The eighth episode of the third season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (July 21, 2019). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

The text has also been posted here.

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on Luke 10:38-42 in the New Testament and also refers to the story in Genesis 18:1-10 in the Old Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original texts). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

Mary and Martha

The sisters, Mary and Martha are a bit of a mystery in the gospels. They appear as a pair in both the Gospels of Luke and John. In John 12:1-3 they even appear in a very similar context to this story where Jesus is a guest, Martha serves and Mary doesn’t appear to work but offers special devotion to Jesus.

I have chosen, in my retelling of this story, to read Luke’s story independently from John’s two stories of sisters with the same names, a decision I made mostly to ensure that I didn’t miss the unique insight that Luke is offering by attempting to harmonize the accounts of two different authors. Luke and John may have been working from similar traditions about a Martha who served and a Mary who gave devotion to Jesus but they clearly went in quite different directions with that source material, extracting different lessons about Jesus and what he was all about.

Hospitality

The practice of hospitality seems to have been absolutely central to the ministry of Jesus. On several occasions, the gospels speak of Jesus or of his disciples travelling around Galilee with very few resources. Jesus sends his disciples out with the expectation that, most every place they go, people will welcome them, feed them and give them a place to sleep.

This was not an unreasonable expectation in the ancient Mediterranean world. There were strong cultural and religious forces that made people feel an obligation to offer hospitality to strangers. Many ancient peoples had myths and legends of individuals who offered hospitality to strangers and then discovered that the strangers they fed happened to be gods. They were richly rewarded for their devotion.

The particular story in the Jewish tradition that underlined the need to offer hospitality was the story of Abraham and Sarah and the three strangers. It seems quite reasonable to think that many of the Jews who welcomed Jesus or his disciples into their homes, had this particular story from the Book of Genesis on their minds as I have attempted to bring into my narrative.

How did people see Jesus?

One question that quickly arises when you talk about hospitality in the ancient world is the question of what people’s expectations were. Did people really expect that if they did practice hospitality that they would, sooner or later, entertain divine visitors unawares? Apart from some particularly gullible individuals, probably not. They may not have taken the myths that literally but they probably did expect that the act would bring various blessings upon them and their households. It does not seem unlikely that some people welcomed Jesus with those kinds of expectations in their minds.

I personally believe that the question of the divine presence of God in Jesus of Nazareth was a post-resurrection obsession of the church. During Jesus’ life, I don’t think that the idea of Jesus being the incarnation of the divine would have occurred to the people who met Jesus in the flesh. It was only after the early Christians had experienced the resurrection that they began to consider the possibility that God had been uniquely present in him. It was only then that they looked back at some of the things that Jesus said and did and interpreted them in the light of that idea.

I do not think, therefore, that Mary and Martha invited Jesus into their home because they thought that he was the incarnation of God, but the gospel writer may have had that very idea in his mind as he included this story in his gospel — an idea that I have sought to illuminate in my retelling.

Acknowledgements

I thank two actors for lending their voices to this episode. Gabrielle McAndless played the part of Martha. She is a student in Music Industry Arts at Fanshawe College, Ontario and will go far in that industry, I expect. Paula Rumbolt played Mary. She is a blogger, speaker and student at Heritage College and Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario. Find out more about Paula’s work at The Car Door.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License