Only one thing? Martha, Mary, and Love in Person

Psalm 15 offers a summary of what God really requires: Think the truth in your heart; don’t engage in slander; don’t harm other people; honor those who fear the Lord; don’t take advantage of a borrower; don’t take bribes against the innocent. That’s not so complicated. Our Lord in the Gospels teaches us to go deeper still. All of the precepts in Psalm 15 — like the Ten Commandments, which are the heart of the Jewish law — can be summed up in the two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. Love is the fulfillment of the law. Love in many guises, by many names. Mercy. Forgiveness. The fruits of the Spirit: patience, generosity, self-control: they’re just different aspects of love. That’s as simple as it gets.

Yet in today’s Gospel it might almost seem as if Jesus is oversimplifying when he says “There is need of only one thing.” Very often, when this Gospel is proclaimed, the lesson that comes across seems to be that there is need of two things. You hear remarks like “The Church needs both Mary and Martha: both prayer and service, both contemplation and action.” And of course that makes sense, right? Prayer is important, but we also need to get things done.

Look at the spectrum of religious orders: You’ve got more contemplative, cloistered orders like the Carmelites and the Carthusians, whose vocation is all about silence, solitude, and personal and communal prayer. And then you’ve got the more active orders who are out in the world, like the Dominicans and the Jesuits, Pope Francis’ order, whose vocation involves service to others through education, healthcare, charitable work, and so forth.

And even in those orders it’s never just one thing or the other. Even very active orders like Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity begin the day with prayers and Mass and make time for adoration and spiritual reading and meditation. And even in very contemplative orders there’s still work to do. There has to be a balance of some kind. Saint Teresa of Ávila was a contemplative, a Carmelite, but she saw value in Martha’s work:

Believe me, both Martha and Mary must entertain our Lord and keep Him as their Guest, nor must they be so inhospitable as to offer Him no food. How can Mary do this while she sits at His feet, if her sister does not help her?

So for Saint Teresa of Ávila, action and contemplation are complementary. Each needs the other. Hospitality is important. Offering food to guests is important, especially in the cultural world of the Bible. We see that in the first reading, with Abraham welcoming the three men and helping his wife Sarah prepare a meal for them. Martha is doing the same thing as Abraham. Why does Jesus reproach her?

Certainly not for preparing food or serving. It’s her complaint against her sister Mary, and her anxious, troubled attitude, that draws Jesus’ gentle rebuke. But that doesn’t answer the question: What is the one thing necessary?

Let’s try a thought experiment. What if Martha had joined Mary at Jesus’ feet and listened to his teaching? Would everyone have gone hungry? What happened when Jesus was teaching the multitudes out in the middle of nowhere? Did they go hungry? No. Jesus saw to their needs. Of course I’m not saying he would have done the same thing in the house of Mary and Martha! There was no need. They had food! But perhaps, if Martha had joined Mary at Jesus’ feet and listened to teaching, at some point, Jesus would simply have said, “Now, how about something to eat?” And that would have made all the difference, regardless who did the serving, Martha or Mary or both of them together, because they would be doing it not just for Jesus, but at his prompting.

Another name for love

And this is the key to the one thing necessary. King David tells us in the responsorial psalm that one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord. But Jesus teaches us that the converse is even more importantly true: The one who lives in the presence of the Lord will do justice. To live rightly in this world, we must live in God’s presence, cultivate intimacy with him, inner openness and responsiveness to his prompting in our lives.

Intimacy; responsiveness: just another name for love, but an important one. Martha loved Jesus, and her service was prompted by love, but not by responsiveness to his prompting. There he was in her house, teaching, and she was distracted. We can love God, and do all sorts of things in some way motivated by love of God, while being distracted from what he wants for us.

Thomas Merton, who, like Saint Teresa of Ávila, belonged to a contemplative order, made many attempts to express the relationship of contemplation and action. In one of his best-known efforts, he said that, practice,

there is only one vocation. Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to be a contemplative and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others.

How can we can do this? How do we cultivate intimacy with Jesus? Pope Francis, in a 2020 general audience, points out that the Catechism says that “when Jesus prays he is already teaching us how to pray” (CCC 2607). Jesus’ example of intimacy with his Father shows us how to cultivate intimacy with him. What can we learn from Jesus’ example? Pope Francis points out four things.

1. First and foremost is the primacy of prayer, the “first-ness” of it. The first movement our heart at the beginning of each day should be a movement toward God.
2. Second, we must be disciplined and insistent in our prayer. Anyone can pray now and then when the mood strikes them, but Jesus teaches us to embrace prayer as a discipline, an exercise within a rule of life.
3. Third, we need solitude and silence. We aren’t all cloistered, but we need some kind of cloister in our hearts, and if we can possibly order our lives to create some measure of solitude and silence for prayer, to avoid distraction, our prayer will be better for it.
4. Finally, if like Martha we’re anxious or upset anything in our lives, in prayer we are led to the realization that everything comes from God and returns to him, and we arrive at the peace that comes from surrendering to God’s will and placing ourselves in his hands.

When we pray like this, we will experience the truth that the one thing necessary is, in a sense, not a thing at all. Not an idea or an action, but Love in Person: Jesus Christ.