Memorial of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus
Saturday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 29, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072923.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with three beloved friends of Jesus. And I mean real, down-to-earth buddies, heart-companions like the ones we seek out in the peaks and valleys of our lives. Jesus loved these three friends as John tells us in his Gospel:

Like many of the inspirational Bible figures, we know little about Martha, Mary and Lazarus. But the little we know goes deep when we consider it in prayerful reflection. For today’s prayer, I am focusing on Martha.

Martha is the doer – the wise, practical, and somewhat anxious member of the family. I think Martha had to have been the oldest, the big sister who watched over her younger siblings. She was the one who made sure the house was clean, the shopping done, the meal prepared. And, probably, she got a little annoyed when the others took these important responsibilities for granted. She obviously felt a bit unappreciated at times. Martha was confident in how she wanted things to be and worked to make them so.

Everyone needs a friend like Martha, even though they are sometimes a little annoying. They help keep us on the right track by their honest assessment of reality and their robust engagement of its demands. They prod us to recognize the call within our circumstances and the grace it will yield if attended to.

The Church offers us two readings to choose from today recounting incidents in the life of this family. In one of them, Martha even prods Jesus to do what needs to be done:

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming,
she went to meet him;
but Mary sat at home.
Martha said to Jesus,
“Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
But even now I know that whatever you ask of God,
God will give you.

John 11:20-22

In the other reading choice, Martha (by tattling to Jesus) prods contemplative Mary to be a little more practical in their domestic situation.

Jesus entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
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?

Luke 10:38-40

Finally, in a monumental unwillingness to let unwanted things be as they are, Martha won’t even let Lazarus rest in peace. She wants him raised from the dead, and so she prods Jesus with the veiled request cited above.

We can use our imagined insights into Martha’s nature to help us understand our own approach to the presence of God in our lives. What can guide us in such a meditation is the key component of this Gospel reading – the response of Jesus to Martha’s search for balance in her life:

Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
She said to him, “Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
the one who is coming into the world.”

John 11:23-27

Jesus asks Martha to shift her perspective from practical knowledge to unquestioning faith. In a very real sense, Jesus is raising Martha to new life before he raises Lazarus. Ultimately, Jesus does what Martha asks, but not because she thinks it’s a good idea. The miracle is released from Christ’s heart by Martha’s unqualified faith.

And so it is with us when we pray. If our “prayer” is a dictation of how we would like God to behave, it will not engender the transformative grace of new life. That miracle is accomplished only if our prayer is an expression of absolute faith in God’s loving Will.

Poetry: The Raising of Lazarus – Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Hanz Wright
This poem, unpublished in the poet’s lifetime, appears in a notebook that the Austro-German Rilke (1875–1926) kept while in Ronda, Spain, in 1913. The translation was begun by Wright decades ago (“I have been working on it, in a hundred versions, since I was in college,” he says). – source: Boston College Magazine

Evidently, this was needed. Because people need
to be screamed at with proof.
But Jesus knew his friends. Before they were,
he knew them; and they knew
that he would never leave them
desolate here. So he let his exhausted eyes close
at first glimpse of the village.
And immediately he seemed
to be standing in their midst.

Here was Martha, the dead boy’s sister.
He knew he would always find her
at his right hand, and beside her
Mary. They were all here.
Yet opening his eyes it was not so.
He was standing apart,
even the two women
slowly backing away,
as if from concern for their good name.

Then he began to hear voices
muttering under their breath
quite distinctly; or thinking,
Lord, if you had been hereour friend might not have died.
(At that, he seemed to reach out
to touch someone’s face
with infinite gentleness,
and silently wept.) He asked them the way
to the grave. And he followed
behind them, preparing
to do what is not done
to that green silent place
where life and death are one.

Merely to walk down this road
had started to feel like a test,
or a poorly prepared-for performance
with actors unsure of their lines,
or which play they were supposed to be in;
a feverish outrage rising inside him
at the glib ease with which words like “living”
and “being dead” rolled off their tongues.
And awe flooded his body
when he hoarsely cried,
“Move the stone!”

“By now he must stink,”
somebody helpfully shouted.
(And it was true, the body
had been lying in the tomb
four days.) But he was far away,
too far away inside himself
to hear it, beginning
to fill with that gesture
which rose through him:
no hand this heavy
had ever been raised, no human hand
had ever reached this height
shining an instant in air, then
all at once clenching into itself
at the thought all the dead might return
from that tomb where
the enormous cocoon
of the corpse was beginning to stir.
In the end, though, nobody stood
there at its entrance
but the young man
who had freed his right arm
and was pulling at his face,
at small strips of grave wrappings.
Peter looked across at Jesus
with an expression that seemed to say
You did it, or What have you done? And all
saw how their vague and inaccurate
life made room for him once more.

Music: Rise Up, Lazarus – CAIN