Mary and Martha: Why Bible study trumps gender and work straightjackets
6th Sunday after Pentecost
This Sunday’s text (Lk 10:10:38-42) is, like last week’s Good Samaritan, another famous Lukan vignette—and similarly trivialized. Let’s be clear: the Mary and Martha tale decisively flips the script for women regarding table and Torah, in antiquity and today—though this has yet to dawn on churches that continue to forbid women to study or preach! The gospel overturns not only gender roles; it radically enfranchises all who are silenced and marginalized (right: He Qi).
But this story also speaks to the “anxiety” of our political moment, especially for us activists. The Samaritan tale’s clear articulation of an epistemology of “doing” rightly challenges the Protestant dogma of “salvation by faith, not works,” and the theological idealism it has spawned (see last week’s blog). Yet Luke’s dialectical genius is demonstrated in the very next story—about Mary, Martha, and Jesus’s critique of the “idolatry of doing”! It equally clearly commends “attending to the teachings,” even amidst the clamor of all that needs to be accomplished. That’s why as I spend so much effort inviting fellow activists into scripture study—not instead of engagement, but as a foundation for and energizing of it.
That said, the RCL also invokes for the second straight week the prophet Amos. And Amos 8:1–12a is a keystone text about economic justice as the central vocation of our faith. So this is also a perfect opportunity for unmasking the plutocrats of our time: those who put profit before people, while masking it with religious rhetoric (8:4-6). Which is exactly what Trump is doing (with his disingenuous Christian Nationalist “cover)” by freight-training his disastrous budget bill through a spineless Republican Congress, a structural adjustment that will empowers those who would “buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” (8:6).
It’s truly an all hands on deck moment, friends—for both biblical reflection and strategic political action.
Only two more weeks to use the HARP 20% off discount code SOJO20 at my page on Bookshop.org; it expires at the end of this month!
-Ched
