Biblion Bible Commentary
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One Thing Is Needed
Luke 10:38-42
38 As they went on their way, he entered into a certain village, and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. · WEB
One sister works, the other sits and listens, and the complaint about it is answered gently and not conceded.
A certain woman named Martha received him into her house Luke 10:38.
The house is hers, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. She is the householder, and the hospitality is her initiative — she received him, and evidently a traveling group with him.
The placement is deliberate. The parable before this ended with go and do likewise, and the reader arrives at once in a house where somebody is doing a great deal and is not commended for it. The two scenes are meant to be held together; either alone produces a distortion.
She had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus' feet and heard his word Luke 10:39.
At his feet is the disciple's position — where the man freed from Legion was found Luke 8:35, and where Paul says he was brought up under his teacher Acts 22:3. It is a posture of instruction rather than of adoration, and a woman taking it is the quiet scandal of the paragraph. Teaching in that world was for men; Mary has placed herself in the students' row and nobody moves her.
But Martha was distracted with much serving Luke 10:40. The word is pulled away — dragged in several directions at once. And much serving is not a small tea; a household feeding a traveling party has real work to do, and she is doing it alone.
"Lord, don't you care that my sister left me to serve alone? Ask her therefore to help me."
The complaint is entirely understandable and it does three things at once: it accuses her sister, it questions his concern, and it tells him what to do about it. Anyone who has been the one in the kitchen has said some version of it.
"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things" Luke 10:41.
The doubled name is how this book signals tenderness under correction — the same form used to Simon on the last night Luke 22:31. And the diagnosis is not that she is busy. It is that she is anxious, which is the word used of the thorns that choke the seed Luke 8:14 and of the ravens in the next chapter. Serving is not the problem; something has got into the serving.
"But one thing is needed. Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her" Luke 10:42.
What is not said is as important as what is. He does not tell Martha to stop, and he does not say that listening is superior to work — this Gospel has just spent thirteen verses on a Samaritan who did not sit down. What he says is that Mary has chosen something, that it is good, and that he will not take it back from her at her sister's request.
That last clause is the real answer to the complaint. Martha asked him to send Mary to the kitchen, and the refusal protects a woman's place among the learners. It is the same book that will have women at the tomb first, carrying a message the apostles do not believe.
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