The typical way of reading the story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42) is the obvious one. Martha is following the cultural expectations of a host and the gender expectations of her time. She wanted Mary to do the same by helping her. Jesus doesn’t agree and says Mary, who is sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to his words, is doing the better thing. The reader’s response….. good Mary, bad Martha.
But what if that isn’t the real story? Looking again, we might wonder if Mary’s place in this story isn’t so much about the expectations of hosting and gender roles, but rather about the expectations regarding learning and from whom.
Mary, a woman, sits at Jesus’s feet, listening and learning. Her teacher, Jesus, is a man. The people of Jesus’ time may have questioned, as Martha did, why Mary was sitting there, but not because she wasn’t helping. Instead, they may have wondered about a woman in the place of a disciple, the student of a male teacher.
Perhaps an overlooked lesson in this story is that of equality in education and discipleship. Perhaps a message is that women don’t only belong as cooks and those who serve the food, but also belong as students and disciples, along with the men.