I been reading a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest. He is the founder of Homeboy Industries in the Los Angeles neighborhood that is the gang capital of the world and Homeboy provides them a way back into a godly and productive life.
As a part of what he does, Greg celebrates a lot of church services in detention facilities and to do it, he had to learn a whole new language – not only Spanish, but Homie. And the Homies he tries to help have to learn a new language too because when he teaches them the Bible, he uses a lot of words they don’t know, so both sides have to do the best they can to make themselves understood and what happens is that when they engage in conversation, the homies substitute words they do know for words they don’t. The results are sad, awkward, and funny like these:
A young Homie who wants to read a Bible verse in church might say: "This is a reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Filipinos". Or someone who was hungry and looked for help might tell him: "I had to go eat at the Starvation army". Once one of the young men who worked in his office gave him this phone message: "Professor Davis at UC wants you to give a talk and he says to be sure to tell that you will be constipated".
But we do the same thing. We can’t help it. We only know what we know and when we talk about what we don’t know, we have no choice but to do it in terms of what we do know. It’s the only way we can relate to something. It even happens when we read the Bible. Like this passage:
Luke 10: 1-2,: After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
Or this one:
Matthew 28:18-20: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you".
The likeliest way to read these is as evangelists, that it means we are to go to work for God. It's a thing, and a familiar one. We want to be one of those to whom God says, Well done, at our life’s end. To get there, we must work. Work is what we know. Work is our language of faith.
But I keep running into a problem with this. Quietly, in the background, something else is going on.
John 12:1-8, Luke 10:38-42: Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”
If the highest service we can render to God is to do the work that must be done, to bring in the harvest, to spread the gospel, then where does this come from? Mary, Jesus says, has the better part. The better part of what? Of Jesus? Of obedience? Of a life of faith? I think the answer to all of these is yes, but that’s the problem. Mary’s approach is one of contemplation, not work. All she did was make a frivolous gesture of love and then sit and listen at Jesus’ feet. Nothing got done. No souls were won. No additional seats at their table were filled with converts. But this, Jesus said, was the better part. This is for us, like for the homies, the part we don’t know.
The fields may be ripe and we may be asked to be fishers of men, but this kind of work may not be the only kind of work Jesus is talking about. After all, when you think about it, God does not need us to win souls to Him. He is perfectly capable of doing it all on His own. In fact, the little bit we can do would be useless without the part only God can do. This is what Jesus called the better part. We can’t do what He can and somehow, we have to understand that without Him, all of our outward kingdom work will fall short.
In the end, we can’t convert anyone. We can’t bestow faith. But we can do something we are repeatedly asked to do. Love. Love God and love one another. The Bible tells us to work for the kingdom a handful of times, but tells us to love more than 500 times and that love for God just because He is God is the highest love there is. Not because of something He did or because of something He gave, but just because He is God.
Mary and Martha did not agree about the best way to love Jesus and they’re a great example of the tug of war we still fight between the active ways to love God and the contemplative ways to love God. Contemplation – sitting and waiting at Jesus’ feet – is not productive. It is not measurable. It doesn’t get anything done but according to Jesus, it is the better way.
Ok, I know that someone needs to mow the lawn and take the garbage out to the curb on Thursday evening. And, if we are going to open our church doors for community events, someone needs to bake and grill hot dogs and do dishes. Beware, however, of patting ourselves too vigorously on the back when those things are done and we go no further. We have given our work to God and He is undoubtedly pleased with it. But unless we go to that secret place where only we two are together in mutual love, we have not given Him that one thing He wants most. We also spread the gospel by being it rather than by doing it.
The Homies used words they knew to deal with concepts they didn’t know. They were often clumsy doing it, but Greg, their spiritual advisor, loved them for the effort. Mary spilled perfume on Jesus’ feet because she didn’t know any other way to show Him how extravagantly she loved Him. It was awkward and wasteful, but Jesus loved her for it – not in spite of it, but because of it. Find a way to show your love for God that doesn’t involve a lawnmower or a kitchen or study or evangelizing, a way that doesn’t involve anyone else but you and God. An intimate act of love. Sing. Ponder. Pray. And give it all you have, because it all belongs to God, anyway.
