Luke 10:38-42 Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village… There is a touch of playfulness in our Lord's reply to Martha. He takes an image from the very table about which Martha was so unnecessarily and unduly anxious: for the words rendered "Mary hath chosen the good part," mean "Mary hath chosen the good portion, the best dish, the Benjamin's mess." It is as though He had said to the careful and fretted housekeeper: "You are very kind, Martha; you are doing your best to please Me, and to give Me as good a dinner as you can: and yet it is Mary who has brought Me the best dish, the food I like most. She is nourishing and refreshing My spirit with her love and sympathy. She is giving Me an opportunity of feeding her with the bread of life and the wine of the kingdom. Our fellowship with each other is the true feast. And you, O you poor Martha, are so taken up with your dainties that you are losing the feast!" Obviously, our Lord stoops to Martha's level, to the busy housekeeper's point of view, and playfully rebukes her for her mistake. Her mind is full of dishes and dainties, so full, and so bewildered, that she is forgetting the best dish of all. She wants to serve Him and do Him honour; but she is pre-occupied with thoughts of how she may do her best for Him. And so He teaches her that she will best serve both herself and Him by casting aside her cares, and giving herself up to the joy of communion with Him. Now if you ask me to name this best dish, to tell you exactly what the one thing needful is, I am a little puzzled how to reply; not, however, because I do not know what it is. First, I will tell you what I think the one thing needful is. I believe it is that love for God and man which quickens and sustains the true life within us, and redeems us from all anxieties for the many things of our outward life. But if you rise into this pure, deep, and trustful love, you will be saved from all these base and vexing cares and fears. You will do your best in your several stations. You will be as diligent, as prudent, as skilful, as you can; and then you will leave the results of your faithful discharge of duty with God; fearing no evil, because you know there is no want to them that fear Him. And is not that the very best thing you can do, the best dish of which you can eat? What else has life to offer that is half so good? This is the dish of which Mary ate with Christ, and of which the young ruler refused to eat, at least for a time. And, last of all, it is the best dish, the best portion, because it can never be taken away from us. We lose much as life goes on, more than you can yet imagine. We lose health and energy both of body and of mind; the fineness of our intellectual perceptions is duiled, and the firmness of our intellectual grasp relaxed. We lose our very senses — not going out of our minds, I do not mean that, but — our eyes grow dim, and our ears hard of hearing, and our tongues trip, and our natural force is abated. We lose, or partly lose, our very memories, so that our own past grows hazy to us, or even dark. We lose the power to do much that we once loved to do, and to enjoy much that was once pleasant to us. We lose our friends, or at least the presence and use and enjoyment of our friends, losing at the same time the faculty of forming new friendships. And, at last, we lose life itself, and with it all that we have gained. But there is one thing we never lose, if once we have had it — the love of God. We never lose the one thing needful, the one only thing which enables us to bear all other losses, and even turns them into gain. (S. Cox, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. |
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