The Better Thing
Quotes
to listen to the word is to have joined the road of discipleship (e.g., 6:47; 8:11, 21; 11:28)
Martha and Jesus are the focus of the action, though Mary is the point of the example—despite her saying nothing
The literary style of the “silent testimony” recalls the woman of
Sometimes the activity associated with ministry can prevent us from more important endeavors—such as hearing God’s word so that he can touch us (8:15, 21). The image recalls
This account shows that attention to Jesus is a key element in the disciple’s life. In fact, this account also develops the lawyer’s response about wholehearted devotion to God. While love of neighbor is illustrated by the Samaritan, Mary pictures devotion to God and his teaching through faithful attention to Jesus
To serve others, like the Samaritan, does not mean that we should be so distracted by service that we ignore God. Our service to others is best set in the context of being in contact with God.
Let your home be a house where the sages gather, and cling to the dust of their feet, and so thirstily drink their words
Yose ben Yo’ezer of Tzeredah said: Let your house be a meetinghouse for the wise; sit in the dust at their feet, and drink in their words with thirst.
To ‘cover yourself with the dust of their feet’ means to sit at the feet of a sage, to humbly learn from him or, if one wanted to travel with a sage to learn Torah from him, one literally had to cover oneself with the dust of his feet”
Rabban Gamliel used to say: Choose for yourself a mentor
Shimon, his son, said: All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better
Do not say: “When I am free, I will study”; perhaps you will never be free.
Four types who sit before the wise: A sponge, a funnel, a strainer, and a sifter. The sponge soaks up everything. The funnel takes in at one end and lets out at the other. The strainer lets out the wine, and keeps the dregs. The sifter lets out the meal, and keeps the fine flour
ON WOMEN’S ROLE
in spite of the reality that, in this period, Jewish women were normally cast in the role of domestic performance in order to support the instruction of men rather than as persons who were themselves engaged in study
This possibility has already been explicitly raised in 8:1–3, 19–21. Women were taught certain requirements of the law, of course, for they were responsible for those aspects of legal observance that impinged on females. As a rule, though, such guidance was confined to the mother-daughter relationship. See the discussion in Seim, Double Message, 102–3; Witherington, Women in the Ministry of Jesus, 101. Schüssler Fiorenza (But She Said, 59) rejects this view as anti-Jewish, but it is hard to understand why. In order to make this point we do not and need not deny that some women were learned, or even that some rabbis (like Jesus) did not extend their instruction to include women; rather, we mean only to affirm that women, as a rule, were excluded from such relationships.
Schüssler Fiorenza’s reading of this text (and her larger reconstructive project) unfortunately requires a level of egalitarianism in the earliest Christian communities and their settings in favor of which there is (almost?) no evidence and against which there is plenty. One cannot help but wonder whose definition of “egalitarianism” Schüssler Fiorenza must use (cf. Seim [Double Message, 105], who notes that Schüssler Fiorenza’s “problem with the conflict seems to be primarily that Martha, who has her sympathy, loses out”; and LaHurd’s [“Rediscovering the Lost Women,” 70–72] observation that criticisms of Luke on women are generally rooted in Western cultural assumptions about what constitutes status and power for men and women). As Sahlins has written in the context of a parallel discussion concerned with history and cultural difference,
Each people knows their own kind of happiness: the culture that is the legacy of their ancestral tradition, transmitted in the distinctive concepts of their language, and adapted to their specific life conditions. It is by means of this tradition, endowed also with the morality of the community and the emotions of the family, that experience is organized, since people do not simply discover the work, they are taught it. (How “Natives” Think, 12)
It will not do, then, to engage in an adventitious historicism that assumes that our predispositions, commitments, and ontologies must fully and in every case have been theirs, nor need we allow room for a primitivism that posits in the earliest Jesus movement a paradisal state that must now be recovered. In order to engage related theological issues both historically and with an eye to the constructive task within our own socio-cultural exigencies, the more pressing question is, Given the largely patriarchal world in which Luke’s narrative is set, how, within this narrative, does the good news articulate with and over against larger cultural moors? Hence, a profitable line of questions might begin with the methodological issue raised by Wuthnow (with reference to the Reformation, but equally relevant to the apostolic church): Why have the social conditions that shaped its ideology not shaped it more? What are the ways in which the convictions embedded in the Lukan narrative seem to have been shaped by and yet also seem to have succeeded in transcending their socio-historical contexts? (Communities of Discourse, 5)
Female Students in the First Century
Women were encouraged to sit in on the advanced discussions at the synagogue if they were able. A few even acquired the high-level education required to contribute to rabbinic debates, and their words are still on record. Some restrictions on women, like separating men and women during worship, actually arose several centuries later
MISC. INFO
You are probably familiar with a dramatic gesture Mary made one day, sitting at the feet of Jesus once again.
Anointing
Anointing a guest with oil was a common, expected act of hospitality (see
