People of the Bible

Martha

Complained about the dishes, and later said the second greatest confession in the gospels standing in a graveyard.

Martha receives him into her house, which means the house is hers to run, and she runs it. Luke gives her the scene everyone remembers: cumbered about much serving, she interrupts to ask whether he cares that her sister has left her to serve alone, and gets her name said twice and a gentle correction. That correction has been used to make her a caricature of fuss, which is unfair to a woman who was, at that moment, feeding him.

Where it appearsLuke 10 · John 11 to 12

Luke John

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The movements, in the order the text gives them.

The story of Martha

01
Luke 10:38-42
Martha, Martha
She asks for help and gets her name repeated and one thing needful. The rebuke is affectionate and the serving is not condemned, only its place in the queue.
02
John 11:20-22
She went and met him
Mary sits still in the house; Martha goes out to the road. Her first words are an accusation and her second are still hope.
03
John 11:23-27
I am the resurrection and the life
She answers a comfort about the last day and is moved to the present tense. Her reply names him Christ, Son of God, which should come into the world.
04
John 11:39
Lord, by this time he stinks
Told to take away the stone, she says the practical thing nobody else will say. Her faith and her nose are both allowed to speak.
05
John 12:2
Martha served
At the supper six days before the Passover she is doing the same thing she was doing in Luke, and this time nothing is said about it at all.

Why it matters

John hands her the same qualities under much worse conditions. Her brother has been dead four days and it is Martha who goes out to meet the man who did not come, opens with if you had been here, and then keeps speaking. The conversation she starts moves from a doctrine about the last day to a claim in the present tense, I am the resurrection and the life, and her answer to it, yea Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, is the confession John puts at the centre of his book, spoken by the woman with the apron.

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