Mary and Martha may have been the most important and prominent women in Jesus’s life after his own mother.
We first meet Jesus’s friends in Luke, and later in John 11 and 12. Mary positions herself at the feet of Jesus in each of these stories. Luke says Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching,” while John 11 says she falls at Jesus’s feet. Mary also anoints and wipes the feet of Jesus in John 12.
As Mary sits at Jesus’s feet, Martha finds herself “distracted by her many tasks” (Luke 10:40). Consumed by anxiety about her preparations, Martha asks that Jesus tell Mary to help her, however, she receives an answer from Jesus she did not anticipate. Jesus commends Mary for sitting at his feet, inviting Martha to consider the way in which she serves.
Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying” (Luke 10:39). Without understanding the cultural context, we might miss the importance of this. In Jewish tradition, “sitting at the feet” was what a disciple did, for example, the apostle Paul tells us that he was educated “at the feet of Gamaliel,” (Acts 22:3). Gamaliel, an esteemed rabbi in Israel, trained Paul who later called himself a “Pharisee of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6).
Mary sits at the feet of Jesus because this was the posture assumed by a disciple. Mary, was a woman in a male-dominated world, and yet had become a disciple. Jesus’s affirmation of Mary’s posture reveals his acceptance of Mary as a legitimate follower, welcoming women to learn at his feet.
We are moved to wonder, does a disciple sit at Jesus’s feet or serve? A clue to a deeper meaning may lie in a small word in verse 39 that is often left out in translation: the Greek word “kai,” translated into English as “also.” A more literal, word-for-word translation would read like this: “And she had a sister called Mary, who also having sat at the feet of the Lord, was listening to his word.”
We can surmise that this meant that Mary also served, or perhaps indicated that Martha, like her sister Mary, also sat at Jesus’s feet. Either way, Jesus does not condemn Martha, nor does he pit the sisters against each other. Jesus seizes a teachable moment on discipleship, showing that disciples are not called to either sit or serve but are called to both sit and serve.
