Mary at the feet of Jesus

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There are two Gospel accounts of Mary and Martha and how they relate to Christ. In Luke, it occurs in chapter 10:38-42

*38 As they continued their journey he entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. 39 She had a sister named Mary [who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. 40 Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” 41The Lord said to her in reply, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. 42 There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” *

We often look on Martha in this story as simply outraged that she’s doing all the domestic work, while Mary is listening to Jesus. In our interpretation, Jesus saysthat it’s OK for Mary to focus on his message the spiritual is more weighty than the everyday tasks Martha is performing.

However, I recently read an address by the Anglican theologian and historian, N.T. Wright in which he makes clear that there’s more going on. In particular, he says that in the ancient world, the domestic sphere was split between men and women, as is common in the Muslim world today. When people outside the family came to the house, women stayed in one part of the house, men in another. According to Wright, that explains Martha’s consternation at Mary’s location beside Jesus. For a woman to cross the line of demarcation between male and female social spheres was a violation of a taboo in the ancient world. To read Martha’s asking Jesus to instruct Mary to assist her in domestic work, Martha appears to be mortified at the breach of protocol her sister has made, and in a face-saving maneuver requests Jesus to set the world right again by putting Mary back where she belongs. Yet Jesus does not confirm the male/female division of space. Instead, he confirms the choice Mary has made as valid.

According to Wright,
“to sit at the teacher’s feet is a way of saying you are being a student, picking up the teacher’s wisdom and learning; and in that very practical world you wouldn’t do this just for the sake of informing your own mind and heart, but in order to be a teacher, a rabbi, yourself.”

Mary and Martha are also portrayed in John 11-12 in the Lazarus story. The passage is too long to reprint here, but there are a few notable verses I think are notable:
*
“1 Now a man was ill, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and dried his feet with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was ill. 3 So the sisters sent word to him, saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.””*
*
“27* [Martha] said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” 28When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary secretly, saying, “The teacher is here and is asking for you.” 29 As soon as she heard this, she rose quickly and went to him. 30 For Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still where Martha had met him. 31 So when the Jews who were with her in the house comforting her saw Mary get up quickly and go out, they followed her, presuming that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled”"*

Chapter 12
“3Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.”

Again, John shows Mary at Jesus feet, twice. In Chapter 11, it’s almost chiding Jesus, and her outpouring makes Jesus troubled. In Chapter 12, she anoints his feet and dries them with her hair.

The New American Bible note on the anointing is interesting:
“so Mk 14:3; but in Mt 26:6, Mary anoints Jesus’ head as a sign of regal, messianic anointing.” In Matthew, the anointing is depicted as occurring in the house of Simon the Leper.

Though she is unnamed in Mark and Matthew, Jesus says something quite notable about her act of anointing:
"Amen, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

The fact that this anointing is present in all the gospels is pretty strong evidence of the importance to early Christians (and us). According to Wright, anointing is a priestly act.

Outside of Wright’s observations, Mary’s drying the feet of Jesus with her hair is also notable in light of the instruction by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:
“5 But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled brings shame upon her head, for it is one and the same thing as if she had had her head shaved. 6 For if a woman does not have her head veiled, she may as well have her hair cut off. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should wear a veil.”

Mary (of Bethany) is a very important figure in all the Gospels (though she is not named in Mark).

The story in Luke shows Jesus defying social conventions separating men and women. The anointing is a priestly act, and shows up in all the gospels. Mary is promised to be remembered for her act of anointing, but in modern times, her role seems to be all but forgotten.

Does Mary of Bethany’s important roles influence our depiction of women in the church? It seems to me that we downplay her.

 

[katrntogo]

I suppose it depends on ones location or parish but our previous priest (now gone Home) spoke quite often of how our Lord treated women & how it was unheard of at that period of time & thus, it should show how women should be treated. & no, he was not for women being ordained & neither am I. I have found as a convert, I am often surprised how conservative my studies have made me.

Thank you for sharing this & I look forward to responses to your post.

 

[fnr]

I suppose it depends on ones location or parish but our previous priest (now gone Home) spoke quite often of how our Lord treated women & how it was unheard of at that period of time & thus, it should show how women should be treated. & no, he was not for women being ordained & neither am I. I have found as a convert, I am often surprised how conservative my studies have made me.

Thank you for sharing this & I look forward to responses to your post.

It is a good question in my eyes how crazy Jesus must have looked to the random person on the street. He let women follow him and sit at his feet.

One other paragraph I found useful in Wright’s address is the one where he discusses Galatians 3:

"27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
28There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendant, heirs according to the promise."

Wright’s exegesis is eye-popping:
*What then is he saying? Remember that he is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave or a woman – at which point the women in the congregation that God ‘that you have made me according to your will’. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant.

I think there is more. Remember that the presenting issue in Galatians is circumcision, male circumcision of course. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was; but of course for those who embraced it it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only marked out Jews from Gentiles; it marked them out in a way which automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. And that’s not all. Though this is somewhat more speculative, the story of Abraham’s family did of course privilege the male line of descent: Isaac, Jacob and so on. What we find in Paul, both in Galatians 4 and in Romans 9, is careful attention being paid – rather like Matthew 1, in fact, though from a different angle – to the women in the story. If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to be doing in this passage, then, is ruling out any attempt to back up the continuing male privilege in the structuring and demarcating of Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham.*

 

[fnr]

Another issue I just thought of is that “messiah” in Hebrew (Christos in Greek) means “anointed one.”

Who anointed Jesus? A woman, Mary of Bethany.