Tuesday, April 3, 2012

MARTHA

When others began to ask why Jesus had not saved Lazarus, His dear friend, when He had saved so many others, I wanted to explain to them. I wanted to say that sometimes that is not what God does. That Jesus was a teacher. That it was enough that He cried with us. That God Almighty cried with us for our brother.

People always thought that there were two paths. The stories were told so many times we became almost like one of His parables. There was the Martha Path and the Mary Path. There was the worker bee and the woman who sat at His feet. The things of this world and the choice to work toward a better one. Or to sit and pray and dwell on the world to come.

I thought that way once. It might even be a useful little parable. I do not mind being a part in it, not even the part of the misguided sister of the morality tale. But I understood, when Jesus rolled the stone away and I leapt forward to tell Him there would be a stench – it wasn’t that I was too focused on this world to see the Next clearly. That was part of the test. Part of the miracle. Part of the wonder. How could we know that the rules had changed, that the world had remade itself, that God had intervened in our lives, if we never look at the world around us to know its rules?

God is in the stone that keeps back the terrible smell of the dead and rotting. God is in the mummified figure of Lazarus emerging. God is in the horror of the wrappings that enclosed my brother’s dead body as much as in the glory of Lazarus stumbling toward me. Alive again.

The miracle is in the world. The Martha Path is one of even greater wonder. I sometimes wondered if Mary was even surprised. If it even seemed a thing of great consequence that we would have a little more time on earth together. To me it was a moment of wonder and awe. To Mary it was, in its way, a matter of course.

Surely not, of course, but the Martha Path and the Mary Path is such a charming little narrative, even I get sucked into it. But I can’t help thinking of my path as the one full of more awe and more beauty and more consolation. Mary sat quietly at His feet, went to greet Him, and welcomed her brother back as if He had never been gone. I fell at His feet, spoke my true heart to Him all in a moment declared and discovered my faith, and saw my Lord undo all of the cruelties and efforts of the world that I had undertaken in the past four days. Like they were nothing. Like my griefs were nothing. But only after He worked and grieved alongside me.

I knew both, as Jesus did.