Ever been embarrassed in public by a family member? I will never forget the day someone in my family asked my cousins how to teach me to dress properly. I’m sure I turned bright red with embarrassment. I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 8 years old, but that incident stuck in my memory.
Family gatherings can be like that. “Can you tell so and so how they should behave?” can sound like an innocent comment but is really an attempt to shame the other person in public. How embarrassing it is to hear that. It is also very common.
Which is why the Mary and Martha story is so relatable. It sounds like a typical argument between two sisters. I imagine that Martha was the first-born child, used to acting in a parental role, taking charge and making sure everything got done just right. And Mary was the youngest child who got spoiled by doting parents and was not good at the practical aspects of day-to-day living.
It came to a head when Jesus showed up for a visit. Martha was determined to show good hospitality. That was a core value of her faith. Stories going back as far as Abraham and Sarah taught about the importance of hospitality. Without hospitality, being a wanderer in the wilderness could easily lead to starvation and even death. But Martha was also focused on herself and her tasks. She mentioned herself several times, “My sister, me, and me.” The only thing she wanted Jesus to do was join her side and use his authority to correct her sister’s inappropriate behavior. And she claimed Jesus was being uncaring, hoping to get him to take her side. This is classic manipulation and triangulation. Trying to get a third party to do the communication that she would not have with her sister. Some psychologists would go even further and describe this as bullying behavior.
It's subtle bullying that leaves the target feeling shamed and embarrassed and uncertain how to react. Mary never said a word in her defense, she might have been as shocked and ashamed as I was at my family gathering. Words like these can leave us speechless!
We have no idea of why Mary did what she did leading up to Martha’s comments. Was she rebelling against Martha’s expectations, deliberately sitting down with the men, and daring Martha to complain? Was she putting Jesus on the spot by acting like an equal to the disciples? Or was she just mesmerized by what he was saying, forgetting what she should be doing and dropping everything to sit and listen?
Even today, the Marys and Marthas of the world can experience deep shame around housekeeping and expectations. If you watched the CBC show “Back in Time for Dinner”, you may remember the mother saying that the 1950’s with its expectations of domestic perfection made it the worst decade for women. And there is still a lot of shaming around housework. This week I read, “How to Keep House While Drowning” by KC Davis. She is a psychologist and a mother of two; the youngest was born during Covid lockdowns. She struggled with post partum depression with her first, so wanted to prevent that by having a friend help with cleaning, other moms with babysitting swaps and so on. All that fell apart when Covid struck. And when she shared how she was doing, she was told that she was lazy because she didn’t get the dishes and laundry done every day. There was no sympathy for living with depression or mental illness. So, she wrote a book about housekeeping and talked about the outer messages that fed her inner bully. It lives in our heads and can be louder than real people because it doesn’t stop. It can trigger depression, anxiety, and shame. That inner bully which sounds a lot like Martha, can leave us vulnerable to mental illness.
And lest we think this is a problem that only women face, there’s a wonderful book called “Becoming the Kind Father” by Calvin Sandborn. He also writes about the inner bully who shames men for showing emotion, vulnerability, gentleness, or any number of things our society has decided men shouldn’t be. That toxic idea is probably what led to the sword attack we heard about in Athabasca this week. Both Sandborn, Davis and others like Brene Brown write about how destructive the inner bully is.
Comments like “Tell my son he shouldn’t cry”, or as in today’s scripture, “tell my sister she should be helping me in the kitchen” feed the inner bully until it destroys souls, families, and marriages.
Jesus says to all of us, “You are anxious about many things. But it’s time to quiet the inner bully and love yourself and your family instead of feeding shame and blame.
We are called as Christians to convert our inner bully to an inner Christ. A gentle, loving voice that changes shame and blame words into love and support. It takes time, but it is possible. We do that when we admit that we are not perfect, that we feel overwhelmed at times by all we feel pressured to be and do. Martha was called to be hospitable, but not to the point that she forgot the love she had for Mary. Her sister was called to learn from Jesus, but not to the point that she neglected her sister. Both were called to listen to Jesus’ message to love each other, pray for each other and not to lose track of their relationship with him. We too are called to listen to Jesus’ message of love and compassion. It’s why we say a prayer of confession and hear words of comfort and assurance on Sundays, to calm our inner bullies. When we replace those inner bullies with Christ’s peaceful, loving words and vision, we can heal ourselves and our world. May it be so for us all.
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