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Birth Order Issues: Mary and Martha's, Jesus' and Yours
July 29 , 2007
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Genesis 18:1-10a Psalm 15 Colossians 1:15-28 Luke 10:38-42
In the name of God: our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend. Amen.
For the next several Sundays all the gospel stories have something to do with families; well, sort of. Today it’s Martha and Mary having a family conflict at their home in Bethany (Lk.10.38f. cf. Jn. 11.1f.). Next Sunday it’s Jesus teaching the disciples to pray the ‘Our Father.’ So they learn to call God—the God of all creation!— their personal ‘Abba’ or ‘Daddy;’ just like Jesus does. And thus they begin the spiritual journey that the Church continues today: incredibly we are becoming family members—familiars—with the Blessed Trinity; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is incredible, isn’t it? Being family with the Godhead! But what does it mean?
Today’s Old Testament reading gives a foretaste of what it would mean; and I mean literally a fore-taste, if you will pardon the play on words. Because in the story told about Abraham and Sarah today we see them serving a meal to God. More precisely, they serve food to three men who are mysteriously the same as the one “LORD [who] appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.” (Gen. 18.1-2) Recall here the classic icon by the Russian artist Rublev, who depicts the Holy Trinity as the three persons who visited Abraham and Sarah that day. And imagine yourself seated at table with Them; yes, at that very table where the Three of them are seated in the icon, seated where a serving of food like the Holy Eucharist has been placed before Them and before us.
But in today’s domestic scene of family hospitality at Martha’s and Mary’s house there is conflict and complaining rather the harmony of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity. (You recall the theology of the trinitarian persons: the harmony of the three persons where each defers to the other.) And notice something in particular about Martha’s complaint. Notice that it conveys the typical attitude of the older child in a family system. You know what I mean; the way we are all typecast according to our order of birth in our family. The eldest child is the hyper-responsible one, right? "Martha, Martha,” Jesus observes to her, “you are worried and distracted by many things” (Lk. 10.41). Now that’s a hyper-responsibility pattern, isn’t it?
In addition the eldest child got more attention growing-up, being the first or only child at least for awhile. You know how it goes even in our own time: take for example the family photo album. Ever notice that there are more pictures of the eldest child among the photographs? It’s because the parents gave them more attention than they gave the middle and youngest children, right? (http://pbskids.org/itsmylife/family/birthorder/article3.html) Now we can hear some of that attention-confidence in Martha’s voice, today. She’s so self-assured that Jesus will respond the way she expects when she exclaims, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." Now there’s somebody who’s used to getting attended-to!
And that leads to this next character trait. The eldest is the one who learned how to be the boss, right? Because the parents relied on them to take care of the younger ones. And taking care of people includes telling them what to do, doesn’t it? Just like Martha is used to telling Mary what to do in today’s gospel. So the eldest feel like we were born to be the bosses, right? Come on, the rest of us out there, admit it! You know who we are, you eldest children. Yeah: I’m one of us too! (By the way, on a note of conceit, it’s an interesting fact that most Presidents of the United States were firstborn children, or firstborn sons in their families. Now that is interesting, isn’t it? [smile])
But lest we firstborns get too inflated, sister Martha reminds us today that being eldest has its ‘down side’ too. Listen here to some familiar complaints of firstborns:
Sounds a lot like our Martha in today’s gospel, doesn’t it?
As usual, of course, the parents get blamed for a lot of these typecasting patterns. Again, there probably are just fewerpictures of you middle children and younger children in the family photo album, aren’t there? You’re not just making it up; it’s an objective fact in most families. And to corroborate your side of the story, I have some humorous insights that substantiate some of the unfair practices that contribute to birth order issues in families today. Consider for example the following situations familiar to many parents, and familiar as well to us adult-children-of-parents here today.
For weekday activities, you take your—
1st baby to Baby Gymnastics, Baby Swing, Baby Zoo, Baby Movies and Baby Story Hour; then later you take your
2nd baby only to Baby Gymnastics; last of all you take your
3rd baby to the supermarket and the dry cleaners.
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For parents’ night-out, with your—
1st baby the first time you leave them at home with a sitter you call to check-in five times; then later with your
2nd baby, just before you walk out the door you remember to leave a number where you can be reached; and lastly with your
3rd baby you leave instructions for the sitter to call only if she sees blood flowing somewhere.
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And how about when the parents are just at home? With your—
1st baby you spend a good bit of every day just gazing at the baby; while with your
2nd baby you spend a bit of everyday watching to be sure your older child isn't squeezing, poking, or hitting the baby; and finally with your
3rd baby you spend a little bit of every day hiding from the children.
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And for a final example consider what happens when baby accidentally swallows a coin. When your
1st child swallows a coin, you rush the child to the hospital and demand x-rays; then later, when your
2nd child swallows a coin, you carefully watch for the coin to pass through; and finally when your
3rd child swallows a coin you deduct it from the child’s allowance!
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Funny stuff, isn’t it? Yes, and in a humorous wa.y it confirms the experience of some of you middle and younger children, if indeed you got less of what your parents had to offer when you were growing up. But it also provides some lighthearted insight into another side of the story from the perspective of the parents themselves. In most cases they were good people suffering from something that might be called parenting fatigue. Now, given the inevitability of parenting fatigue and the resulting birth order issues in most families, how are we adult children of such parents going to deal with those issues in the family system?
Of course, sooner or later most of us grow beyond raw sibling rivalry between ourselves and our brothers or sisters. In that connection, I’d like to consider the possibility that today’s gospel offers us a biblical model based on how Mary (in concert with Jesus) resolved her birth order issues with her older sister, Martha.
Now you might not be surprised to hear that this biblical model has a ‘big picture’ framework of truly cosmic proportions. That’s what we would expect from a biblical model, right? And sure enough, today’s second reading from the epistle to the Colossians gives us that big perspective of cosmic proportions. But it does so, remarkably, in a way that intersects the smaller human story of Martha and Mary in their quiet home in Bethany. For in today’s reading from Colossians we are told about Jesus’ birth order in the cosmic scheme of things.
Yes, Jesus himself is given the highest kind of birth order and we, as his followers, are siblings of Jesus in accordance with that preeminent birth order. For Colossians declares that, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;
for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers--all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
And not only that, but:
He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him . . . (Col. 1:15-28)
Now all that is what I like to imagine Mary was contemplating that day at their home in Bethany, when she refused to help her sister Martha with the housework and preferred to sit at the feet of Jesus. I imagine that such teaching from Colossians provides the kind of insight that Mary was gaining from sitting and listening at the feet of Jesus. Indeed I believe that it was possible to be with Jesus in that setting and somehow experience that “in him,” as Colossians says, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1.19). Thus it might have been for Mary the way it was when his cousin John the Baptist first saw Jesus (months before also in the village of Bethany) and exclaimed, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God; [behold] the one who takes away the sins of the world!’ (John 1.27-29).
Therefore, beyond the content of what Mary heard him teaching as she sat at Jesus’ feet that day, I discern that she also realized something about the context of having Jesus located there in the center of her own family system. Yes, there is the Jesus who exists in a cosmic scale of reality as described in the first chapter of Colossians, where he is the firstborn of all creation and the firstborn of the resurrected dead.
But there is also the family scale of reality that Mary experienced with Jesus. That is the ordinary, everyday scale that we all experience in our households from the cradle to the grave. Yet what a convergence when the grace of God enables the two scales to intersect! What a convergence, when your experience of the truth in one scale of reality intersects your experience of truth in the other scale of reality! (Cf. C.S. Lewis on “transposition” in The Weight of Glory.)
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace . . . so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him . . . (Col. 1:15-28)
Perhaps it was the promise of that kind of reconciliation and blamelessness that emboldened Mary that day to continue to sit at the feet of Jesus and contemplate him without yielding to the urgency or the authority of her sister. Perhaps she experienced something in Jesus, as the firstborn “of all creation,” that could displace, resolve and re-order the firstborn authority and power of sister Martha. Thus Mary was able, as Paul says elsewhere in his letter to the Romans,
to be conformed to the image of [God’s] Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family . . . (Rom. 8.29-34)*
Yes; by making Jesus our eldest brother in that large family we become family members ourselves in the household of God. And thus was the hope of finding her place in that kind of household that led Mary to chose “the better part” that day in the family home in Bethany.
May we too make the same choice this day and every Sabbath in the days ahead. Because God has pledged, Paul says in concluding today’s reading from Colossians—God has pledged
to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory . . . (Col. 1.27-28).
Brothers and sisters in Christ, may we all sit in his teaching until we all attain to that maturity and that “glory.” And what does “glory” mean and look like in this context? I think I can best describe it the words of my favorite poet, Rilke, as ‘the one thing you are waiting for; the one thing that would infinitely increase your life; the powerful, the uncommon’ (Rainer Maria Rilke, “Remembering”); that is, the fulfillment of all your heart’s desire.
Yes; and maybe that glory would eclipse the glory of all the ‘kingdoms of this world’—the social systems, the political systems, the economic systems, as well as the family systems—yes, all those systems that would claim our allegiance and ‘lord’ over us and ‘boss’ us and dictate to us their reality rather than the fuller reality that obtains over ‘both heaven and earth.’
May we instead, like Mary that day in Bethany, displace one reality with another, and displace the glory of this world with the glory of that other, and so choose “the better part” as she did. And may we all sit ‘at the feet of’ this teaching until we all attain to that maturity and that hope—“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen
Comments? Contact The Rev. Thee Smith at: TSmith@stphilipscathedral.org