Martha was more than a Busybody

The doctor pauses before speaking. A family member sits us down. A phone rings at an hour when phones should not ring.

When something like that happens, most of us brace ourselves. We know what's coming. And there's a good chance it means someone died.

I've been there. I'm betting many of you have been as well.

Martha is the one who comes to deliver that news to Jesus in John 11.

Her brother has been dead four days. The tomb is sealed. The mourners are wailing. And Jesus, the friend who could have prevented all of this, has finally arrived, too late. So it seems.

We think we know Martha. We have met her already, in Luke’s Gospel, bustling about the kitchen while her sister sat at the Lord’s feet. We remember the gentle rebuke: ”Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42).

And so Martha has become, in the Christian imagination, a kind of cautionary tale. The anxious one. The one who missed the point.

But John shows us that Martha was much more than a busybody.

The Sister Who Ran

Notice how the scene begins. ”When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home” (John 11:20). The reversal is striking. In Luke, Mary is the one who draws near, and Martha is scattered. In John, it is Martha who moves toward Jesus first. Mary remains seated in her grief.

This is not a contradiction between the Gospels. It recognizes, though, that people are are far more complex, and beautiful in their faith, that we often judge them to be at first.

The Martha who was once distracted by many things has learned, it seems, to know the one thing needful. Grief has done its work in her. Or perhaps love has. Or maybe, she always had that faith. Just because she missed the point in Luke's Gospel, when she rebuked her sister once, doesn't mean she didn't believe. She was, after all, busy trying to honor their guest, Jesus Himself. Even if she was a little off in her understanding about the best way to honor him.

Her first words to Jesus are raw: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21).

There is reproach here, and there is faith. Both held together in one sentence.

She does not pretend she is not hurt. She does not soften her sorrow. She says what she feels, and you can almost hear the pain in her words: You could have stopped this. You did not.

And then, without pause, she says something extraordinary: ”But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him” (John 11:22).

Even now.

Two of the most important words a believer might ever speak, even in what appears to be a hopeless situation.

After the diagnosis, even now.

After the funeral, even now.

After the marriage ended, after the child walked away, after the prayer went unanswered, even now.

Martha does not know what she is asking for. She almost certainly does not expect a resurrection in the next hour. But she refuses to let death have the last word about who Jesus is.

 

The Dialogue That Reveals Her Faith

What follows is one of the most theologically dense conversations in the Fourth Gospel, and Jesus conducts it with a woman. This is worth pausing over. In a world where women were not typically the recipients of formal theological instruction, Jesus draws Martha into precisely such a dialogue.

He does the same with the Samaritan woman in chapter 4. John is doing something deliberate here.

Jesus says, "Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23). Martha replies with an understanding of the common belief among Jews at the time, showing she is not wholly ignorant to theological truths: "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day" (John 11:24).

She is a good Pharisaic Jew. She believes in the general resurrection at the end of time. It is orthodoxy. It is correct. And it is not, at this moment, what Jesus wants her to see.

Jesus' response is one of the many great “I AM” sayings in John's Gospel: "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"(John 11:25-26).

Note what Jesus does. He collapses the future into the present. Resurrection is not merely a doctrine about the last day. Resurrection is a Person, standing in front of her, asking her a question.

The Greek here is worth noting. Jesus uses egō eimi, the divine name of Exodus 3:14, the name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. I AM the resurrection. He is not claiming to bring resurrection at some undetermined point in the future or to teach some deep, theological, truth about it. He is claiming to be it.

And then he asks her the most important thing at all: Do you believe this?

The Confession

Martha’s responds with one of the New Testament's fullest christological confessions of faith. She says it, moreover, as she's grieving. There was some frustration, a subtle rebuke, earlier when Jesus first arrived and she ran out to meet him. She'd wished he'd come sooner. This is natural. It's simply the question many of us ask in times of tragedy: why?

But that is not a crisis of faith. She maintains her faith throughout the text. And now her faith comes to a crescendo: "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world" (John 11:27).

Notice, she calls Jesus three things: Messiah, Son of God, The one coming into the world. Each of these titles is packed full of meaning.

Messiah, in Greek Christos, the Anointed One, the promised King of David’s line who would restore Israel.

Son of God, a title that was applied to the Davidic king in Psalm 2. However, in John's Gospel up until this point the term has developed into something more than what was understood from the Psalms. Genuine, divine sonship.

The one coming into the world, speaks to the prophetic expectation that many pious Jews held at the time. It's the language John the Baptist used concerning Jesus, too. It's language of a people oppressed, but a people who still had hope.

You might notice some parallels here with another, probably more famous, confession of faith from Matthew's Gospel. There, at Caesarea Philippi, Peter declared: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16).

Martha’s confession is at least as full. It is fuller in some respects. And John places it here deliberately, on the lips of a grieving woman. 

And these words are linked to what John ultimately tells us was the purpose of the entire Gospel that he wrote: "But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31).

That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

Martha’s confession is the confession of the entire Gospel. It's the very heart of the message John wrote, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that all who read it or heard it read would come to believe themselves.

Martha becomes, then, a model of Christian faith. Not the busybody who had chosen the "lesser" good, as many of us remember her.

 

What Grief Teaches About Faith

Something has happened to Martha. As I said before, her faith was still there in Luke. She wouldn't have been so concerned to show the Lord hospitality if she didn't honor him at all. But in this moment, at the very least, her faith swells into something more profound. Something deeper.

And it might very well be that it was grief that had awakened this deeper faith in Marth.

That's what grief does, if we let it.

It's not automatic by any means. Some people turn to resentment in grief. There is a cost to it. But grief has a way of clearing away everything else that we only thought mattered before.

I tend to think that's what happened to Marth. All the many things that once distracted Martha have been consumed by a sorrow that left her unable to stay in the kitchen. And in that grief, in that loss, the one thing needful remains.

Her sister sat at the feet of Jesus and learned. Martha, it seems, learned another way. She learned by loss.

Saint Augustine, meditating on Martha in another context, wrote that she was busy about the service of the Lord, and that such service is holy, but that Mary had chosen what would not pass away. Both sisters, he suggests, represent aspects of the Christian life, the active and the contemplative.

In John 11, though, we see something more, the sequel if you will to what had happened in Luke: the active sister has entered a dark night. She's the one, now, who has become the contemplative.

The one who was busy about many things is now the sister who runs out to meet Jesus, while the other sister praised before remains at home. And in her running, seeking Jesus alone, which is the truest focus of all contemplation, she confesses the mystery that even the best-educated men of her time could not quite see. 

This is how the life of faith works. We are not defined by single moments. Our faith becomes what it is over time, through testing, through trial, through a series of God-ordained events that if we'd never endured them would never have led to the beautiful destination He was always drawing us toward.

The person we were at thirty is not the same person at fifty.

The distractions that were as scattered as twigs on a forest floor us in one season may be gathered, by suffering and by grace, into a bonfire of faith, consumed by a single flame.

 

Living the Confession

What can we apply from this text to ourselves?

First, we can learn that we don't need to couch our prayers in piety. If we're hurting, we can say it. If we're confused, if we are struggling to hold back a resentment, even at God, we can be honest about that. God already knows what's in your heart. You often can't help what you feel. So say it. In the speaking of it, Jesus will hear your words, and lead you beyond them. Martha did not hide her reproach. If you had been here.

We are honest with those we truly love. We hide behind a "dress" of seemingly "formal" behavior behind those we fear, or merely respect, but do not fully love or trust. I am not saying we should behave irreverently. Jesus is God after all. We should worship God with reverence and awe. But we must also know that God's majesty is not in tension with His heart. He might be King, and should be honored as such, but He's also our Father. So many prayers, quite good and useful, each more beautiful than the next, we recite in the way of some kind of stage act. The way a peasant might approach a King, afraid that if he speaks wrongly it'll be off with his head. Martha shows us another way.

Second, speak your faith and confidence in who He is even when you do not yet know what He will do next. Say it aloud. It has been customary to recite the Creed in every gathering throughout most of Christian history. You could simply repeat Martha's confession. Many early Christians said, simply, "Jesus is Lord." Three words with incredible power that contain dissertations of depth. Say it even when you're suffering, in pain, or in the wake of loss. Say it when you're afraid. It will condition your heart to trust that He has the situation in His hands.

Third, hear Jesus' question to Marth as if He spoke it to you. Do you believe this? This isn't abstract doctrine. It's a personal question. It speaks to the specific circumstances of our lives. Jesus does not ask Martha whether she believes in the resurrection in the abstract. He asks whether she believes that He, standing before her, is himself the resurrection and the life.

You might try this as a practice. When you next find yourself in the anxiety that once was Martha’s, or in the grief that later became hers, stop and hear the question: Do you believe this? Do you believe that the Person who asks is himself the answer? And then, if you can, say Martha’s yes.

She isn't the first or the only person to speak her faith with a simple "yes." Mary said it, too, when an Angel spoke to her words that in their greeting troubled her. She said "yes," anyway. Martha says "yes" here. Not because she knows how everything will happen afterwards, but because when she says "yes," she knows the heart of the One whom she trusts. We say "yes" to God not because we feel it, necessarily. Not even because everything makes sense. But because He is standing there, He loves us, and only He can raise what has died in you.

Fourth, we can remember that great confessions of the faith are not reserved for the theologians. They aren't even reserved for the Chief Apostle, Peter. Such confessions find their voice on the lips of ordinary people, facing ordinary sorrows. Martha was not a rabbi. She was not the "rock" upon whom the Church would be built. She was a woman with a dead brother. And she uttered the very same truth that upholds the Church upon the foundation who is Christ, Himself.

The tomb was not yet opened when Martha made her confession. Lazarus was still bound in his grave clothes. She could not see what was about to happen. She could only see Jesus.

But that was enough.

It is still enough.

 

God Bless,

Judah