The Heart of the Matter, Luke 10:38-42
Introduction
My first staff position in a church was as the Associate Pastor of The Kirk Community Church in Dunedin, Florida. I normally arrived at church early but on this particular morning my wife and I had arrived just a few minutes before the worship service was to begin. As my wife Christina unbuckled the baby from his car seat, I straightened my tie in the mirror and watched something which is really rather commonplace in a rather uncommon way.
I have seen people go in and out of church many times. That morning though, it was as though veil had been removed from things I had never before seen. It was one of those moments when something that has always been right in front finally comes into focus. Were I a painter, I would love to paint this image the way that it appeared to me that day. I paint a portrait of people walking as if unencumbered yet clearly overloaded with piles and piles of clutter on their shoulders.
It was as though God was allowing me to see the burdens that we carry with us every day and bring with us into the doors of the church every Sunday. It was as if He wanted me to know just how heavy and cumbersome those burdens are. As I watched the people filing into the church building from their sedans, trucks, and minivans, it occurred to me that each person carried his own invisible burden.
Some carried the burden of guilt for past sins. These people hoped that by regularly attending church they would convince God to forgive them. Some of them carried the burden of fear, depression, and anxiety. These people came to into the church hoping to find peace – even if only for an hour on Sunday morning. Whatever their burdens were, one thing became clear to me; most of us, all of us, carry burdens that we were not intended to carry alone.
As I sat watching all of these people, many of whom I knew well, making their way into the church that Sunday, I was struck with the sense that so many of us come to church and generally live out our Christian faith out of what is largely a sense of obligation rather than of love. We fill our lives with repetitious, albeit well intentioned, deeds in order to fulfill our obligations rather than living a life which flows from the love of God working in and through us.
Imagine the folly of a man who chooses day in and day out to hoard and heap burdens upon his shoulders which are not his to carry alone. Imagine the woman who works diligently to earn the forgiveness which she has already received.
Dear Saints of God, if we are ever to learn to live lives which are filled with the grace of God, if we are ever to live the grace-filled life, we must let go of obligation and embrace love. We do not do good works to earn God’s favor; we do good works because we have received His favor. Good works, duty, stoic obligation are not what is pleasing to God. While people tend to be mostly concerned with the outward appearance of things, God is concerned with our hearts. (I Samuel 16:7)
Obligation or Love?
In Luke 10:38-42 is recorded the dichotomy between the service of Martha and the worship of Mary. Martha is busy serving Jesus and His disciples while her sister Mary sat at the feet of Jesus with the rest of His disciples. This in itself gives a great deal of insight into the nature of the Kingdom of God. Unlike other rabbis of His day, Jesus not only allowed women to follow Him, but according to Luke’s record in this passage He even allowed them to sit at His feet and receive teaching.
In the ancient near eastern culture it was only the disciples of a teacher, and most notably a disciple who was training to be a teacher himself, who was allowed to sit at the feet of the master. In even allowing Mary to sit at his feet while He taught was a display of the radical nature of the Kingdom of God! While the world maintains a rather ugly status quo of domination, Christ sets captives free. While the world of Jesus time saw women as second class citizens and even as the property of men, Jesus thought Mary worthy to receive and pass on the message of redemption and grace.
The main thrust of this passage is Martha’s anxiety over her having been left alone by Mary to complete all of the duties of cooking and serving Jesus, His disciples, and perhaps others who followed Jesus into their home. In the ancient near eastern culture there was a high premium paid on showing proper hospitality to guests, and Martha had been abandoned by here sister to do all of the work herself.
Jesus is very gentle with Martha when He tells her that Mary has chosen “the better or the good part.” Some have wrongly used this passage of Scripture to justify an ascetic, purely spiritual, Christian lifestyle. They skew the words of Jesus to justify a disconnected Christianity that sees engaging the world’s here and now problems as unspiritual and even idolatrous. While the words of Jesus do leave room for this kind of interpretation, when they are taken within the full context of Jesus overall message, it seems clear that this is not at all what Jesus is saying.
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus is seen running the money changers out of the Temple rather violently because they were corrupt. Clearly, Jesus message in this passage is not that duty and obligation are bad things. The message is not that Martha is an unspiritual busy body while her sister Mary is a spiritual giant. The real issue at hand is attitude. Mary had chosen to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to the master. She loved Jesus and she wanted to be near Him while Martha, on the other hand, was distracted by her many legitimate obligations.
The message is not that it is wrong to handle our obligations. Jesus never denied the Scriptures and they teach us to be diligent in the work that God has given to us. Proverbs 18:9 says, “One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.” Working to feed Jesus and the disciples was not the problem which Jesus addressed with Martha. Jesus is making it plain that our attitude is as important as our actions. Obligation is good but love is better!
Consider the emptiness of the work of the man who awakes, goes to work each day, then returns to his wife only to lay down to sleep, content to have merely met his obligation, though he has done it not out of love but out of a stoic desire to do what is right. Consider, on the other hand, the man who does the same thing but whose heart is fueled by love rather than merely obligation. What of the mother who meets all of the physical needs of her child yet never shows them love or compassion? Obligation is good but love is oh so much better!
Dance of Grace
If we do right things but complain, is that pleasing to God? If we work diligently in our Christian life, does that alone bring honor to God? Certainly not! The invitation of Christ is an invitation out of dry religious or ceremonial obligation and into a vibrant experience of knowing God and being known by God. He wants to show the world, through us, the beauty of His love as we experience His love in our lives. Our Heavenly Father is asking each one of us right now, at this very moment, if we will be people through whom He can love the world.
Surely we must let our hands do His work but we must not stop there. In order to live the Grace-filled life, in order to experience the grace of God in our lives as we are intended, the work of our hands must be fueled by the presence of His grace in our hearts! For many of us it’s difficult to have a right attitude about God because are minds are full of engrained misconceptions about who He is. It is awfully difficult to let God love the World through us if we don’t even know just how much God loves us. How can we share something that we don’t have?
For us to move from obligation to love in our relationship with God, we must learn to experience the divine. Christianity is not intended to be a dry theological discussion, nor is it merely a list of do’s and don’ts.
I am convinced that much of what is marketed in this culture as Christianity little more than the denunciation of immoral behavior and the exaltation of the noble self. In many ways Church culture encourages a kind of disconnected genuineness, does it not? We have a way of encouraging people to only show us the good sides of their personalities as we “play nice” on Sunday mornings simply because that is what good people do.
Christianity is not the sum of its doctrine any more than it is about religious obligation. Christianity is about a vibrant relationship with God as He is to be found in Christ! In the first verses of the very next chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives us The Lord’s Prayer. In Luke 11:4 Jesus says, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.”
When we read these words of Jesus most of us read into the text what our western minds have been preprogrammed to understand. Whether we like it or not, our minds have been shaped by the logical, rational, and often legalistic components of western thought. This is nothing new. The western minds has been shaped by the Greeks, the Romans, the Middle Age Church, and right up to this very day our minds are oriented very much toward logical argument, rationalism, and legalism.
If you are anything like me, it is very easy for you to read these words of Jesus and walking away thinking that Jesus has described a criteria for receiving forgiveness that is very much contingent on my ability and willingness to forgive others. It is as though what He is saying is that to the extent that I forgive others God will forgive me. Our legalistic minds enjoy order so much that we read the passage in pieces instead of reading it in the context of Jesus broader message in the preceding and following text as well as within the context of His entire message.
Jesus is not saying that this is a “tit for tat” relationship of forgiveness whereby God only offers to me the same measure of forgiveness that I offer to others. God’s grace is not in any way contingent upon anything that I do. God pours out His grace because He is gracious. God pours out His mercy because He is merciful. This portion of the Lord’s Prayer is an invitation into a dance of grace.
I am convinced that Jesus is inviting us to be active participants in the radical grace of God that has been poured out in Jesus Christ. We have been invited to a dance!
The message is not that I must get busy forgiving so that God will forgive me. The message is that God’s forgiveness is so magnificent and His love is so rich that I can be an active participant in it. I can love others the way that God loves me. I can forgive others the way that God forgives me. The message is that I can do this because of God’s love fueling my actions to such an extent that it is as though they are His actions because it is His love working inside of us that is the well spring from which all good things flow.
Only one chapter before the account of Jesus dealing with Mary and Martha, and in all three of the synoptic gospels, Jesus says or confirms that all of the law is wrapped up in loving God with all of our heart and soul and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Christ was a radical and we are to be like Christ. To the extent that we allow God’s love to reside in us, to that extent we are the Church of Christ. To the extent that we allow God to love others through us, allowing God’s love and not stoic obligation to be the driving factor in our lives, to that extent we will find freedom from the drudgery of obligation to the freedom of love.
Good actions and right living should flow out of the depth of God’s love inside of us. Good actions and right living are not how we please God; they are how God responds to a hurting world through us, in us, not because of us.
Conclusion
I heard the story of a bird that flew through the open door into a chapel one sunny morning where service was being conducted. Full of fear it flew backward and forward near the ceiling and against the windows, vainly seeking a way out into the sunshine. In one of the pews sat a lady, who observed the bird, while thinking how foolish it was, not to fly out through the open door into liberty.
At last the bird’s strength being gone; it rested a moment on one of the rafters. Then seeing the open door, it flew out into the sunshine, venting its joy in a song.
Then the lady who had been watching the little bird thought to herself: “Am I not acting as foolish as I thought the bird was? How long have I been struggling under the burden of my sin in the vain endeavor to get free and all the while the door of God’s grace has been wide open?”
I encourage you to let go of counterfeit ways of thinking about God and your response to Him. Let God’s grace fuel your relationship to Him and to other people. Obligation is good but love is better!
