Seeking the Better Part | Sojourners

Seeking the Better Part

The story of Mary and Martha in Luke's gospel is a familiar one to all Christians. Most Christians today associate Martha with women's traditional roles in the church: Cooking and serving food, caring for altar linens, and the like. Since the last thing most churches want is for women to grow restive and refuse to perform these vital tasks in church life, many sermons subtly subvert this text by defending the equal importance of Martha's roles. Thus they do exactly what the text emphatically says is not to be done: taking away from Mary the "better part."

Interestingly enough, the classical church tradition did not associate Mary and Martha with roles specific to women, but rather connected them with the two stages of Christian life, which were seen as including both men and women. Martha was seen as representing the active life, the life of service, while Mary represented the contemplative life of study and prayer. The text was used to recommend both modes of life to all Christians, but suggesting that the contemplative life was the higher and better one.

What was the original context of this text in the life of the early church? What was the gospel writer seeking to say to his church by preserving this particular story?

THE FIGURES OF MARY, Martha, and their brother Lazarus appear in a number of gospel stories. Their home in Bethany lay directly behind the Mount of Olives, and Jesus seemed to have stayed there often when he was in the Jerusalem area.

We have assumed that these three were biological siblings, but in the Jewish society of the time it would have been very unusual for three adults to remain unmarried. While Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are described as living together in one household, neither their father or mother are mentioned, nor do they have either spouses or children. Some scholars have suggested that this probably means that the household in Bethany was not simply an ordinary family, but was a small, urban Essene community.

The Essenes were a religious order in the Jewish community of Jesus' time. They had a monastic settlement at Qumran in the Dead Sea area. The library from this community, which was hidden in caves when the Roman army besieged the settlement in 73 A.D., was rediscovered in 1947. Translations of new parts of these scrolls has revived the speculation that Jesus and the early Christian movement were closely associated with the Essenes. The great Jewish scholar Philo, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the time of Jesus, described Essene communities in his area as consisting of equal numbers of women and men, both of whom spent their days in prayer and study.

In addition to the Dead Sea settlement, the Essenes also had many small groups that lived in ordinary houses in cities and towns and included both women and men. If the household of Mary and Martha in Bethany was such an urban Essene community, then we would not only have evidence of intimate links between Jesus and this movement, but also a clue to the original context of this particular story.

In Jesus' time, the question of whether women were called to study the Torah alongside men was by no means settled in the Jewish community. Some rabbis seem to have allowed women to study, particularly their own daughters. Certainly Philo found nothing unusual in the fact that women studied in the communities that he described. Rather he assumes that these women, through their special vows, have risen above traditional gender roles and have the same lives of prayer and study as men.

We know from rabbinic literature that this question was still being hotly debated in later centuries. For, in the Jewish tradition, to study with a rabbi was to be oneself a rabbi in training. Once a woman is educated in the Torah, she may also be recognized as a teacher. Indeed Jewish tradition of the period recognizes one such woman, Bruriah, as a rabbinic teacher.

In order to exclude women from being rabbis, the majority rabbinic tradition would come down on the side of decreeing that women shouldn't study Torah at all. "It is better to burn the Bible than to teach it to a woman," cries one rabbinic teacher, an outcry that itself testifies to the fact that such teaching was indeed happening.

IN THE EARLY CHURCH, women were included equally with men in the study of scripture. There is no evidence that women were ever excluded from the catechetical community. Indeed, preparation of adults for baptism included a course of theological and biblical study, and women undertook the same study as men. But this also raised the question for Christians of whether women could be teachers and preachers, both as local pastors and traveling evangelists. There is clear evidence in the New Testament that women were included in these teaching roles.

This inclusion of women, and indeed overcoming of all social distinctions of race and class, was linked to the theology of baptism. "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" (Galatians 3:28). The redemption won by Christ has overcome all such worldly distinctions of groups. But this inclusivity did not go unchallenged, particularly as the original expectations of the speedy transformation of the world faded, and the church settled into becoming an institution modeled after the collegial institutions of its day.

Although Christianity would never eliminate women from study, by the mid-second century the conservative trends that sought to repress women as official teachers and preachers won out. Even then there were some churches that assumed that women were included in these roles. The outcry in I Timothy, "I do not allow a woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent," parallels the rabbinic outcry--again testifying to the fact that opposite practices were actually going on.

The Mary and Martha story represents an early stage of this controversy. Here the issue, as in the synagogue, was over the question of whether women could study at all. Martha is represented as doing the traditional support work of the household which the rabbis assigned to women, while Mary is "out of her place," seated at the foot of Jesus as a disciple of his teachings in the manner of the students of a rabbi. Here the controversy is emphatically decided on the side of Mary's right, and the right of all women, to be included in the study of the Christian teachings.

Today, 2,000 years later, the churches are slowly coming around to this original Christian perception. The gospel of Jesus overcomes distinctions of gender, race, and class. Women as well as men are included in study, and thereby also in the possibility of becoming teachers and preachers of the Christian message. Dispute over this question has hardly disappeared in the churches.

Does this mean that we devalue the work of women who cook and serve food by lifting up the right of women to study and teach? Perhaps we, like the classical Christian view, can now go beyond interpreting this text primarily in terms of women's roles, and see both as roles to which all Christians, both men and women, are called.

All Christians are called to service. Central to Jesus' teachings is a transformation of values in which the hierarchy of aristocratic domination over servile labor is overcome. The very concept of the Messiah as one who comes to rule over others is transformed. Jesus comes not to be served but to serve. Service is no longer seen as the devalued work of women and slaves, but rather the "greatest of you shall be servants." That is to say, the men of the church who aspire to leadership should see such leadership as service, a language traditionally used for the work of women and slaves.

This also means that service ceases to be devalued or "servile." It becomes the work of redemption, the work of bringing in God's kingdom on earth, doing God's will on earth, as it is in heaven. Women and slaves thereby are also liberated from servitude. They, alongside men of privileged classes, are disciples of rabbi Jesus, called to sit at his feet and preach his message.

DOES THIS SIMPLY MEAN that gender roles are transformed? That both men and women can help in the kitchen and also study and teach? Such a conclusion is itself not unimportant for Christian churches still agonizing over these questions, with many still using the Christian scriptures to enforce traditional patriarchal limitations on women's roles.

But perhaps we should not assume that, in the early Christian mind, Martha stood for the kitchen workers of the church, while Mary is the eager scholar. It is interesting that in St. John's gospel it is Martha who is the more prominent of the two sisters. It is Martha who comes to meet Jesus, while Mary is described as having "stayed at home."

Moreover Martha forthrightly challenged Jesus for not having responded sooner to their urgent message that their brother was dying. When Jesus reveals to her the secret that "I am the resurrection and the life"--not only at some future end of the world, but here and now--Martha responds with a confession of faith that parallels that of Peter in the other gospels: "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

In medieval and renaissance art, Martha is seen as a powerful figure and is often associated with the taming of dragons. Unlike St. George the dragon-slayer, who goes forth to kill the dragon in knightly armor, Martha is seen as taming the dragon. One 16th century painting from the Church of St. Laurence in Nuremberg shows Martha with a processional cross in her left hand and with the finger of her right hand raised in admonition. The large dragon at her side is wide-eyed but subdued and listening attentively to her teaching.

Perhaps we might think of Martha, the dragon-tamer, as the type of good pastor, politician, or homemaker who does not respond to conflicting forces with military might or crusades to annihilate the other by force, but rather uses persuasive reason to win the others into friendship. How much better our world would be today if we had more such Marthas, more dragon-tamers and less crusading warriors!

The Christian gospel calls us all, as those baptized into the new humanity in Christ, out of dominating rule and also out of devalued servitude. It calls us all into service for God's kingdom. But to understand the meaning of that call we must gather at the feet of Jesus and learn his teachings. This is indeed the first and better part, which should not be taken away from any of us, either because of gender stereotypes or because of busyness with the tasks of daily life.

The words addressed to Martha are addressed to all of us: "Oh, Martha, Martha (or Marvin, Marvin), you are worried and distracted by many things; but only one thing is necessary." Or, in the words of Matthew 6:33, "Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all else will be given to you as well."

Rosemary Radford Ruether, a Sojourners contributing editor, was Georgia Harkness professor of applied theology at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, when this article appeared. This article was adapted from a sermon she preached at St. James Cathedral in Chicago, Illinois.

Sojourners Magazine November 1992
This appears in the November 1992 issue of Sojourners