Distraction and Focus

Well, if you were looking for a restful day in church, this wasn’t the Sunday to come – there’s an awful lot of hubbub and activity in our Old Testament and gospel readings today, a lot of bustling about in the kitchen. Abraham, in the story from Genesis, and Martha, in the story from Luke, both find themselves entertaining the Lord in their homes, and they hasten to do the right thing by him.  But somehow, only one of them really seems to get it right.

So let’s compare them. Abraham is caught napping, taking his siesta in the heat of the day, but when he sees the three men suddenly standing there, he can’t move fast enough to get a meal served before them. He runs into the tent and tells Sarah to make some bread, races to the herd and picks out a calf to be prepared for dinner, tells the servant to hurry up, and then rushes all of the food out to the three men, standing there panting as they eat. The three men, who are in some mysterious way an appearance of God himself to Abraham, tell him that the long-awaited promise of a child will come true for him and Sarah. And indeed, this does come to pass, and Abraham becomes the ancestor of all of God’s people.

Martha, on the other hand, hears a different message. She too welcomes the Lord into her home – this time Jesus and his entourage, his disciples and probably a huge crowd of followers besides – and begins to do all the many tasks required to feed and host such honored guests. Like Abraham, Martha hastens to prepare a great feast for all of these people. Her sister Mary, on the other hand, just sits there, listening to Jesus. And so Martha, insanely busy and resentful that her sister isn’t helping her, asks Jesus to help out instead by telling her sister to get up and start working. But Jesus answers her, Martha, you’re too worried and distracted – Mary has chosen the better part; there is need of only one thing, he says. And so Martha goes down in history, forever scolded by Jesus.

Two similar stories – but in one of them, the host receives God’s loving promise in return for his hospitality; in the other, the host receives Jesus’ reprimand for her anxiety and distraction. And yet both Abraham and Martha are performing the duties required by their culture, doing what they could to honor distinguished guests. So what is the difference, exactly?

Abraham is someone we hold up as a great example of faith, faith that is evident in the stories about him. God and Abraham talk together many times during Abraham’s lifetime; sometimes Abraham argues with God, often he struggles to stay faithful to God’s promises, but throughout all, he stays in relationship with God. So he’s a wonderful example for us – he doubts God and messes up and has questions aplenty along the way but stays focused on God anyway, returning to God each time he walks away. And so I suspect he does recognize God when he appears at his tent that day as three men – the lavishness of the feast he prepares is an offering to the one he has listened to and believed in for years. And this offering, and the relationship with God it speaks to, are a model for us of living the life of faith.

Mary and Martha have also often been interpreted as examples, of the contemplative and the active way of life. The story of Mary and Martha has sometimes been seen as asking the question, Is it better to pray, or to work? And in this interpretation, when Jesus upholds Mary’s choice to sit at his feet and listen (the posture of a disciple), he is upholding the more contemplative, introverted way, the way of retiring away from the world and into the monastery, as somehow loftier than that of working about the everyday, ‘mundane’ tasks.  The idea has lingered on in the belief that the church should be about praying, not about social action in the world. Martha is worldly, Mary is spiritual, and we are supposed to be spiritual. 

But this can’t be a very complete interpretation.  If what Jesus meant to say was that all of his followers should retire from the work of the world and sit in prayer and contemplation all their days, who would go about feeding the hungry and freeing the oppressed, preaching the gospel and healing the sick – all the things Jesus also instructs us to do? Not to mention provide the hospitality that Jesus himself so often enjoyed.

So we look at the story more carefully. Jesus doesn’t say to Martha that she should stop working. He says, ‘You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need only of one thing.’ The problem is not the work she is doing, the problem is that she is ‘distracted’ – the Greek word translated here means that she is ‘drawn different ways at the same time.’ There God is in her home, Jesus sitting and teaching, and she can’t stop to listen. She is pulled in too many other directions – by cultural expectations, her sense of duty, her resentment of her sister. Maybe also by her inability to recognize Jesus for who he is, something more than just another wandering mouth to feed. And then to make it worse, Martha tries to distract her sister from Jesus, even to distract Jesus himself from what he is doing: she addresses her complaint to him, not to Mary, trying to embroil him in her irritation – a classic move of triangulation. Jesus’ response to her is one of pity, for he sees that she is missing the one thing that would give her life. Her distraction pulls her away from the best part of all, being in God’s presence and hearing what God would say to her, being in relationship with God.

When Jesus calls people to follow him, he often calls them away from something. Sell all you have and follow me; go and sin no more; leave your nets and be a fisher of people. Whatever is blocking them from relationship with God, he tells them to let it go: money and wealth, family ties, sin or simply being too darn busy, Jesus says, put it aside and come, be with me.

But is also clear that when people drop their distractions and look at Jesus’ face, follow where Jesus leads, they are not necessarily lifted away from all the things they were doing before. The tax collectors mostly stay tax collectors; the fishermen end up going fishing again; Martha hosts more meals for Jesus. But things are different: the context in which they work changes, or the way they go about their lives changes, or something in their hearts changes, so that they put their focus where it should be first of all, on God. Disciples, it seems, are those who live their lives, whatever those lives are, in the presence of God – not dwelling in anxiety, or fear, or ambition, or any of the other things that might motivate us. Those are distractions, the ‘many things’ that draw us different ways at the same time. What Jesus calls us to is the one thing, the best part, the deepest and most stable ground of all to stand on. He calls us to be and to remain in the presence of God.

There’s a beautiful little book written by a monk named Brother Lawrence, a 17th century lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris, called The Practice of the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence served in the kitchen and the shoe-repair shop, never as a choir singer or spiritual director or monastery prior. But he knew that his whole life should be lived in the presence of God – that as he swept the floor of the kitchen, he did so to the glory of God. And he became suffused with a holiness that radiated out to everyone that met him – so much so that after he died, his few writings, and things he said, were gathered together in this book that is still read and beloved today. It’s one I read and reread again. I need this message as much as anyone.

That is what I think Jesus is saying to Martha, and what the difference is in her story versus Abraham’s. Abraham offers his best to God, in an ongoing relationship of trust and love; Martha finds herself pulled away from Jesus and resenting those who sit near him. Both of them are offered the promise of abundant life, but Martha can’t lay hold of it until Jesus calls her away from her distractions and towards him. Martha, Martha, he says, with pity: the one thing you need is right here before you. Choose the better part and be here with me, in my presence: and my presence, my love, will not be taken away from you.

And so maybe we hear Jesus say to us – and return again to practice God’s presence in all we do. To live our lives as God has given them to us, but to live them beginning and ending each moment with God. Not because God needs us to live this way, but because we need it – God’s help to go through each day.