Reading Luke 10:38-42: On Being Intentional in a Troubled Age

Reading Luke 10:38-42: The story of Mary and Martha.  Jesus tells Martha that she is ‘careful and troubled’ over many things.  Martha seems to be doing all the serving, getting things ready for dinner, etc.  From what I can understand, she gets upset that Mary isn’t being more helpful.  Then Jesus tells her that she is ‘careful’ and ‘troubled’.  It turns out that ‘careful’ is the Greek merimna – the same word which Jesus uses in the Parable of the Sower to describe those for whom the gospel takes root and begins to grow, but is eventually choked out because of the ‘cares’ of the world.  It means to be anxious, to be worried, and to be ‘fractured’ because of this anxiety.  There is a sense in which you let your anxieties and worries get the better of you, which means that you are less able to grasp good things for your life. 

This seems to be Jesus’s counsel to Martha.  He gently tells her that Mary has ‘chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her’.  ‘Good’ here is the Greek agathos – the very thing in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy for which humans should strive in order to truly flourish and, for Aristotle at least, live lives of truly happiness and fulfillment.  So Mary has chosen ‘what is good’ by listening to Jesus.  And ‘choice’ here means to reason things out and make a deliberate, intentional choice – it is literally, ‘what follows from a reasoning process’.  I have a lot of sympathy for Martha, and there are many messages in this story.  But I think one take-away is that it is essential to intentionally choose to ‘grasp’ the gospel, or to aim to truly flourish in the gospel in your individual life.  It’s not that Martha is unfaithful, but perhaps she’s not being mindful about how her surroundings, or the circumstances of the moment, are impacting her spirituality. 

This lesson need not be confined to the act of taking ‘great care’ of temporal needs.  I think it can be applied to any situation in which we quite unintentionally block the light and truth and peace of the gospel from coming into our lives.  In this day and age, I think this story is crucial.  This current age is full of situations – daily situations, I would say – which can cause us great anxiety and great confusion.  The problem is that, so often wherever you look, other people are also experiencing this anxiety and confusion, which causes misunderstandings, contentions, and an inability to reach out and connect with one another.  There is so much destabilization.  When that anxiety, confusion, and destabilization takes over, the human tendency is to forget to ‘look to God and live’ – at the very time we should be remembering!  Jesus’s reminder here is that this ‘loss of intentionality’ in grasping the power of the gospel in our lives, because of things that distress us, can happen to any of us.   

This is why I tell my children that the gospel is the answer to any problem that we face – it should be your first resort, and your last resort.  To understand that requires intentionality; it requires a deliberate, reasoning process to choose gospel principles over the instincts of the natural man like fear, anger, blame, suspicion, doubt, meanness of spirit, lack of generosity, inability to forgive, etc.  It’s the idea that we need to act, rather than be acted upon:  active in living the gospel, not passive in letting the tendencies of the natural man take over us.