Mary, Martha and the Good Share

Last night before we went to bed, my wife told me about this news article. It describes the recent "family law" that Afghanistan's president has reportedly approved for the Shia minority in his country. Apparently the law will, among other things, make it illegal for Shia women to refuse to have sex with their husbands, have custody of their children, or leave the house without permission. Canadians have expressed astonishment and outrage at the possibility that all our risk and expense and sacrifice in Afghanistan might unwittingly result in this kind of government-sanctioned women's-rights abuse.

Canadians are asking "was this what we were fighting for?"

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon is seeking clarification from Afghan cabinet minsters.

And I'm thinking of Mary and Martha.

Do you have a flannel-graph vision of this story haunting your childhood, too? Jesus visits two sisters. As the practical-minded Martha makes busy in the kitchen, preparing the meal, the spiritually-minded Mary sits at the Lord's feet, hearing his word. Finally fed up with doing the housework alone, Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to give her a hand. But he gently affirms Mary's choice: she has chosen "that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

If you're like me, you grew up with the impression that the point here was to contrast Martha's hustle and bustle with Mary's serene contemplation. "We need to learn to have a contemplative, Mary-spirit in a bustling, Martha-world."

Not long ago I read an article by N. T. Wright that sheds some pretty piercing light on what the "better share" that Mary chose might really have been. Wright points out that the obvious and scandalous thing here for a first-century reader (and, perhaps, a reader in places like Afghanistan today), is that rather than keeping to the back rooms with the other women, Mary is sitting at the Rabbi's feet in the male part of the house. He suggests that this is the source of Martha's indignation. Mary has cut clean across one of the most basic social conventions. To help you feel the scandal of what Mary has done, Wright asks you to imagine you'd invited him to stay the weekend at your house and, as it got around bedtime, he went and set up a camp-bed in your bedroom. In Mary's culture, there are certain places a woman just did not go. And sitting at the feet of a rabbi--the place where you trained to be a rabbi yourself-- was emphatically one of those places.

Martha isn't just asking for Mary to lend a helping hand. Mary has quite brazenly flouted a socially-coded gender role, by seeking a place as a rabbi-in-training under the Master. Martha is asking Jesus to put Mary back in the place where, as a woman, culture says she "belongs."

She's asking Jesus to ratify her society's gender code. And this is exactly what Jesus will not do: Mary has chosen the "good share" of the work, and it won't be taken from her.

Wow.

In calling Mary's choice "the good share," Jesus has spoken good news for the men and women of Afghanistan. And for the men and women of Canada, too. Because Jesus refuses to rubber-stamp a gender code that functions simply to keep women "in their place." Instead he invites them to find their place, discovering what it really means to be a "biblical" woman, sitting together with biblical men, in training at his gracious feet.