Blog
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Martha and Mary and the Problematic Guest
The past few days I've spent some study time exploring the story of Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary. You know the one – Martha banging pots, rattling dishes and cutlery, checking oven, swearing at the beeping microwave, piling everything in the dishwasher, trying to set a table while stirring a sauce, checking the recipe online, and Mary sitting at Jesus' feet. It isn't fair. Even less fair when Martha complains to Jesus and gets a telling off for getting so worked up.
What's that about? Well it's a long story trying to explain this short story. Martha is the one who welcomes and invites Jesus, assuming that for such an important guest everyone will muck in and get on with what needs to be done. Usually Mary and Martha are a team but this time Mary is sitting, all ears on what Jesus is saying. One of my favourite paintings is the Vermeer Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It's in the National Galleries in Edinburgh and it's now a regular stopping place if I'm in the city and it can possibly be done.
This painting sent me chasing for other visual interpretations of this story and there are a lot. And they all tell the same story, but often with variations of how the scene is interpreted. Is Jesus annoyed or gentle? Is Martha criticised or consoled? Is Mary lazy or is she doing the right thing? Is conversation more important than food on the table when it comes to hospitality for a hungry guest? Does Martha miss the point, does Jesus overlook Martha's practical kindness or indulge Mary's fascination with the radical teacher from Nazareth? How has Mary chosen the better part and the one thing necessary? Does that mean that all those practical souls whose kindness and friendship is expressed through their own nature as doers of the word, are to be told what they are doing isn't the way to love God? As if those who pray and read the Bible are more in line with what God wants than the person who bakes the bread, drops in with the casserole, misses the prayer meeting to take someone for a hospital appointment?
Yes, I know. Mary was listening to the word, and Martha was clattering in the kitchen. No amount of working, doing, activity is a substitute for prayer, devotion and looking after your soul. But Martha, if she ever gets a fair hearing, might want to say, "Well no amount of praying and Bible study and worship songs are going to feed the proper hunger of the body – give us this day our daily bread is, for a baker, a command to use gift and energy in feeding others." The word activism is a good put down word, usually used by those who want to be super-spiritual and dismiss the spirituality of those who like Bezalel in Exodus 31 was gifted by the Spirit with the practicalities of hand and mind to get the job done.
Annette Everett created a beautiful statue of Martha and Mary standing together, back to back, the sculptor's way of saying that contemplation and action, listening and doing, being with Jesus and working for Jesus, are both required in the model disciple. This, and Vermeer's painting are interpretations in which Martha isn't put down, but helped to see that all the effort in the world isn't a substitute for attentive listening to what the guest actually wants, needs and expects. Hospitality is not to foist the host's agenda driven approach to making the guest feel welcome; it is to pay attention to what the guest says, to offer first the gift of presence and that precious time needed to get a good meal on the table.
There is a rich and varied tradition of how this story has been used in the church down the centuries, across the world in different cultures, and often as a co-opted script to put women in their place! That's another story, but reader beware and be aware, Luke in telling this story has Mary doing what a man does and a woman is never expected to do in Jesus' time. And Martha's activism (a word too often used in a pejorative dismissal of people's hard work) is described as diakonia, ministry, service. Together these two women contain the rich diversities of Christian ministry and devotion to God, the love of neighbour and God, the practical kindness that prepares food and the attentive listening that receives the gift the guest brings.
Such a rich story.
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Autumn, Compost and Living Towards God
Autumn is one of the hinge seasons of the year, a turning from summer to winter through the slow process of maturation, fruitfulness and letting go. As a boy I helped my dad run a market garden sized greenhouse, growing and selling pot plants, many of them grown from cuttings. The compost was home made, a combination of soil (often collected from molehills in the spring), river gravel from the Nith, peat and finally leaf mould.
The leaf mould came from one of the woods within walking distance of our cottage, that layer of rich, rotted humus accumulated over years and years of shed leaves, which felt like the richest pile carpet you ever walked on. With a hessian sack, a small riddle and a pair of old leather gloves I would happily go and collect a bag of leaf mould, riddled under the branches of beech, lime, oak, sycamore, elm and rowan trees. The smell of rich composting vegetation still creates for me images of a boyhood spent in fields, woods, by riverbanks, hills and small lochans.
This time of year is an evocative month or two when, despite all the changes to the countryside, I walk in a state of moderate wonder-looking, or in the words of John's Gospel, 'beholding', 'gazing' and 'contemplating', the range of colours in trees on the turn. Leaf mould is a benevolent legacy, a gift from previous years, a store that nourishes and gives life beyond its own life. Each autumn, another downpayment to the fertility of our earth and its soil. One of the lessons learned in boyhood, but not realised till later life is the slowness and hiddenness of those layers of leaves, gently decaying into a medium for new life.
In my mind perhaps a similar process takes place. Ideas that years ago seemed so gripping, real and certain, mellow into a maturing compost of thought, memory, experience and a restfulness no longer needing such gripping certainty, and content with a wondering thoughtfulness I take to be wisdom. Not the resignation of 'all passion spent', as if nothing mattered much any more. Rather, an intellectual steadiness and spiritual humility that looks on the world not as a competition to be won, but a game to be played, a play to be performed, a score to be improvised using as much of ourselves and our gifts and our hard learned skills as we can bring to it.
It's over half a century since I went for sacks of leaf mould. I trust that over those intervening decades my thoughts and feelings, ideas and emotions, decisions and choices, words and silences, tears and actions, have settled like falling leaves onto the compost that is my life. And year on year that topsoil supplemented by the rich materials of a life lived so far as grace and love allow, towards God.
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Meditation on a Photo in 100 Words (4) Kings College Chapel.
"The church is not the building, it's the people." Those words are a truth which, if pushed too far, lose their grip on the truth they affirm. A church is a people being formed in community, gathered and scattered and gathered again for worship. A church building is a place where prayer and praise, baptism and communion, year on year, are offered. The building is not sacred; yet what is done there, like slow falling rain, soaks the nutrients of holiness into the soul. In this building, over centuries, souls have prayed, and holiness has taken root in their lives.
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100 Word Meditation on a Photo (3) King’s College Aberdeen
August in Aberdeen, early morning mist, laden with drizzle, the crown and the cross silhouetted against soft grey skies.
The cross that, when lifted up will draw all people to the Crucified, seen rising above the trees, the gentle wetness seeping through branches and leaves, coalescing in large drops that fall as tears on those walking below.
The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous; not a thow-away remark, but one of Jesus' one-liners in which is condensed an entire theology of the love that falls with extravagant benevolence, and gentle mercy, on our broken, God-made, love drenched world.
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100 Word Meditation on a Photo (2) King’s College Aberdeen
Round your table, through your giving,
show us how to live and pray
till your Kingdom's way of living
is the bread we share each day.
bread for us and for our neighbour,
bread for body, mind and soul,
bread of heaven and human labour –
broken bread that makes us whole.
Dean Ramsey tells of the parish minister of Stonehaven giving thanks for the safe ingathering of harvest, "except for a few stooks between here and Bervie". Clearly it's good to be precise with the Almighty and the extent of blessing received, not to limit gratitude, but to earth praise.
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100 Word Meditation on a Photo (1) King’s College Aberdeen
The beauty of old wood, satin to the touch, warm and worn to a dust induced patina, painstakingly rubbed by accident or intent, polished by a procession of worshippers, done and dusted over decades.
The interlocking triunity of carved circles are symbols of grace love and communion; creating, redeeming, sustaining, life, light and love; gifts of Father, Son and Spirit, set within garlands of fruit and flowers.
The durability of cared for wood creates in King's College Chapel a sense of time, past present and hoped for. To sit and rest against wise old timber, is prayer.
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A New Commentary on Revelation – the Best So Far.
A lot of books come into our house from libraries, ordered online, gifts, picked up in charity shops, now and again from someone doing what I'm doing quite regularly now, filleting and downsizing. Once you get to a certain age and stage it's worth asking if a book is worth buying as a lifetime investment! Howver there are times when the answer to that is still, yes.
There are hundreds of books in our house, most of them in my study, which were bought with a view to future use, and in fairness most of them have been used, many of them read through, some of them still on a long term pending list.
There are books read years ago I'll not read again – they are slowly finding new homes. I've a number of books I've had for years and never opened and they sit there offended at my inattention. But there are also books I've read two or three times and opened much more than that, and some of them are now bricks in my intellectual foundations – and some of these are biblical commentaries.
This one on Revelation is the most recent acquisition. It's expensive, nearly 1000 pages, and is easily now the critical commentary that comes nearest to being definitive, certainly in my lifetime. A biblical commentary on this scale is a work of exegetical art, and executed with the consummate skill that comes from deep scholarship, long thinking, a huge capacity for organising mutli-disciplinary sources of information, and in the case of Koester, a fluid and smooth writing style. The result is an encyclopedia on Revelation, and an interpretation of the text by an acknowledged expert.
There is a section on the history of interpretation, and few documents have been subjected to such weird, wild, misinterpretations; even amongst the more responsible and disciplined approaches there are differences and collisions of ideas. What lies at the heart of this book is an ancient and strangely contemporary confrontation between good and evil, life and death, violence ond peacemaking, empires clashing in the night as Arnold would say. Yes I have other commentaries on this strange book – and I've used and will still use them – but this is the book which will gather into coherence the results of a detailed, up to date exposition that pays attention to literary, historical, theological and textual issues, and do so against the social, political and cultural backgrounds of Greece, Rome and Israel.
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Death in the Long Grass at the Fruit Farm.
I was at a fruit garden and coffee centre in Montrose on October 1 (Yesterday). I was taking a funeral a bit later and came down early because I like to sit and think and prepare inwardly. Conducting a funeral should never become a familiar and well practiced set of skills. Death is an inevitable outcome of life, and each person's death is unique, special, important, and changes the way the world is. A presence has gone, a voice has fallen silent, a face only now visible in memory, a fellow sojourner has finished their particular and once travelled journey.
One of the first lessons of pastoral theology is to acknowledge with reverence the limited time and unlimited hopefulness of human life, our capacity as human beings to grow and change, to discover or hide from who we are, to be in fact, human. Death is that moment when potential and possibility have come to fulfilment, and the rest is left to God.
John Donne's words remain amongst the most cliched, quoted and irresistibly humane words on the way we should look on the death of another.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.And so on my way to take the funeral of a lady who to our knowledge had no close relatives, (and indeed no family member attended her funeral) I stopped for a coffee and some food, and some reflection time. I came back into the car, started it, put it into reverse, and my eye caught a movement in the long grass about 30 feet away. I realised immediately I was looking at a stoat, frantically at work, hauling and pulling a young rabbit it had killed towards, presumably, its den. I stopped, switched on my camera and managed only three or four pictures before the movement stopped and the grass was still. What I saw was a rare sight, one of those moments when several random rare circumstances coincide, and you are by entire accident, a witness.
Life can be unpredictably cruel. As one philosopher said, death is the possibility that overshadows all my other possibilities. As a theologian yes I can create a framework of creation, fallen and broken, where accidents happen, where life only survives by the death of some other part of creation; even vegetarians consume parts of the world to go on living in the world. And I can ask questions, interrogate my own faith claims, wonder what kind of God creates this kind of world, ask the futile question which reduced to my recent encounter with creatures reads, why this young rabbit and not another? Who kills the stoat? Why is life so ridiculously cheap and so infinitely expensive, so casually disposed of but to the one whose life is taken the tragic stopping of a unique unrepeatable existence?
At which point, it was time to go and conduct a funeral, and to celebrate a life, the infinitely expensive gift, and to remember with gratitude someone uniquely precious, and to do so from the standpoint of hope, trust and faith. The New Tesament vibrates with life and shudders with hope in the face of a creation which groans and awaits its redemption. The last reality of the universe is not death, but eternal love, the creative patience of the God who says "Behold I make all things new!" Death is the last enemy, but it does not have the last word. That word is God's word, and it is a word that spoke the world into being, called into existence each person and all creatures into the mystery that both terrifies and liberates, life and existence within the purposes of a God defined as the Love, Light, and Hope of all things.
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Why the Phrase “a Kinder Politics” Has the Potential to Generate Change.
Sometimes it's the ordinary words that contain the deepest meanings, and the most far reaching possibilities. We live now in the rhetorically overblown world of politics in which spin is now the least of the dangers to truth. For added devalue of truth, evasiveness is now a required skill, mantra chanting of words like deficit and austerity is a new liturgy of the have plenties, moralised clauses of exclusion such as 'those who do the right thing', and 'hard working families' are given quasi-moral currency, and promises (such as on child tax credits) are printed and published like promissory banknotes only to find that, once in power, the notes are declared by the issuer as past their use by date. These are rough and hard and harsh times for many people, and they need more than politicians who make a virtue out of being rough, hard and harsh in their policies, even if they do sound like sweet reason in their explanations and claim to represent the nation's interests.
So when Jeremy Corbyn creates what sounds like an unlikely oxymoron it's worth paying attention; he might just be saying something we have waited a long time to hear. He promised a "kinder politics". Who would think that after years of austerity, hard nosed ideology, and conflicted interests as lacerating as any class divisions of the past, that a politician would realistically suggest a kinder politics. The word, and concept and experience of kindness has not been evident on the floor of the House of Commons, or in the development and implementation of economic policies, nor in the crucibles of poverty, disadvantage and vulnerability which have been the three preferred easy target areas for the benefit cuts of recent years – and as for benefit sanctions, these only exist in a society which has grown tolerant, even slowly but surely preferring, unkindness to kindness.
Jeremy Corbyn spoke of kinder politics and a more caring society. It is to his credit as a leader of the Labour Party that Corbyn is unabashed to use such words – kinder politics, more caring society, in other words a commitment to the common good. In one of Walter Brueggemann's recent books, Journey to the Common Good, a chapter is entitled "Continuing Subversion of Alternative Possibility." What Brueggemann is getting at is that there is a place in Christian witness for calling in question the status quo, a spiritual and ethical necessity to contradict the dominant story of the powerful, a call from God indeed, to subvert, undermine, destabilise the alleged certainties of 'that's the way it is' by persistently and patiently pointing to alternative possibilities. That is what Corbyn was doing today – daring to describe kinder politics, a more caring society, commitment to the common good.
Will he succeed? Will the Party follow, especially the powerful and influential voices which are trained to sniff danger, to act in self-preserving ways and to position themselves to advantage? Such is politics. But if Labour is to win back the hearts of the electrorate, at least enough of them to win an election, then the party faithful and its strongest voices will need to embrace risk; and they will need to put constituents and ordinary folk above personal interests, and open their eyes to a larger vision than the mere calculus of what is safest and least likely to upset the political equilibrium of the status quo.
I am heartened that a politician articulates through such a simple term as kindness, a deeply and disturbingly subversive word of notice to the politics of austerity, with the relentless focus on benefits, welfare and health as key savings sources. This is a call to a more humane politics, a more human face of the body politic, and I for one buy into it 100% as a Christian, as a voter, and yes, as a human being who thinks kindness is a political as well as an ethical value. .