Tag: Jesus

Martha and Mary

“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’ ‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’”

Luke‬ ‭10:38-42‬ ‭NIVUK‬‬

For centuries this story has been read as two women quarrelling over the housework or food preparation. And it rather puts women in a no-win situation: it comes out clearly that Mary is better for sitting and listening and yet every woman knows the housework still needs doing, especially when visitors come round. 

I was thinking of this when I was watching someone’s post on Facebook of a video of a rather smug mother showing off about what a better mother she was than other people. She was talking about how she was bringing up her children to be respectful while other mothers clearly didn’t care. And realising full well the irony of telling myself a story about her to understand why she was telling herself stories about others, I couldn’t help noticing her expensive sports clothes, immaculate kitchen and other things that suggested she was rich, not working in a paid job and privileged. And I thought that she probably had no idea what the lives of the women she was criticising were like. We women can be really horrid and judgemental to each other. As in my post on defensiveness, I wonder whether this judgemental accusation is hiding our own weak ego, needing the reassurance that we aren’t wrong. 

So back to the Martha and Mary story, which for so long has frustrated me because it made me feel guilty about being so overwhelmed with my busyness that I don’t make time to sit still. I felt doubly got at: first I do more than my share of work and then I’m told that I’m wrong to do so! (See how I’d personalised it?!) The story pits the two sisters against each other and doubly seems to punish the hardworking one who is already exhausted. 

So I was fascinated to read a book by Mary Stromer Hanson which told the story differently. She pointed out that the King James translation has an extra word “also” in verse 39:

“And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.” KJV Luke 10:39.

This goes back to the Greek but has been missed out in modern translations. The implication is that both Mary and Martha “sat at Jesus’s feet” (which is likely to be an idiomatic phrase describing their roles as his disciples – and therefore, as an aside, taking on a role that was clearly not just for men).

It goes on:

“But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.” ‭‭Luke‬ ‭10:40‬ ‭KJV‬‬

There is no indication here that the “serving” is in the kitchen. It could equally be some other type of service, perhaps in a community, or even “ministry”. 

Jesus answers, and we have always read this as a rebuke, but try reading it again in a comforting voice, reassuring her that he has heard her worries and sympathises, but wants to remind her that the type of service Mary is doing (one which has led her to leave home and Martha, perhaps?), is good for Mary. 

“And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

‭‭Luke‬ ‭10:41-42‬ ‭KJV‬‬

Now, is this new reading more “right”? I don’t know, and from how I interpret spiritual truth (see earlier blogs on religious Truth), it doesn’t matter too much [any atheist reading this far who thinks this shows how you can read anything into the Bible and therefore it’s meaningless is missing my point as much as any Bible-literalist who thinks I’m wrong because I’ve looked at it differently from how they were taught…]  The point is, that how we read Jesus’s reply depends a lot on the story we’ve told ourselves about who Mary and Martha are. 

And maybe how we read other people’s parenting stories on Facebook depends a lot on the stories we tell ourselves about them. 

So let’s return to what Jesus might be saying here: Mary’s way (the type of work she does) is good (for her). You have your own burdens, Martha, and I sympathise, but you don’t solve those by stopping her following her path. 

So, whether we are mums or not, whether we work outside the home or with our families, whatever we do, let us not attack each other!

But one final contradictory word (because I like living on the contradictory edge) – when I do stop my busyness and just sit, I always benefit and know it is good. 

Different types of truth part 2: religious truth

I know God exists. I also believe, to paraphrase that science t-shirt (see previous blog), that the nice thing about God is that He exists whether or not you believe in Him. (I use Her and Him to refer to God and get different value from both, by the way).

Now, scientists reading this will be horrified by what I’ve just written. They intuitively understand that these are very different types of truth. Even other scientists who have a faith similar to mine will probably have a wry smile, recognising the point I’m making and recognising why it will horrify other scientists. 

I guess that many non-scientists, particularly those with religious faith, won’t understand what the problem is. And this, I think, is where seeming conflicts between science and religion start. 

Sometimes I see religious posters on public transport. These often give the message that “the Bible is right because it says it is”. Sometimes they are that explicit, sometimes they imply this by quoting Bible phrases at you. I don’t know who these adverts are aimed at, but my guess is that they are not very successful with converting an atheist. The people who create such posters are genuine and find this message helpful and convincing to them, they are likely not to understand what is wrong with the first paragraph. 

But I also think that scientists can become very blinkered in their own way. By prioritising scientific truth over all other kinds of truth, they risk both missing something valuable and alienating nonscientists. I want to build bridges and keep the dialogue open. 

When I realised I was becoming a Christian, I struggled intellectually as well as spiritually. What I want to describe is how I reconciled my faith and my intellect. I don’t do so to convince others, but simply to show one way of bridging that divide. I know that this makes no sense to either the atheist or those who believe there is only one true way to God. In later blogs I might explore their arguments (these initial posts are about setting the basis of my own thoughts, providing my axioms, if you like).

My faith starts with my experience. In worship I feel myself come spiritually into resonance with something beyond and within me, which I call God. In everyday life I can also sense myself in, or out, of that resonance. It is hard to describe in words what it feels like, but it is a combination of physical feeling and a sense of rightness. It has a lot in common with feeling “in love” – an experience most of us have and which science can explain in terms of evolutionary need and chemical changes in our hormones, but somehow we all know has some reality in and of itself beyond those explanations. Indeed, feeling in spiritual resonance with God feels like being in Love and always leads to Love, in its broadest, most open sense. 

When I stay in that resonance I am changed, transformed. I widen my understanding, encompass a fuller truth, learn to forgive and be forgiven. When I read the Bible I hear stories of people who have had similar experiences. I recognise in those stories my own struggles, failures and steps into becoming more than I was. When I read about Jesus I recognise a man who was in such perfect resonance with God that the Love of God flowed out of him and was seen by those who met him and either entranced them or made them fight it. (I have also developed a theology around the specific details, but this isn’t the time to share that).

Now, one of the key things for me in spiritual understanding is to think in duality, not dualism. In other words to hold mutually contradictory things in tension and live at that dissonance. It was physics that first taught me to do that. I found a way to handle wave particle duality that was absurdly simple: a photon is not a wave and not a particle. It’s a photon and it behaves as photons behave. We, with our limited intellect, need models to explain the photon. So when it is travelling through space we find the model of a wave helpful and we think of it as a wave. When it interacts with matter (say a detector!) we find a particle model more helpful. We must never forget that these are our models to deal with our intellectual limitations, because the photon goes on being a photon. 

Now, when it comes to God we are not just intellectually limited, we are spiritually limited, too. So here, too, we create models. Some are intellectual models (theology), some are spiritual models (practices, mysticism) and many are parables, stories that give us glimpses of some aspect. Different people, developing this in different communities, came up with different descriptive models and therefore you have different religions. When we treat the religion as Truth, rather than as a model pointing to Truth, we can get hung up on the differences, consider ourselves right and them wrong (religious people) or delight in pointing out the inconsistencies between different models in use in the same religion as proof that they are wrong (atheists).

I choose to follow a single set of models (a Quaker Christianity) exclusively. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognise truth in the other models, but so far I have not reached a spiritual limit of the models I have (consider Einsteinian gravity expanding Newtonian). And by sticking to one set, rather than mixing up those of different faiths, I find it harder to avoid the uncomfortable bits which lead to me being transformed! I know enough of myself to know that I could make this an intellectual exploration of different faiths, picking nice bits from each. Sticking to one forces me to follow its path through the uncomfortable.