Jeremiah 13.1-11; Deuteronomy 32; Luke 10.38-42
From Luke 9.51, where the Evangelist tells us that Jesus ‘resolutely took the road for Jerusalem’, until the very end of Luke’s Gospel, the journey of Jesus and his disciples is systematic and orderly, a steady progression from Galilee in the north towards Jerusalem in the south. Today’s Gospel is the solitary exception. The name of the village to which they have come isn’t given, but St John’s Gospel [11.1] tells us that the home of Martha and Mary (and Lazarus, whom Luke doesn’t mention) was the village of Bethany, about two miles south and east of Jerusalem.
Clearly this episode is geographically and chronologically out of place; and so it is pertinent to consider why such a careful writer as Luke places it here. Jesus’s visit to the house of Martha and Mary immediately follows upon the well-known parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, with its challenging closing exhortation to ‘Go, and do the same yourself.’ Lest the Gospel become less ‘good news for all people’ than a catalogue of moral imperatives, though, Luke juxtaposes a different kind of appeal. ‘You worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one.’
That unum necessarium is to draw near to the Maker of the Universe as he draws near to us, to listen to him [cf Luke 8.15], and to receive from him all that he means to give us. Bethany was evidently for Jesus a place of rest and refreshment [cf Genesis 2.2]; his promise is to make us partakers of that same rest and peace. [cf Ephesians 2.17-18]