Colossians 1.15-28, Luke 10.38-42
The Fifth Sunday of Trinity, 21 July 2019
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
Oh, Martha, distracted, worried, angry Martha. Martha, taking out her frustrations on her sister, trying to get Jesus to gang up with her against her sibling. Oh, Martha, sadly, I know her well. I have played the role of Martha many times. I hope today we will find the gospel being kind to her, and helpfully illuminating what makes Martha mad. It may help make me less mad in future.
Jesus says, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.’ He sees how Martha is troubled by the too-many ‘tasks’ that she has taken on. We know how that feels - there’s a positive side to good hard work, but then there’s the underside of overwork: the ill health, the mental breakdown, the collapse of relationships. Our hard work, our overwork, may sometimes be a displacement activity, a way of ignoring things more important, more difficult, far deeper.
Notice how Martha is ignoring the truth that she is in rivalry with her sister. This is the second cause of Martha’s worry and distractedness, that she is entirely focused on what Mary is or isn't doing. Have you ever been there yourself - working up a sweat in the garden or the kitchen or at your desk whilst all the time not enjoying the work you’re doing, but obsessing about the other person in the situation, who you’re increasingly resenting because they’re not helping you, they’re not being there for you? Like Martha, you are in rivalry with an other, wound up in anger, frustration, and loss.
Martha’s rivalry with Mary makes her try to get Jesus to take her side and intervene: ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ Martha’s intention (probably unconscious) is for she and Jesus to unify themselves against Mary.
For this is a classic example of what psychologists call a ‘drama triangle’. [3] Not a love triangle - though love triangles are drama triangles sometimes - a drama triangle is a model of human behaviour which involves three psychological roles which sound very familiar, roles which people often take in a situation: the victim; the villain - the one who persecutes the victim; and the rescuer, who intervenes, maybe out of a desire to help the situation or the underdog.
The victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer - roles we each play out very often, even every day - think about it, you’ll recognise it. But unlike the pantomime formula of the hero, the villain, and the damsel in distress, we’re not type-cast in one role particularly, but we change roles all the time, for the drama in a ‘drama triangle’ comes when people’s roles switch.
Luke’s gospel story lines up Martha as the persecutor of her innocent sister, Mary the victim, and Jesus as the rescuer. But in this particular ‘drama triangle’ the drama happens when Jesus switches his role at the end. As Jesus chides Martha for her distractedness now Jesus becomes the persecutor and Martha the victim. What might happen next - maybe Mary would step in to defend her sister, praising her hard work in the kitchen and offering to help? If so, another triangle would be formed - Mary, formerly the victim, would now become the rescuer.
What Martha wants to happen next is for Jesus to take sides with her against Mary - to strengthen her cause against Mary her victim. This comes into many of my sermons - the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ which is at the heart of all human society. It’s what makes us send innocents to the cross, or to the tabloids, or isolated to the edge of the playground, it's how people get publicly shamed on Facebook and Twitter: it happens when we assert ourselves and our social group over and against others. It seems to be part of our survival mechanism, and we’re very good at justifying such behaviour. [4]
Consider how many times Martha’s story has been told to boost the idea of Jesus as being a champion of silence and contemplation in religion, how many sermons on this subject have pitted the quietists among us against the activists and made the activists feel inferior, for surely this story shows that Jesus is on the side of those who prefer to study and contemplate... [5]
Well, if we left our investigation there, that might be the case. If we settled on the story as a drama triangle in which Jesus, the rescuer, and Mary, the victim, gain at the expense of Martha, the persecutor, then it would be a neat analysis. But it would not be the gospel, it would not be good news to any of them - stuck in a cycle of behaviour from which they can’t escape.
You see, Jesus is the One who can step outside the triangle. He is the One who can break the cycles of destructive self-interest which otherwise imprison us. He can help us change our hearts, and alter the way we act towards others.
When Jesus says, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things’, he’s breaking the drama triangle. He’s stepping out of the role of rescuer to Mary - but without damaging Mary in any way. Whilst affirming Mary for the good way she has chosen Jesus is expressing empathy for Martha. He’s getting alongside her, telling her he sees the trouble in her heart, he’s speaking words to rescue her from the distractions which harm her and supportively offering her a better way.
‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.’ The one thing which will rescue her from her rivalry with her sister, and all the distractedness that rivalry causes, is to focus instead on learning from Jesus. For:
He is the one person above all who can begin to untangle us from our webs of rivalry. He is the one who came to do the desire of his Father without rivalry. When we learn to imitate him, we become more focused on what is most needful to do: to notice the needs of others and to respond to them with compassion. As we prayerfully practice being rooted in Jesus then we’ll disentangle ourselves from our rivalries - without triangling Jesus into them. A healthy relationship with Jesus will improve the health of our relationships with others. [6]
In his letter to the Colossians Paul powerfully describes the role Jesus plays in human society. ‘In him all things hold together’, he writes.
‘In him all things hold together’ - for in Jesus, our relationships lose their rivalry, and situations can always become win-win.
‘In him all things hold together’ - and thus, outside him, things fall apart. In our prayers let us ask Jesus to help us to identify the source of our distractions, our worries, our anger; let us permit him to open our eyes to the damage this is doing to others and to ourselves; and let us allow him to show us a way to step outside of our drama triangles, to find a different way of relating, in which we and those with whom we live, are each affirmed and held together in empathy and care.
Notes
[1] Shortened from Illuminating what makes Martha mad, preached in Somerset in July 2016 and Cheshire, July 2013.
[2] This sermon’s analysis draws heavily on Paul Nuechterlein’s Girardian Lectionary, Proper 11C. Notes inspired my approach to this subject.
[3] Wikipedia: Karpman Drama Triangle
[4] See eg Wikipedia: Victim mentality.
[5] For a deep discussion of this opposition playing out through history, see Diarmaid MacCulloch: Silence: A Christian History
[6] Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Proper 11C. Paraphrased.
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