July 2025 – Relationalrealities

Today’s Gospel reading tells the story of Jesus’ visit to the house of Martha and Mary, as recounted by Luke. I have to say my first reaction to seeing this as the gospel for the day drew a weary yawn from me – oh no, not this old chestnut again. For me, the old chestnut is the well-worn trope -better to be a passive hearer of the word than an active doer. I didn’t have to dig too deeply to realize that my response was a self-justification. When I go a little deeper, I experience this story of Luke’s as a judgment of one of my prominent personality characteristics.

I’m a potterer. My new best friend, Chat GPT, defines potterer as: a person who occupies themselves by doing small tasks in a leisurely, casual, or aimless manner. They spend their time doing small activities around the home or garden without any urgency or particular purpose. Ouch!

When Al and I came to Providence, we bought a 200-year-old colonial house with many small rooms. Having spent the greater part of our lives together in flats or condos designed around integrated kitchen-living-dining spaces, living in a house with many small rooms did not really suit us. But the one gift of such a house for me was that there was always something that needed doing, fixing, changing. As many of you may know, 200-year-old houses provide a marvelous excuse to potter.

We’ve since returned to condo living. However, one drawback to the integrated kitchen-living-dining space is that my need to potter around becomes a major source of irritation to my spouse.

At 6 pm most evenings, Al and I stop and sit down together to watch the PBS NewsHour. 6 pm coincides with cocktail hour, which for me at the moment means a refreshing glass of chilled Fino Sherry. As I approach my advancing years, I find myself returning to the satisfaction of this most quintessentially English aperitif.

But if you think I’m painting a picture of two aging clerics quietly sitting down to watch the evening news, you would be wrong. I start out sitting, but because the TV is always visible in our integrated space, I soon start wandering back and forth between pottering in the kitchen and sitting still, driving Al to eventually say – For heaven’s sake, sit down – before in exasperation, asking – Is there any need for you to be in the kitchen? No need, I reply, just trying to be helpful.

The major problem with pottering is captured in T.S. Eliot’s words from the first part of his Choruses from the Rock –

The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; …Where is the Life we have lost in living?

I enjoy being busy with small activities that lack urgency and a particular purpose. In other words, I am continually in a state of distraction. Distraction from free-floating existential anxieties causes me to miss so much of what life has to offer – life lost in the living.

In the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of his friends Martha and Mary, we are being offered three key insights. Firstly, the story offers us a glimpse of the importance to Jesus of friendship. He was more than an itinerant holy man wandering to and fro, accompanied only by a band of followers obsessed by a mission. Jesus seems to have had room in his life for familial friendships. We can imagine that he returned to Martha and Mary’s home in Bethany whenever he was passing through the area, as further evidenced by John’s story of another visit made to Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus, in the tumultuous days before his final week in Jerusalem. How many times do we miss the moment offered to us in friendships because we are too distracted, preoccupied with other things?

Secondly, Luke introduces us to the difference between Martha and Mary’s welcome. While Martha is preoccupied with the duties of playing the host, Mary sits quietly at Jesus’ feet, receptive to his words.

Luke describes Martha as a woman distracted by many things. He very deliberately uses the word perispaō which carries a rich meaning of being pulled away, to be dragged around, to be overburdened or drawn in different directions. Martha is overburdened by her distraction, which diverts her attention away from what really matters in this moment. The issue isn’t Martha’s host responsibilities—it’s her attitude of busyness. Martha wants Jesus to feel welcomed as the family’s honored guest and longtime friend. But pay attention to what her approach to this is doing to her. Her joy at Jesus’s arrival is tainted with resentment about all she has to do – Lord do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work?

The third insight in this story lies in remembering that Luke is the most woman-friendly of the New Testament writers. He uses his story of Jesus’ visit to Martha and Mary to make a countercultural point. In taking on the role of a disciple and sitting at the Lord’s feet, attentive to his words, Mary’s action would have shocked a first-century Jewish audience, where such a privilege was reserved only for men. By contrast, Martha seems resentfully resigned to fulfill the more conventional expectations of a good 1^st-century Jewish hostess.

Luke’s story of Jesus’ visit to old friends is a theological story about the nature of discipleship. All disciples are good people, but not all good people are disciples is the theological message Luke wants to get across. He contrasts Christian discipleship with what I would call being a good person, doing what a good person does. Now we all agree that doing good is preferable to doing harm, but where does the source of our motivation to make a difference in the world come from? In other words, are we motivated by our need to project self-image? I’m kind, I’m generous, I’m concerned about others because this is who I am. Or are we motivated to do good because we are motivated by a sense of being part of something so much greater than ourselves –namely a participant in the mission Jesus began but now entrusts us to continue.

You may ask – am I not just splitting hairs? Why does the source of our motivation to do good matter, so long as our actions achieve a good result? Luke would answer, simply pay attention to the personal effect of the difference in Martha’s and Mary’s responses to Jesus. Discipleship begins not with doing for, but with attending to, Jesus. Jesus doesn’t say Martha’s work is wrong. He says she’s missing the one thing necessary.

Are we not all Martha? Distracted. Pressured. Measuring our value by what we can accomplish—even in ministry. But Jesus invites us to slow down and metaphorically sit at his feet. We are a community where the primary impulse is often to serve as a projection of our need to be effective. How quickly this compulsion can turn to, if not resentment, then to burnout when things don’t go the way we expect.

When the source of motivation is a desire for a successful outcome, the danger of disappointment lurks in the shadows. However, when the actions we take flow from a faith-filled vision of discipleship, we cannot feel daunted because we understand ourselves to be conduits through which the greater expectations of the kingdom are being realized, regardless of how things may appear to us. Not my will but thine, O Lord.

We must guard against our need to be do-gooders – if being of use, making a difference, is to be a fruit of discipleship and not just a projection of our own sense of self as a good person. Christian-inspired action flows out of our desire not to act but to listen and receive Jesus through stillness. Anglican Tradition – with its emphasis on the centrality of common worship offers frequent opportunities to encounter Jesus in the collective stillness of hearing his Word and being fed by his body and blood. This is the essential prerequisite, only after which can we go out with confidence to love and serve the Lord.

Luke uses this brief narrative to emphasize that listening to Jesus—receiving his teaching—is the heart of true discipleship. This story is less about contrasting personalities (active vs. contemplative) and more about what matters most in the life of a follower of Christ.

Questions to ask ourselves:

Do I value Jesus’ voice above my own productivity?
Have I confused good works with spiritual depth?
When was the last time I sat still and really listened?

Martha’s service isn’t wrong, but in that moment, it’s conflictual. She is trying to serve Jesus without first receiving from him. Her motivation is shaped by her conventional understanding of what’s required of her. Her impulse comes from both self and societal expectations, rather than from faith. Consequently, her good intentions leave her feeling burdened and resentful.

Mary wasn’t lazy—she was focused. She wasn’t passive—she was present, allowing herself to be shaped by her encounter with Jesus’ Word before embarking on the life of faith in action. How very countercultural.

Image: Jorge Cocco

In his recent WAVES Festival address in San Diego – WAVES being an acronym for Well-being, Art, Vision, Entrepreneurship, and Science- David Brooks offered a commentary on current America, referring to the country having taken two recent hits. He described the Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office as a searing memory. What I saw that day was a group of people who occupied the Oval Office seeking power – just pure power – the power to bully. The Oval Office event reminded Brooks of George Orwell’s 1984, in which one of Orwell’s characters describes his lust for power being fulfilled not as a demand for obedience, but in the capacity to make other people suffer. It seems clear that Brooks’ number one hit on the nation concerns the Administration’s driving impulse – to achieve absolute power confirmed by its capacity to inflict suffering and embrace cruelty as a primary instrument of routine government.

In his address, Brooks suggests that American society moves through repetitive historical cycles – his point being that no matter how bad things currently seem, we’ve been here at least once before in the amazingly short 250-year history of the American experience. While identifying several socio-political elements in the repeating historical cycle, as his second hit on the nation he identifies the dramatic shift in the politics of immigration.

He notes that the idea of America is that we welcome all sorts of people here, and we celebrate diversity and pluralism. America is a crossroads nation where people come and bring their talents, and they have the opportunity to grow and contribute to the creation of a national sense of confidence. He noted that the current political climate is the result of a cataclysmic loss of [national] confidence and some sort of spiritual assault.

In Luke 10, the lawyer initiates a conversation with Jesus about the inheritance of eternal life. We detect a quality of self-serving in his approach. Fixing him with a shrewd and assessing gaze, Jesus flushes out the man’s real concerns. It’s not his capacity to love God that’s on the lawyer’s mind, but the thorny requirement to love his neighbor as himself. He blurts out – Who is my neighbor? As is his custom, Jesus does not try to explain. Instead, he tells him a story.

As I often remind us, the construction and telling of stories provides the only lens through which we can view and make some sense of our experience and place in the world. In his address to the WAVE Festival, Brooks is reminding us that we have always had competing stories through which to discover and articulate our experience as a nation. In any period, the rise and fall of particular stories color our view of ourselves as a nation. This is so clearly demonstrated in the cyclic pattern of our attitudes to the concept of neighbor. Is a neighbor someone like us or not like us, someone to be welcomed, if only out of a sense of self-interest, or feared? Each answer will determine national immigration policy.

Brooks identifies national confidence as a key ingredient of whether we embrace an inclusive or exclusive story of neighbor. He quotes John Bowlby the great British psychoanalyst and originator of attachment theory who wrote that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base – all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. Brooks argues that recent history has robbed Americans individually and collectively of a sense of living life from a secure base. Fear and insecurity have come to characterize the current state of national confidence. Since the financial collapse in 2008, ordinary Americans have experienced one blow after another to our confidence. Our insecurity, now both everyday as well as existential feeds a pathological suspicion of our neighbor. Like the lawyer confronting Jesus, we are currently experiencing a deep anxiety concerning personal and collective obligations towards our neighbor, the biblical stranger in our midst.

We find ourselves in periods when our national confidence allows us to welcome immigrants as an untapped resource contributing to our shared prosperity through high-value knowledge and skills or filling the multitude of jobs we no longer wish to or lack sufficient people to perform. There are other periods, such as the one we are currently slogging our weary way through, when, sapped by loss of personal and national confidence, we fall prey to the story casting immigrants as threats to our very way of life. From history, even our short 250-year national history, we can chart which of those competing stories has the power to liberate and which to imprison – to take us forward or cast us back. I suppose the light at the end of the tunnel is the knowledge that we have been here before, and we eventually come through periods of fear and insecurity to embrace a brighter story of ourselves.

Because we are somewhat biblically educated Episcopalians, we are aware of some of the historical cultural tensions and clashes of identity in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. For a start, we remember that Jews and Samaritans hated each other – a hatred rooted in the tragedy and pain of a shared history. Between Jew and Samaritan existed a hatred and fear of a ferocity equaled by the current Israeli Palestinian mutual fear and loathing. Good Samaritan for Jesus’ hearers was a shocking and provocative oxymoron – a rhetorical figure of speech in which deeply incongruous and contradictory terms are combined. Such is Jesus’ way.

At the heart of the lawyer’s conversation with Jesus lies his need to have Jesus limit his obligation to love his neighbor as himself. His need was rooted in his fear of too much being asked of him – in other words, he lacked the self-confidence to receive the commandment. Jesus recognizes this, and so at the end of his provocative story, he asks who in the story was the neighbor to the robbed and beaten man? Without thinking, the lawyer blurts out, the one who showed him mercy.

The obligation to show mercy suddenly jumps out of the parable and hits the lawyer fair and square in the face. Mercy emerges as the heart of what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The concept of love is always ambiguous. We can quibble over the extent or limit of what it means to show love for our neighbor. But the command to show mercy allows for no such ambiguity. Perhaps this is why, in the current political climate, mercy has become the most provocative and incendiary of all the expectations of the kingdom.

Month: July 2025

Conflictual Motivations

Neighbor Problems