God And Culture

God and Culture

Luke 10:38-42

Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz

The Mary and Martha story can be found in Luke chapter 10 verses 38 to 42. The usual

interpretation is that Jesus is telling Martha that it’s more important to listen to him

than it is to do the regular household work. And that’s a fine interpretation. I want to

add in more to the interpretation of the story because there’s so much more to it. I

could spend quite a bit of time going through different aspects of it. But I will do that

because we only have so many minutes together.

In my research on the Bible, I look heavily at the language and also the culture. When

you understand the culture of Jesus day, the stories met start to make a lot more sense,

and you get a lot more out of them. Remember that the authors of the Bible did not

have to write their culture into each of the narratives because they knew their culture.

For example, if you wrote in your diary on Sunday that you went to church, you didn’t

have to write all the details. Details like: I drove my car to church which had gasoline

in it and yes, I did have a license to drive. We know there is a lot more than just having

a car and driving to church.

So let me tell you a little bit about the culture of what’s going on here. When a holy man

shows up at your house, the cultural aspect of hospitality takes over. The first thing you

did, of course, was you invited him in with some of his entourage because you could

probably only fit so many people into your house. The ladies of the house would then

do a couple of things. First, they would bring out a basin of water, and they would wash

the feet, especially of the holy man. Remember, there were no paved roads that Jewish

people could use. Their roads were plain dirt and dusty roads.

The second thing the ladies would do would be to prepare a meal. In the morning, when

the lady of the house awoke, she would make bread for the day. She knew how much

bread she needed to make because it was for her entire family. Then she would make

an extra loaf, which was much smaller in case visitors showed up that day. Therefore,

she would be ready to show hospitality to whomever showed up at her door or whoever

her husband may have brought home.

Therefore, Mary and Martha were obligated by the culture of hospitality to go into their

kitchen area and prepare a meal for Jesus. However, Mary decided to violate the culture

and sat at Jesus’ feet. This also tells us that she probably washed his feet also. And of

course, Martha got very upset because she had to do all the work and the serving all by

herself.

When Jesus says to Martha that Mary made a good choice, he’s informing us that there

is a difference between God’s law and the culture law. So, which is more important to

follow God’s law or obey the laws of the culture. Hospitality was considered a tradition,

but it was also an under-the-table law that you did. Mary was obviously breaking that

law.

So, who makes up the laws and the culture of our society? I wondered where these

different ideas came from. For example, if you look back to the 1950s coming all the

way up to today, you will see that clothing styles have changed. Many of you may

remember the time that men got dressed in fancy suits on Sunday to go to church and

women broke out their prettiest dresses, they even wore hats.

Have you ever watched the show Dinosaurs that was created by Jim Henson and his

Muppets? Well, Jim Henson talked about society’s culture of the day through dinosaur

families. One day, the baby said the word “shmu.” The whole family gasped when the

baby said this because this was considered a bad word. The show goes on to tell us

we’re the dinosaurs got the idea that this word was a curse word. They end up in front

of the council of elders, and by the time the episode is done, the entire language was

considered curse words. Jim Henson’s satirical attempt to tell us that there are laws in

ways that we do things that are developed by humans, and we should question why we

do them. That’s precisely what Jesus was saying to Martha. Perhaps we need to examine

these traditions, and the human-made laws, to determine are they the right things to be

doing?

St. Paul talks about this in Romans five, even though he is very verbose, and it is pretty