Esteban Redolad
As they continued their journey he entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary [who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” The Lord said to her in reply, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her” (Lk 10:38-42).
The story of Martha and Mary has been used, through the centuries, to highlight the dichotomy between prayer and action, and to establish the distinction between the contemplative and the active life (and to give primacy to the contemplative vocation). There is however, a possible different assessment of the distinctive roles played by the two women. In the story Martha plays the typical feminine role (that is, according to the society of 2,000 years ago), while Mary becomes the prototypical disciple.
Martha was busy with all the chores that then, and still now, are expected to be performed by women in many cultures: cooking, cleaning, and house work in general. Mary, on the other hand, did what no one expected from a woman: to sit at the feet of the Master, that is, to be his disciple. And Jesus did what no master ever did: to have women disciples. “Martha, Martha”, Jesus will conclude, “Mary has chosen the better part”.
Martha was unable to move away from the chains of a patriarchal society in which her role was only subordinate. She was contented, even if she complained, with her role as a servant. Martha was debased by the weight of a male dominated culture, while Mary dared to assume a mission.
May the Marthas we all have inside, complainers but impoverished and degraded, give room to the Marys, unafraid, challengers, aware of our worth, of our potential and our mission.
REFLECTIONTHE BREAD OF LIFE DISCOURSE (II)Martí Colom“Is this not Jesus?” Following the meditation published a few days ago, we continue reflecting on the Bread of Life Discourse, which extends itself for most of chapter six of John’s Gospel and we have heard at Sunday Mass during the past few weeks. In verse 6:24 we are told that one of the resistances that Jesus found in those to whom he proclaimed the Good News was based on nothing less than in his closeness to them. He identified himself as bread from heaven and they responded murmuring, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother?” They ask themselves, filled with wonder, how can he bring us something new if he belongs here, if we have always known him, if he is one of us? Beyond these questions (which begin with the mention of Jesus’ name, as if his well-known identity was the strongest argument to discredit his message), there is a deeply rooted tendency not just of those who listened to him 2,000 years ago, but even of many today: the tendency to think that when God manifests Himself in our lives this will necessarily happen by way of extraordinary signs and spectacular events completely foreign to our daily experience. We refuse to accept that God may come to us tip-toeing, through ordinary people, through those we have closest. Yet, this is exactly what happens. Perhaps many of us are more in debt than what we would like to admit to superstitious and magical ways of thinking, out of which we automatically associate God’s presence to the super-natural and everything that is grandiose, foreign and incomprehensible. It seems to us that our daily experience simply cannot be the scenario or the means for God’s action. Jesus, of course, comes to challenge this mentality and to claim back the richness and sanctity of everything ordinary, and to suggest that his own closeness to those he lived with (in short, his humanity) it was not, neither then nor now, an obstacle for him to be living bread for all. If we try to be his followers we must understand that each and every one of us is also called to be bread of life for others: from our simplicity, from our rootedness to our own cultures, from our personalities more or less integrated, even from our many limitations, from our fears and hopes. A careful reading of this passage, finally, will help us to discover God’s footprint in places where we perhaps were not looking: in the father and the grandfather that give me advice, in the children who question my ideas, in the wife whom I love, in the sick person that I visit, in the friend to whom I open my own heart, in the neighbor that helps me, in the coworker I see every day, in the brother with whom I pray together and in the poor person who I perhaps tend to ignore instead of finding, in him as well, my bread of eternal life.
