But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.<\/em>
She came to him and asked, <\/em>\u201cLord, don\u2019t you care\u00a0that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!\u201d
\u201cMartha, Martha,\u201d\u00a0the Lord answered,<\/em> \u201cyou are worried\u00a0and upset
about many things,\u00a0but only one thing is needed.
Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he said “one thing<\/em><\/strong> is needed,<\/em>” I think Jesus was doing his rabbi-thing where they are pretty much ALWAYS referring to things in the Hebrew scriptures to fill their teachings with multiple layers of meaning and goodness. In particular, I think he was making a reference to Psalm 27:4, to allude to that and really the whole Psalm (read it sometime soon if you’ve got time, it’s a potent one)<\/em>. I especially think that’s cool because though women wouldn’t have been able to study the Torah formally, as I understand it they DID receive instruction in the Psalms … so Jesus is deliberately referring to something that he knew Martha would know. Decided to post an old one today–wrote it six years ago, less than a month after I started writing poems. Seemed like a good one in our hurry and flurry culture. It’s from Luke 10:38-42: As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha\u00a0opened her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Anyway … the poem. See how it (and, really, the story above) hits you!
(As always, I welcome comments\/questions\/etc. at john@ichthusmhk.org!)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnwilliamschwartz.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/poem-ONE-THING.png?resize=166%2C281&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"