Imitating St. Martha’s Virtues and Learning from Her Misunderstanding, 17th Wednesday (II), July 29, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life
Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Martha
July 29, 2020
Jer 15:10.16-21, Ps 59, Jn 11:19-27

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Two of the most important days of “reparation” in the liturgical calendar are July 3 and July 29, for St. Thomas and St. Martha respectively. Like St. Thomas, St. Martha is one of the saints who throughout Church history have seemed to be remembered not for their great faith but for the way Jesus challenged them to grow in faith. Thomas will forever be remembered more for his “doubt” — a doubt the other apostles shared before Jesus’ first appearance — than for his Christological confession. Likewise Martha has suffered in comparison to her sister, Mary, as someone whom Christian tradition has deemed to have had her priorities mixed up. Today is a day to try to correct the record and do ecclesiastical penance by learning from them! The Church has us celebrate the feasts of the saints, as you know, not merely so that we can beg for their intercession but so that we can learn from them the virtues we need to live the Christian life in a holy, faithful and truly fulfilling way. Today on this Feast of St. Martha, therefore, I’d like to ponder four of her great virtues, virtues that Sisters of Life, that Catholic priests and indeed all Catholic faithful should be known for.
• We should ponder first her hospitality. St. Luke tells us, “Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.” The evangelist mentions that it was Martha — not Martha, Mary and Lazarus — who welcomed Jesus, because she was the one who really put in the effort of hospitality. That’s also what today’s opening prayer features, when we turn to God the Father “whose Son was pleased to be welcomed in Saint Martha’s home as a guest” and ask for the grace similarly to be received by him in the house of heaven. Together with St. Benedict, she is the most famous saint of hospitality in the history of the Church. It’s not by coincidence that the guest house in the Vatican where Pope Francis now lives and where all the Cardinals stay during the conclave is called the Domus Sanctae Marthae, “St. Martha’s House.” Her hagiographically famous hospitality to Jesus and the apostles should help us to examine our own, first to Jesus and then in him, to others. St. Josemaria used to call the chapels he would make and adorn to house Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament “Bethanies,” and would say that we should welcome Jesus in that chapel and elsewhere with the same love Jesus found there. He would use that as an illustration to show how our hearts, our lives, our bodies and souls are likewise meant to be like Martha’s House in Bethany, receiving Jesus within. Once we learn how to receive Jesus in that way, then it becomes so much easier to extend a similar hospitality to others because, as Jesus said, whenever we welcome a stranger, Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Welcoming the Lord and others as we would the Lord is something in which we need to persevere. It’s not enough in welcoming to give a good “first impression,” but the welcoming must continue. We must receive others as gifts given by the Lord, including those who are near us, to make them feel valued, loved, appreciated, at home.
• Second, we should ponder St. Martha’s loving service. St. John says that after the raising of Lazarus she threw a reception for Jesus and she was “ministering” to the guests present (Jn 12:2). We see her doing the same when she and Martha received Jesus into their home in St. Luke’s Gospel (10:38-42). She was cleaning and cooking for Jesus and working so hard that she began to resent that her sister Mary wasn’t doing any work at all but sitting at Jesus’ feet. Jesus gently defended Mary’s choice, saying that she had chosen the “better part,” and the “one thing necessary,” and she wouldn’t be robbed of it. She hadn’t realized that Jesus had come to their home primarily to feed and not to be fed, to serve and not to be served, and that’s what Mary grasped that Martha hadn’t. But this does not mean in the least that Jesus was somehow disparaging her loving service of him. He had elsewhere praised feeding the hungry, saying, “I was hungry and you fed me.” All he was doing was calling her to recognize that in our relationship with Jesus we first must be nourished before nourishing others, lest we run out of the ability to nourish others with the most important nutrition of all. She seemed to learn the lesson over time, as we will see.
• The third virtue we should ponder is St. Martha’s faith. We see that faith on display in the great miracle of the raising of Lazarus in today’s Gospel. Despite being apprised of Lazarus’ illness, Jesus had waited until he had been dead for four days until he arrived in Bethany. There was a Jewish idea that the soul would hover around the body for three days after death trying to re-enter, but once a person had been dead for four days, it was over. Martha obviously must have known about the raising of the little girl of Jairus the synagogue official and of the only son of the widow of Nain, but both of those resuscitations happened minutes or hours after death. Lazarus had already been dead past the point of no return. Yet, she ran up to Jesus with faith and said, first, with perhaps a little bit of resentment, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” but then slipped in a petition for an inconceivable miracle, “but even now I know that whatever you ask of God, He will give you!” Jesus replied to her, “Your brother will rise,” and Martha immediately responded by expressing her firm belief what Jesus must have told them about the afterlife in response to their questions when he dined in their home: “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day!” But that’s not really what Martha was seeking and Jesus took advantage of the opening to help her to see that the resurrection would not be so much a fact as a relationship, specifically a relationship with him: “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even though he die, will live and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” For someone with this faith in Jesus, in other words, death would merely be a change of address; life would be changed not ended. Then Jesus asked her directly: “Do you believe this?,” and Martha responded with words that show the meaning of real faith: “Yes, Lord, I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” Those were words that echo St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, in which moved by God the Father he pronounced Christ the Messiah and Son of God. Because Martha believed in Christ, she believed in what he said, even if it far exceeded her human experience. She believed in everything Jesus said he could do, including raising people from the dead.  Jesus says to us, today, like he said to Martha, “Do you believe this?”
• The fourth and final virtue we can examine is Martha’s desire to share the grace of Jesus’ presence and power with others. Once this dialogue was over, she ran to her sister, Mary, who was in the house, and said, “The Master is here and he is calling you.” She became, in essence, a vocation director. The Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world, comes precisely in order to call us to himself. And Martha wanted to make sure her sister knew of that call. That expression in Latin has often been written on the frontispiece of altars to highlight not only the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist but how he seeks through the Eucharist to summon us to himself, to reveal to us our vocation to be with him and to be sent out by him to bring others into union with him and us: Magister adest et vocat te. The Lord is present in the tabernacle and calling us. The Lord is present in Sacred Scripture and calling us. The Lord is present in the poor and calling us. The Lord is present in pregnant women and their growing babies calling us. The Lord is present in his Church and calling us. The Lord is present in the confessional and calling us. And in all of these ways he wishes for us to go out to others and say the Lord is calling them, too. The proclamation of the Gospel is a witness that that the Lord Jesus is alive and calling us and others, right now, to experience his resurrection and life so that even if they die they’ll live forever?
• The Lord wants us to persevere in responding to his call. This is the issue we see in today’s first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah had chosen to give his life to the Lord who had consecrated him from the womb as a prophet to the nations. He had chosen to put God first in his life and place his entire existence at the Lord’s service. But in today’s reading, he began to vacillate because of the opposition and sufferings that he was encountering in that work. Jeremiah complained that even though “when I found your words, I devoured them” and “they became the joy and happiness of my heart,” even though “I bore your name, O Lord, God of hosts,” even though “I did not sit partying in the circle of merry-makers” but “sat alone” because he shared God’s holy indignation at the sins of those in Judah and Jerusalem, he was experiencing not joy but anguish. He lamented that he was alive: “Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth!” He said he was being treated worse than the usurious money-lenders who were generally considered the most despised of all: “I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me!” He said that he had become a “man of strife and contention to all the land” and that, rather than getting better, it seemed to be getting worse. “Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?,” he asked. God was supposed to be a font of living water, not a broken cistern, as we saw last week, but that living water had become for Jeremiah a “treacherous brook whose waters do not abide.” The living water not only didn’t give him peace but brought danger. Rather than being fed and served by God, he seemed to be finding only tribulation, a tribulation that was leading him to wonder if he had been seduced, deceived, and betrayed by God. God answered him, calling him to conversion, and promising not to take his problems away but to strengthen him to confront those problems. “If you repent so that I restore you,” God said, “you shall stand in my presence.” Jeremiah had been sent to call people to the conversion required to live in God’s kingdom, but he himself now needed to convert. Rather than lifting the people up to God, God communicated, the people and their opposition were dragging him down. “If you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece,” God said, indicating that he had been mixing the message with worldly speech. “Then it shall be they who turn to you and you shall not turn to them.” With regard to the opposition, God promised, “I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail.” He wouldn’t be frail glass to their attacks but a thick, impenetrable wall of the firmest brass. And the reason why he would be strong would be because the Lord would be with him. “For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you. I will free you from the hand of the wicked and rescue you from the grasp of the violent.” God was not promising to remove the opposition — the very verbs “deliver,” “rescue” and “liberate” point to the fact that he would have hardship — but that the Lord would be saving him by his presence in the very suffering of opposition. As we’ll continue to see over the next week, Jeremiah will continue to battle these temptations against perseverance, in which he will be faced with the choice of choosing God with the attendant sufferings that that will mean, or abandoning God for a supposedly easier life. He would be faced repeatedly with the Jesus given to Martha during the hardship after her brother died, “Do you believe this?” Jeremiah would eventually reaffirm the choice of God and each temptation would be an occasion for him to grow in resolve. Similarly for us, the Lord sometimes permits great trials precisely so that we may lean on him more in faith rather than less. Even in suffering and death, however, the Lord is present to “deliver,” “rescue” and “liberate” us by his saving presence.
• The Lord has many times already delivered, rescued and liberated us. And as we seek to welcome Jesus within us today with the same loving hospitality with which St. Martha welcomed him in Bethany, we know that he wants to welcome us and feed us. As we want to serve him and serve others with the same receptive vigor with which she served him in Bethany, he comes to serve us like he washed the feet of the apostles that first Eucharist. He asks us whether we believe, and we reaffirm our faith in him and everything he says. And we commit ourselves perseveringly to go and announce the good news that the Son of God has come into the world and is calling us and everyone we know to a life of loving communion with Him that will continue even after death.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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