Conversations with Jesus, if we listen to him speak rather than our speaking to him almost incessantly, these conversations will bring about a change in your life and my life. His words will bring about a conversion in those areas of our lives where we are weak, where we find uneasiness with the message. It is in these kinds of conversations with Jesus that many of us would much rather "get out into that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans." It is always so much easier to do our own thing, listen to our own ways. And most of us would work ourselves strenuously with the hopes that God would be "pleased, schmoozed, and appeased." What fools we can be!
A Jesuit priest friend says that it would be an interesting exercise if we read the all of the Gospels, underlining those verses that annoy us, that seem to be distasteful or inconvenient." My friend says that if those lines were eliminated from the written Gospels, how much shorter the New Testament scriptures would be! What is truly wrong with those underlined verses? Most often it is because we see ourselves in those words. We know down deep within our souls that the words are challenging us to change ourselves.
The wonderful reality that we sometimes forget when we think about reading scripture or that sometimes frightens us when we have that inner feeling that calls us to take some time to read the scriptures is that "Jesus just keeps sitting in those pages speaking and waiting for us to tune in."
For me, truly be a person who has to be doing something most of the time, these words of Luke are not piece of candy or cake. They are genuine challenge.
