Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot
Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 10. 38-42
“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.”
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905), hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA.
I remember hanging on the living room wall at my Granny Duffy’s house was a picture of the Holy Family. It was in the style of a grainy black and white photograph, and in fact I think it may have been a posed photograph from around the turn of the 20th Century. I can remember it distinctly in my mind and I looked for it on the Internet as I was preparing this sermon, without any luck. In the photo, Jesus and Mary are helping Joseph in his carpentry workshop. They have halos over their heads and they all look very serious.
That’s what we expect Jesus to be like, don’t we? Jesus and all those old saints? Serious, and humourless, and so holy they have halos floating over their heads as they walk down the street, and not like real people at all.
But the snatches we get of the lives of Martha and Mary and Peter and Paul and all the rest of them in the Bible aren’t like those old holy pictures, but real and three dimensional. These are real human beings, with real flaws and gifts and personalities. And one thing pretty much all serious historians agree on, including the ones who are committed atheists, is that Jesus of Nazareth, was an actual flesh and blood human being who really did live in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.
And so to Martha and Mary – this isn’t Mary the mother of Christ, but another woman with the same name. Martha is perhaps a bit of a fusspot. It was she herself who invited Jesus into her home, and there’s no sense that Jesus has asked her to go to a lot of trouble for Him. We all know people who see hosting someone as a test of their skills and dedication. Would Martha really have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs just to take it easy and hang out with Him for a few hours? I doubt it! Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.
We miss something here when we think Jesus is snapping angrily at Martha. I don’t think He is. While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, other parts of the Bible make it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”. So Jesus and Martha were proper besties, and I think He’s gently and affectionately winding her up. Jesus often gently winds people up in the Bible, and not just people who are hostile to Him, but also His friends—Peter perhaps most of all.
If Jesus was a wise and holy teacher who lived a long time ago, we would expect that He would have the normal run of personality quirks, and might even enjoy teasing His friends.
But our today’s other reading claims something far more radical about Jesus, something that leads us into the heart of the Christian faith, and what makes it unique. It says that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God … all things were created by him, and for him: he is before all things, and by him all things consist … it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell”
Let’s unpack that a bit. It says that Jesus was the image of the invisible God in heaven, in other words He is what God looks like in human form. He already was before Mary conceived Him—in fact, before the universe was created, because He was the universe’s creator.
It’s beyond me why anyone would doubt that God has a sense of humour, because that seems quite obvious to me, but here you have the Biblical proof—the creator of all things, as much God as His Father, walked the earth 2,000 years ago among these little towns and villages of Roman-occupied Palestine, and seems to have enjoyed teasing His friends like Martha and Peter.
Why on earth should God come to earth as a human being? To shed light on that, let’s explore where this first reading comes from, the one that claims that the Jesus who teased Martha is also the maker of the universe. It was a letter from St Paul to the Christians in a city called Colossae. It was written around twenty years after the death and resurrection of Christ, so these Colossians were pretty new Christians, and so was every other Christian in the world, even Paul. Paul says the Colossians were once enemies of God with wicked minds, doing wicked works—but now they have new lives that they could never have imagined for themselves, full of faith, reconciled to God… in His fleshy body… through death… Through death! What’s that about?
We associate baptism with babies and children and cute things but it is symbolises death—it is a symbolic drowning—that’s why we use water. An adult might actually go under the water and rise again, but a tiny baby like the one I baptise today clearly can’t do that, so the sprinkling symbolises it. In baptism we die with Christ, so we can be cleansed from our sins by the blood He shed for us on the Cross, and then rise to new life afterwards. Baptism is about dying to selfishness and hatred and bitterness and greed and all the temptations that keep us from loving the people around us as we should and from loving God, then rising to a new and better life afterwards.
Baptism isn’t a symbol that we are making ourselves better people. Baptism about is what God does for us. The water is an outward and visible symbol of the inward and spiritual cleansing that God works in people’s lives through baptism, invisible and often unappreciated by them.
That’s maybe where Martha gets things wrong, and deserves the gentle teasing that Jesus gives her. She was driving herself to distraction, trying to do all the right things to make Jesus happy, instead of trusting that He loved her anyway, and taking the time to relax and enjoy His company.
In our time and place, many of us are a bit like Martha. We think we matter because of what we do. The Church doesn’t do a great job of setting an example on this score, because it is also obsessed with making itself busy doing good works so it can try to prove it’s a valuable thing to a sceptical secular world.
But God doesn’t value us because of what we do, but because He is love. So come to God as you are. Make sure to take time just to hang out with Him, to listen for what He is saying to you, giving yourself the space to do so. You might find God makes you laugh, perhaps gently and affectionately winds you up, and then leads you to doing things for Him that you could never have imagined for yourself.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: Henryk Siemiradzki, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1886). Hangs in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
