Homily

This Sunday the Lord has once again gathered us to take us with him to Jerusalem. This journey is different from our journeys; we did not pick its destination, nor did we choose the route. We are not our own teachers or shepherds. On this journey that proceeds by stages every Sunday, it is the Lord who walks ahead of us; he is the one who guides our steps towards the spiritual maturity to which we are called. Last Sunday the liturgy invited us to stop by the half dead man who had been abandoned by the priest and the Levite. In the Good Samaritan it showed us the true face of the Christian. Today another image is added, as if to create a diptych describing the true character of a disciple. We see Mary seated at the Teacher’s feet. The evangelist Luke puts the episode of Martha and Mary immediately after the episode of the Good Samaritan. I fondly remember a dear friend, Valdo Vinay, who loved to say that it was not by accident that these two gospel passages were found one after the other. He said that they should always be read together, because they represent the “diptych” of Christian identity; the Christian must simultaneously be the Good Samaritan and Mary.
These two images represent the two inseparable dimensions of evangelic life: charity and listening to the Word. The Gospel does not call for some people to be experts in charity and others to be experts in prayer. Every disciple has to stop and listen to Jesus, like Mary, and at the same time take care of the man left half dead on the side of the road, as the Samaritan did. There is no opposition between charity and prayer, between the “active life” and the “contemplative life.” What the Gospel stigmatises is rather the opposition between moving on and stopping in front of those who are in need; between being totally absorbed in one’s own affairs and letting oneself be drawn into listening to the Gospel. The sort of contemplation that ignores the toil of daily life is totally foreign to the Gospel, as is a life absorbed in its own problems and worries.
But let us stop and consider the gospel passage about Martha and Mary. They owned a house in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. Jesus loved to stay there with his friends - he found warmth and affection with them. If we think about the difficult and serious quarrels that waited for him in Jerusalem and especially the wicked and deaf hostility that he often met there, we can easily understand how consoling it was for him to find a house where he could be welcomed and rest. For Jesus, who did not even have a stone on which to lay his head, that house was a longed-for refuge. The friendship of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary sustained Jesus in his tiring mission of evangelisation. This helps us understand why Jesus cried over the death of his friend Lazarus. And yet in this house in Bethany - and so it should be for the house of every disciple - we see the repetition of the wonderful scene from the book of Genesis that we heard about in this Sunday’s first reading.
It is the passage in which Abraham welcomes three pilgrims in his tent. We have all probably seen the famous masterpiece by the holy Russian painter Rublev that immortalized the image of three angels gathered around the table set by Abraham. The Russian painter was thinking about the line in the Letter to the Hebrews that says, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (13:2). Here in Bethany the three welcomed the angel of God, the Teacher from Nazareth, with their exquisite hospitality. We could say that the scene of Martha and Mary welcoming Jesus brings Abraham’s welcoming to its climax. The Gospel is not meant to belittle Martha’s concrete acts, because welcoming is made up of concrete acts, nor is it meant to present the two sisters as the symbols of two states of life. The problem lies in the depth of the welcome. Martha is distracted by her many duties; she is worried and agitated about many things, to the point of forgetting the meaning of what she was doing, that is, welcoming Jesus. Even in the parable of the Good Samaritan we could say that the priest and the Levite were so distracted by their responsibilities, including their religious ones, that they forgot the heart of their service, God’s compassion. It is written, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6).
In Martha’s case her goals get so distorted that instead of thinking about Jesus with affection and kindness she lets him get on her nerves and lashes out at him when she sees Mary sitting at his feet and listening. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work?” (v. 40) she says. Jesus calmly and affectionately responds that she is worried and distracted by many things, but only one thing is truly necessary: listening to the Gospel. It is the best thing, because it can change hearts and lives. Whoever listens to the word of God and keeps it will be a man or woman of mercy and peace. Mary, a true disciple of Jesus, has chosen the better part: listening to the Gospel is the absolute priority in her life. If we listen to Jesus, we will live like him, and we will be saved.