Rebuilding 'The House' III: Martha's House

All the above said, there is nothing as powerful as a properly functioning, healthy church community. It was this that turned over the Roman Empire, revolutionised Western Culture, gave the world an inestimable heritage of service and value. What is it that makes such a thing work? Systems theorists tell us that all social organisms need maintain the balance between task and maintenance. Task is the exciting stuff – it is the stuff that ‘we are here for’, it is what pastors love throwing vision at. It is assumed to be the task of the leader, whether in the business corporation, the NGO or the church. Maintenance is what holders of such conceptions of leadership like to leave to others – it is the vocation of the ‘pastoral care’ pastor, the ‘administration guy’, the facilities and programs director. The systems theorists, however, would point out that vision is not the only task of leadership. The task of leaders is to act as the cut out switch, the holder of the balance between the demands of maintenance and task. To set task without reference to maintenance is to invite burn out and the phenomenon of the ‘big back door’; to set maintenance without reference to task is to freeze into self-satisfied irrelevance. The reaction of Pentecostal churches in particular to the latter model of church has meant a distorted preference for the former model of leadership – the model which leaves the leader with the task of vision, but no responsibility for what happens in the rest of the organisation. This flows through into what our ruling metaphors for church will be: house or Temple, home or mission. Any one of these models can be made to work – the trick is for it to know what it is, and to do that well, without denying the vitality of the other metaphors.

There is no doubt that in the church, as in the broader society, there is a desperate desire for ‘home’. To grab ahold of what we are missing in trading off maintenance for task, one necessity for another (when in fact we are challenged to hold onto both), we really need to have had an experience of what a real household is. It is a rare thing in our culture, and perhaps that is why it is also too rare in our churches. I have experienced such a thing only a few times in my life. I can remember being invited into a home set up by one of my teachers when at school. It was a lovely place – bright, new, and somehow filled with warmth. As kids we would ride out when invited, and never really wanted to go home. Years later, I met a bunch of Italians, who seemed to accept that that sort of thing was just normal. You never felt unwanted, the table was always full, and even when they spoke volubly you always had a sense of being embraced by the life of service and mutual regard that was around you. They held the task of the family – survival, growth, provision, multiplication – in careful tension with the maintenance of the family through the rituals of table, and the authority of the father (actually wielded in many cases by the mother).

In the 1950s, during the beginnings of non-Anglo mass migration to Australia, poverty and necessity maintained the model. It is a rarer thing now to find that sense of embracing family, even in migrant communities. Even so, only last week I spent the weekend at my friend Lou’s place. We went over ostensibly to make salami, but frankly, we would have gone on any excuse. Unlike many houses in the modern city, Lou’s place is designed for people. It is built around a large dining room with a long table, flowing onto a kitchen in which his wife, Pina, is constantly busy. Lou is up and down, getting you things, showing you his vegetable patch, filling your ears with conversation, your plate with food and your pockets and the boot of your car with gifts and knicknacks. When I think of Pina, I think of Martha in the Bible. She is that open hearted, serving, intelligent woman whose life has been put at the service of others. Her house is always full of noise and motion. Nothing is too much trouble. She is up early, and her life is that of the woman in Proverbs 31: ‘a wife of noble character who can find?’ Pina is not perfect, but even her imperfections are the fault-line we see in Martha – they are the result of an excess of doing good, rather than the result of self-protectiveness or judgementalism. She is the sort of person feminists love to hate – the sort of person who has been judged and laughed at in the 19^thC literature about ‘lady bountiful’. She is the person most missed in a cold and heartless society dominated by the contract and the corporation, the person on whom the church of Jesus Christ is actually built. She is Martha, who made the house and served on the tables at which the disciples talked. No one wants to be her, but everyone feels her absence. When you find her house you will know – because even as you reach the door, you know it is a place you will never want to leave.

There are times when you hear a sermon or illustration and you cannot help but think, ‘What?’ For me, as you can imagine from the background described above, it is the treatment of Martha that gets under my skin. You know the story. It’s in Luke 10 – as Jesus and his disciples are on their way, they come to Bethany, not far from Jerusalem (scholars disagree, given the related story of Lazarus and the relatively unremarkable place in which they lived – John tells us, however, that the town was only 2 miles from Jerusalem). There we are told that ‘a woman named Martha opened her home to [Jesus]’. When she sees that, in all the rushing around to serve and prepare for the guests, Mary has chosen to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to what he says, then she asks Jesus to give Mary the ‘hurry on’. Jesus, typically, takes the other path: ‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’ Yes, we intone from the pulpit, Mary was spiritual and chose the better path. Martha was a busybody, possibly jealous of her sister, and wanted to wield power from the kitchen. She is ‘that woman’ that most pastors fear – Mrs Jones, the bossy head of the church fête committee who is really compensating for her lack of spirituality by seeking to exert power over people. She is the symbol whereby we set the ‘spirituals’ (by which we mean the preaching ministry) over against the ‘doers’ (by which we mean everybody else).

Such an interpretation, however, is unsustainable by the text. It is another example of leadership preferring task to maintenance. We need to read what the passage says, and read it both in the context of a hospitality culture, and of Jesus’ normal teaching method. First, we note that it was Martha (not her brother, Lazarus, or her sister Mary) who opened ‘her home to him’. It was her home – she was oldest, perhaps, and her act was one of graciousness, not control. It was an act which needs to be read within the rules of a hospitality culture. We do not understand it, as a whole, because we are a culture of self-reliance, not knit into the sort of moral economy far more visible today in the two-thirds world than in our own. My friend Mark Pomery has it right in his book, What the Church Family can learn from the Italian Family, in suggesting that we need to relearn the rules of hospitality, which have departed from many of our churches. In Martha’s day, an invitation to table, an invitation into the home, placed responsibility on everyone in the house – both on the hosts, to act graciously and provide everything that was needed, and on the guests, to accept graciously and so bring honour on the house. (There is a series of arguments longer than I have time to go into here which relate to the way in which hospitality also tests and domesticates the guest, particularly in the narratives in Luke 11. This is not Martha’s concern, but it certainly is that of the Pharisees in the next chapter – see Julian Pitt-Rivers, 1968). [1] Martha was concerned largely that Mary was not fulfilling her duties, and was therefore insulting the guest by undermining the family’s duty to provide the best available. It was also a concern that Mary was stepping over the boundary between ‘family’ and ‘guest’ – an act which was an attack on the family as an economic unit based on the maintenance of strict authority roles. The balance between task and maintenance takes energy, it takes authority – it is precisely the sort of job that leaders do not like to do, but precisely the reason that they are leaders. Martha here is just being what the family needed her to be – a leader. In a marginal economy, failure to act for the greater good of the family threatened everyone. Martha was not being selfish, and she was not being controlling. She was simply asking that Mary not be selfish, and that she act for the greater good. In other words, Jesus’ words cannot be used to support a view of the world that the ‘spiritual’ is separate, and indeed superior to a culture of service to be ingrained among the laity.

Then what did Jesus mean when he spoke of the ‘better’ which Mary had chosen? The first thing to note is that Jesus does not use the opportunity to denigrate Martha’s graciousness and her work for him. It is still good – he appreciates her sacrifice, her work. But what Mary has chosen is not of the domestic economy, it is of the now coming of the Kingdom. Her act is not disobedience, for it too is necessary, and in the now, it is in fact ‘better’. There would come another time when the church would have to make a similar decision – when it was not good for the apostles to leave the teaching of the word and prayer for serving on tables. They appointed deacons – who served, and liberated the apostles, though in many places, they actually do work almost identical to that of the apostles (e.g Stephen and Philip). The issue is not whether one or the other is good – both are necessary, and good in proportion to their necessity. The issue arises when we place them in opposition to one another, and make people choose between them. In that case, the ‘now’ choice is the better – the Kingdom necessity overrules the domestic economy, but does not annihilate it or make it ‘bad’. Indeed, it is necessary, in order to maintain what the Kingdom moment has created. The evil lies in making people choose between the two. Unfortunately, in constructing a dualism between the spirituals and the domestics, many church leaders do exactly that – make people choose between their task of building the Kingdom, and the need for maintenance of what has already been created. We see churches like this everywhere – a red hot passion for evangelism which is not matched by the ability to keep what is caught. It is precisely Jesus’ desire not to put the two into conflict, to have Martha look up and see both necessities, that prompts him to seize the Socratic moment in which teaching becomes effective. Don’t let the concern of the many things obliterate the one thing necessary for the moment. Both sisters were to find fulfilment of this teaching moment in Jesus’ later visit to Bethany, when he raises their brother from the dead. That passage is very clear: ‘Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.’

Martha is not Mrs Jones. Martha is a strong, practical, loving woman, who is a quick learner and has a giving heart placed in the service of others. We see her again when her brother Lazarus dies. While Mary stays at home (looking after the guests who had come to mourn, perhaps? was that what she had learned?), it is Martha who comes out to meet Jesus. She has implicit faith in him. “Lord’, Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” She has yet to learn who He is – ‘the resurrection and the life’ – but she is just saying it as it is. She is specifically NOT criticising Jesus for not coming earlier – at least not in John’s text – though there are others who do. She is simply saying it as she sees it, as the one who is used to caring for others and making decisions for their good. And so she comes to the right conclusion before many others – ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.’ Interestingly enough, it is on the nearly identical statement by Peter that Protestants suggest that Christ was going to build His Church. Why then do so many who read this passage fail to see that it was as much on Martha as it was on Peter – on maintenance as well as task, on hospitality as well as preaching, on koinonia as well as on euangelion – that Jesus chooses to build his church? Could it be because of an equally encultured fear of intimacy, and a desire to avoid the debt of honour placed on the guest in the act of hospitality? Could it be in part an overrealised eschatology, in which the present home is traded for the one to come? Could it in part be the simple absorption of cultural values about the service and fear of women? Whatever it is, it is time in a society where communities are crumbling that we regained a sense of hospitality, of the mutual edification that comes from serving one another in the domestic as well as in the celestial economy. It may well be that it is Mary who anoints Jesus’ feet, but that anointing occurs within the house that Martha built. It would be a strange irony if the Church, which is constantly referred to in the New Testament in metaphors relating to the oikonomia of the house and the household, lost all homeliness in building its house.

There is a tension here in the metaphors used by church leaders to build ‘the house’. References to the Old Testament often used to back up this sort of understanding suggest that it is not ‘a home’ but rather the Temple which is being referred to. This is quite different to the type of house referred to in the New Testament. The Temple is a ‘state’ institution, something that is about public life at the centre of the polis, the city/ state. The house being referred to in the New Testament is the oikos, or household. As Patricia Thompson notes,

• the household (oikos) is that socially constructed spatial territory (including, but not limited to, the "house" or shelter) that accommodates the human and material resources needed to meet the recurring needs of individuals and human groups, including families. Not all members of the same household are biologically or juridically related. [2]

In sociological terms, it is the opposite of corporate culture, built not for the accumulation of wealth but for the support of life, the necessary consumption of extended families. It is the house of Martha, rather than the Temple of Jerusalem. Both metaphors imply different patterns of authority and responsibility, and to move between them often means that leaders take advantage of the authority elements without also accepting the responsibility which comes with them. Temple churches which seek to be oikos churches (or which succeed at the cost of the surrounding ‘oikos economy’, to link two profoundly linked words!) often strike the limits of their abilities, while oikos churches seeking to shift towards the Temple metaphor do so at the risk of their intimacy and sense of household necessity. Both are needed in the economy of the church, but confusion between them can lead to the undermining of the critical balance between task and maintenance.

Striking the balance is the task of the leader, and one knows a great leader when one falls across a functional organisation/ organism that holds the two together in creative dynamism. I was recently in such a place (again, not perfect, but certainly inspiring!). Formerly known as Southside Christian Church, and now as Edge Church International, it is that conundrum – a mega church with a family feel. It helps that the church is in a smaller capital city, but it probably helps even more that the church structure is heavily interlarded by Italians. The senior pastor, Danny Guglielmucci, puts his stamp on everything, from the preaching to the colours on the wall. What strikes the casual visitor is the emphasis on food and lounge spaces – everything is done to create the sense of oikos. The staff are not welcoming in the usual ‘plastic usher’ form, but follow their leader in embracing people. (I dare say that it will be easy enough to find occasions when this was not the case, but it has certainly been my experience). Of course, it is a particular charism to achieve this. A lot of it flows out of the ‘everyone loves Danny’ phenomenon, which is a result of his insistence that task (building the church) is balanced by maintenance (moving forward together, resolving issues, communal life and action etc), a balance maintained by a principled force which comes from his absolute determination to fulfil what God has told him to do. You can’t be in a room with the man for long without hearing the present actions described as fulfilments of the moments of realisation. Again, not perfect, but an encouragement to think that Martha’s house is not isolated to the small churches who have no other choice than to be what they are. Oikos can be chosen, can be the actual flow of leadership which understands the need to hold task and maintenance in balance.

To end an excursus about metaphors, it is only suitable that we consider one of the most powerful extended metaphors of the literature of our age. J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings is a complex, powerfully written trilogy which rotates around a number of quite simple metaphors. One of the driving forces of the narrative is the tension between the little people (hobbits) and the big world, the Shire vs the Kingdom vs the Empire of Sauron. A repeated theme is that between the homes of the little people, and the great houses and palaces of Kings. The key character, Frodo, sets off on a quest which means leaving home, and passing through danger to what he thinks is the end – taking the Ring to Rivendell. Fleeing the living dead, wounded and scarred, they stumble into the home of the Elves:

• Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, "a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.

The book is full of people longing for home. The seemingly perfect Elves live in the midst of decay, and long for the land beyond the sea. Aragorn longs for the restoration of his line, and his Kingdom. Bilbo simply longs for rest from his burden, a longing that Frodo comes to share, and which results in the end in his leaving the world-as-seen. The longing is part of being, different but unseparable from each race and people. As Augustine proclaims, ‘You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts know no rest until they rest in You.’ The success of Tolkien is capturing this desire for home, for membership in a living oikos, so common in the post-Long War generations of the 20^th century. It is this, and its negotiation of the deeper Augustinian meanings, which give the metaphors in the book such tremendous power, well beyond the Christian mythos within which the books were written. It is a response from the grass roots to which those of us attempting to build communities in the contemporary world need to pay attention. There is nothing as powerful as a properly functioning, healthy church community. The biblical faith has always found its home in such places, in Martha’s house. It is no less relevant today than it was at the beginning – the challenge is to rediscover its power.

---

[1] Pitt-Rivers, Julian. "The Stranger, the Guest and the Hostile Host: Introduction to the Study of the Laws of Hospitality." In Contributions to Mediterranean Sociology. Ed. J. G. Peristiany. Paris: Mouton. Pp. 13-30. 1968.

[2] Patricia J. Thompson, 'Dismantling the master's house: a Hestian/Hermean deconstruction of classic texts', Hypatia, Fall 1994 v9 n4 p38.

Comments

[Deborah Taggart]

wow - once again, good stuff Mark! My favourite moment is: "Why then do so many who read this passage fail to see that it was as much on Martha as it was on Peter – on maintenance as well as task, on hospitality as well as preaching, on koinonia as well as on euangelion – that Jesus chooses to build his church?"

[Chris Baker]

Mark, does this mean that I now have to learn how to cook? I think my life just got complicated... ;-)

[Joshua Ballard]

I must admit, the food offered at the cafe is what made me stay at my previous church. At least until we started to gather at local restaurants after church services.

All the local cafe/restaurant owners loved our groups...or hated them...I'm not sure which.

[bclark]

Lou and Pina.....Yeah!!!!!

Danny Guglielmucci......Yeah!!!!

Friendly Italians....not after the Soccer!!!!

I hope you are going to publish this one Mark. It has loads of relevance to our wider cultural context.

Ben

[Craig Bennett]

Mark,

The Italian comments connect to me. Also your comments on Mary were spot on. How can we build better community structures within the church? When there is so much brokeness within and without.

I think it comes about by helping people to build better communities within their own families, community in which they live,along with the worship community. I think in modern society there is too much emphasis placed on the self, and not on the community and building ones indentity within the community.

[Simon Elliott]

Great article. You referred to the book by your friend, Mark Pomery, 'What The Church Family Can Learn From The Italian Family' - where can I get a copy of that book?

[Mark Hutchinson]

Thanks Simon. Mark's book is a bit of fun which comes out of his being 'married in'. You can get the book either through our mission group, Missione Italia )([email protected]) or off Mark's own page, http://www.markpomery.com. It is quite a chuckle, but does demonstrate how the intercultural perspective provides one with another view!

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