JESUS, he cannot pass by the village where his friends live without coming to visit them. The spontaneity with which the evangelist Luke describes this scene emphasizes the deep trust that existed between the Lord and the three siblings from Bethany: Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. He didn’t have to announce his arrival; he didn’t even need to bring a gift. He knew that he was always welcome and that his friends enjoyed his presence and the opportunity to show him their love. The Gospel states that Martha welcomed Jesus when he arrived at the house. It is easy to imagine the emotions that filled her when she saw the Master coming. However, a certain nervousness was added to this joy. As a good hostess, she wants her boyfriend’s stay to be as pleasant as possible, so she gets to work quickly. While he speaks, Marta adheres to the habits of each hostess: she prepares water to cleanse her hands and provides oil to anoint her head… At the same time, she takes care of it so that meals come at the right time and nothing is missing. In this way, he shows his love for the Lord.
But maybe the work is starting to pile up more than she expected. Her mood gradually deteriorates. While he continues to serve, he thinks within himself. She is desperate because she can’t keep up, and quickly concludes that if Sister Maria had helped her, everything would have changed. However, Mary sits at the feet of the Lord. Therefore, given her sister’s apparent passivity, Martha stands before Jesus: „Lord, don’t you care that the sister lets me serve herself? Tell her to help me!“ (Lk 10, 40). Marta could hide her agitation and uneasiness; she could discreetly approach her sister so that no one would notice and ask her for help. Instead, she decided to turn to Master openly and feels „even justified in criticizing Jesus“. However, this is also a sign of closeness with the Lord, because there is no need to mask one’s thoughts in front of a good friend. We can ask Saint Martha to help us have the same intimacy with Jesus, to show ourselves as we are when talking to him, even if it sometimes means that the Master will show us a better way to organize our lives.
Working knowing that God is in our house …
JESUS, he doesn’t answer Martina’s frustration with harsh words. He knows her good intentions. Therefore, under the sign of special love, he turns to her with the repetition of her name: „Marta, Marta, you care and worry about many things, and only one thing is needed. Mary chose a better share that will not be taken away from her“ (Lk 10, 41-42). At no point does the Lord blame Marta for not doing what she should. He doesn’t even invite her to sit at his feet like Mary and forget about household duties. How could other guests eat and relax along the way? The change he demanded of her was mainly internal: he invited her to approach her duties differently. Martha did many things, but she forgot the most important thing: Jesus was in her house, and she might not have listened to his words.
Often during the day, we can feel overwhelmed like Marta. We may think that our work or family responsibilities make it impossible to find the time we would like to devote to God. However, Jesus does not encourage us to neglect our duties. Like Martha, he invites us to find the Lord in these activities, to perform every task knowing that the Lord is always in the house of our soul. In this way, work becomes a constant act of love, a continuous one, which goes beyond what we can express with our lips or thoughts. „Words are useless,” says Saint Josemaría, „because language can no longer express itself; reason remains calm. He doesn’t talk anymore, he just watches. The soul goes into singing and sings a new song because it feels and knows that God is constantly looking at it with love“.
Fill our work with love …
Weren’t the very actions that led Martha away from Jesus? The holy desire to offer him a good and renewing welcome eventually turned into tension and anxiety because she could not keep up with everything she set out to do. She lost sight of the goal of all her actions. Perhaps she performed all these details of the service out of inertia, as she would with any other guest. But Jesus encourages her not to forget the essential thing: God was in her house. She did not just fulfill her role as hostess: she allowed the Lord to rest. „ The problem is not always an excess of activity, but rather an activity lived incorrectly, without adequate motivations, without spirituality, which permeates the activity and makes it desirable. It then follows that duties tire us more than is justified, and sometimes we get downright sick from them. It is not a calm effort, but a work full of tension; heavy, unsatisfactory, and ultimately unacceptable.
To all who desire to find God amid the world, the same thing that happened to Martha can happen. We are responsible for numerous tasks that require our attention and ongoing effort. This logically leads to fatigue. However, when we know that all this work is of greater importance than we can understand at first glance, it is less likely that this fatigue will deprive us of peace, because we know that our success is not measurable by human calculations. In a personal dialogue with God, we can rediscover that everything we do is aimed at loving him; that we care about this world because it is his world. In this way, we will be guided not only by inertia or what the circumstances dictate, but also by the desire to discover the hidden God in everything we do. „ Without love, even the most important activities lose value and do not bring joy. Without deep meaning, all our activity will be reduced to fruitless and disorderly activism. And who gives us love and truth if not Jesus Christ?“. And who can we ask to intercede for us in this mission to love God in our daily work, if not the Virgin Mary?
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