Luke 10:38-42: Martha and Mary

Business is an affliction that our age struggles with. Life has accelerated to dizzying speeds and many cannot keep up. Today you will find life skills books and life coaches who teach you about simplifying your life, about finding the calm in the midst of the storm, about finding the art of living in the battle of business. We live in an age where we have to choose between the urgent and the important. We have to attend to our on-line selves and our real-life selves. Having the right priorities in our business is a timeless problem for Christians as well. The urgent pushes out the important; the good crowds out the best; and the bad replaces the good. The portion that we are examining today is about what is most important when the pressure is on. Luke 10:38-42 is about a family that will become very close to Jesus. Lazarus, Mary and Martha are prominent in the gospels and are close friends of Christ. Our focus today is upon the two sisters, Martha and Mary. Luke’s gospel is the only gospel that records this account, but it is a well-known story. We are in that part of the gospel where Jesus is spending more intensive time teaching and preparing His disciples before His departure. V38, ‘Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.’ The village we will learn in John’s gospel is Bethany, just a few kilometres from Jerusalem showing us Jesus circuitous route at this time. This may be the first time that Jesus met Mary and Martha and we soon get to see the differences between these two women. As we go through this section we will look at Mary’s sitting and Martha’s serving.

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