Jesus’ humanity is apparent in his friendships

People of the Book: Martha and Mary

The human person, even the most secluded and monastic among us, is social in nature. The most terrifying visions of the past (as in Auschwitz and Buchenwald) and the future (as in Huxley’s Brave New World) attempt to divest humanity of this shared fraternal and communal dimension. Asserting that Jesus was “like us in all things but sin,” Christians believe him to have experienced all the peaks and valleys of the human condition; this unquestionably includes the temporal blessing we call friendship.

Two of Jesus’ most cherished friends were Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. This close-knit family residing in Bethany plays an important role in a number of New Testament passages, narratives which all underscore the authentic humanity of the Lord.

Luke tells the account of Martha and Mary welcoming Jesus during his travels toward Jerusalem. In the business of preparing a meal of hospitality for him, Martha bustles around the house and hearth in the attempts to cook and “straighten up everything” as it were, so that each detail is taken into account. We can picture the scene much in the vein of the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in this country, with the stresses and organizational nightmare that that evening can entail.

Mary (of Bethany, and not as is often thought, of Magdala), is content to sit at the feet of the Lord and feast on his Word alone, gazing up at her Rabboni (teacher).

Martha bristles, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” To which Jesus responds, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”

His gentle chiding, especially clear in the doubling of her name, reiterates the axiom that “when people (over)plan, God laughs.” Jesus calls his followers to focus their eyes on him, while the Bridegroom is near, and to celebrate his presence in our lives, where we alone receive the spiritual nourishment we need to deal with life’s many stresses.

The figures in this scene have long been taken to represent the active and contemplative lives respectively, with the clear implication that she who ponders the law of God night and day (Psalm 1:2) demonstrates “the better part.” However, this can be a dangerous over-allegorizing of the tale, for all Christians are called to be, in St. Ignatius Loyola’s words, “contemplatives-in-action” and not to sit idly by awaiting the Second Coming with sheer passivity, but to go out and “set the world ablaze” with love and action.

The Gospel of John also describes Jesus’ friendship with the pair. When they come to him after the death of their brother, Lazarus, the Lord’s reaction is recounted with the shortest, but perhaps precisely in this terseness, most powerful phrase in the entire New Testament, one so full of emotion and intensity that it makes a careful reader pause: “And Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). What does it mean to say that the Second Person of the Divine Trinity suffered the pathos of this life, the heartache of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare describes in Hamlet?

Theologians such as Metz and Moltmann have tried to read such experiences in fruitful tension with the philosophers’ claim that God’s perfection demands that he is eternal, immutable (changeless), and impassible (unable to suffer). It remains a challenge and blessing to meditate upon the claim that this One is truly Emanuel, “God-is-with-us,” with all that such a claim entails. Moltmann will in response name one of his most enduring works “The Crucified God.”

Mary, who will later anoint the Lord’s feet with perfumed nard and dry them with her hair in preparation for Jesus’ own death, remains at home mourning Lazarus, while Martha, ever-industrious, rushes out to meet the Lord. When he tells her, “Your brother will rise again,” she responds with faith: “I know that he will rise again, in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus reassures her that this is not precisely what he means, nor what he intends: “for I am the Resurrection and the Life, whoever believes in me, though he die, will live; and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Martha’s, along with Peter’s (Mk 8:9), responding acclamation is one of the first Christian creedal claims about Jesus’ identity, “I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, come into the world.”

God gives us innumerable blessings in this life: the irreplaceable love of family, the guiding hand of teachers and mentors, the safe harbor of our faith in stormy waters. But perhaps most special of all are those intimate relationships that develop over time to form that “other self”; those bonds, often forged in the fire of difficult circumstances and fortified (perhaps in more than one sense) in late-night discussions, in which we share our triumphs and sorrows, and through which we see a mirror into our own souls, that of genuine friendship (in a non-Facebookian sense). It is to these people we owe so much of our happiness, psychological healthiness and spiritual development.

How comforting to think such was the case even with our Lord. His relationship with Martha and Mary brings to new light the reflections from the book of Sirach: “A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; he who finds one finds a treasure. A faithful friend is beyond price; no sum can balance his worth. A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy, such as he who fears God finds. For he who fears God behaves accordingly, and his friend will be like himself” (Sir 6:14-17).

Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.