When I meditate upon the lessons they had to share, the peculiarities of their human nature remains as essential as any wisdom I thought they might impart. Each of my mentors was an Abba or Amma, a father or mother or teacher and guide, mostly because they were so good at being ‘themselves'. They didn't coach me in how to be successful, or powerful, or happy. They showed me in their own lives, how to live with bold faithfulness into who God had created them to be. I am still discovering, after the passage of decades, that there had been and still is a cost to living with such integrity. Part of what they had taught me, indeed, was that they bore their own wounds with dignity not because they were somehow superhuman, but because they had become so completely themselves that nothing or no one could take it away.

This same vintage boldness captured my attention in our gospel today, which draws our attention to Mary, a friend of Jesus, who apparently was becoming so in tune with who she was in God's eyes that she could increasingly live and act extravagantly for the sake of others. The three characters in today's story are no strangers to us. The scene is set in the house of Lazarus in Bethany. "There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him." And although a crowd gathers there because Jesus is among them, the Gospel of John says, "they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus."  

This story, however, is not about Jesus and Lazarus-our story connects us to the larger household of Lazarus, and in particular the two sisters who live there, Martha and Mary. Rosemary Radford Reuther, the feminist theologian, thinks that their housing arrangement is much like those of the Essenes, a Jewish religious order with a monastic settlement at Qumran. In addition to the Dead Sea community, the Essenes also had many small groups that lived in ordinary houses in cities and towns. Ruether speculates that the household Lazarus in Bethany was such an urban Essene community, built around equal numbers of women and men, both whom spent their days in prayer, study and work.

In Jesus' time as in ours the roles of women in leadership were anything but resolved. Some rabbis seem to have allowed women to study with them-and in the Jewish tradition, to study with a rabbi was to be a rabbi in training. Once educated in Torah, a woman could be recognized as a teacher.

Modeling such progressive rabbis, early Christian communities included women equally in the study of scripture, and subsequently women were both local pastors and traveling evangelists. So if the household of Lazarus is such an Essene community, Mary and Martha are to be seen as mentors in training - learning not just to say the right things, but also to be themselves in the fullest possible ways. Martha's discipleship frequently models what it is to be a follower of Christ by what she does -servant of all. Mary is the one who is usually seen doing the work of contemplative prayer and learning. Each sister is a mentor for us. Both disciplines of ministry were expected from those who lived in Essene community. Our biblical narrative discloses only parts of their stories, so that we may sit at their feet!