11/08/2026
Martha, Martha
On Serving, Responsibility, and Knowing What Is Mine
I have heard my dad preach on Mary and Martha for years, and I have to admit, I have always been a little defensive of Martha.
Mostly because I am very much a Martha.
Someone still had to prepare the meal. Someone still had to welcome the guests. Someone still had to make sure everything was ready. A part of me has always wanted to say, “But Jesus, the food did not make itself.”
Well, okay. Maybe a part of me has actually said that.
I understand Martha. I understand noticing what needs to be done and stepping in to do it. I understand the joy of creating something meaningful for other people and the satisfaction of solving a problem, filling a need, or making something work better than it did before.
I also have ideas.
Many ideas.
Enough ideas, apparently, that I can now call Mom and begin a conversation with, “I had this idea—” and before I can even get the rest of the sentence out, she will respond, “No, you didn’t.”
This has never stopped me from having the idea. It has merely informed me that the people closest to me have identified a pattern.
I don’t sit still particularly well. If there is something to make, write, fix, organize, bake, plant, build, improve, rearrange, or otherwise turn into a project, there is a fairly good chance some part of my brain has already started working on it.
And mostly, I like that about myself.
Those aren’t bad things. Neither was Martha’s instinct to serve.
Scripture is full of the beauty of service. Jesus Himself served. He washed feet. He welcomed the overlooked. He cared for the hungry and the hurting. Hospitality, generosity, and sacrifice are woven throughout the story of God’s people.
So what was Jesus saying to Martha?
The older I get, the more I wonder if He was correcting something deeper than her work. Maybe the problem was not that Martha was serving, but that somewhere along the way, she began carrying the weight as if everything depended on her.
The story of Mary and Martha is often told as though Jesus were choosing one woman over the other. Mary was right because she sat at His feet. Martha was wrong because she worked.
I’ve never particularly liked that interpretation, possibly because it leaves me wondering who exactly was supposed to feed everybody.
But Jesus did make a distinction between the two women. Mary had chosen the good part, and He wasn’t going to take it away from her simply because Martha wanted help. I think that’s important. Whatever Martha was doing, it had begun to distract her from something more important.
And Jesus spoke to her about it.
“Martha, Martha.”
There is something tender about those words. Not a harsh correction from someone frustrated by her effort, but an invitation from someone who knew her completely.
She was careful and troubled about many things.
I wonder if Martha had forgotten something she desperately needed to remember.
She was not preparing a place for Jesus because she needed to earn His presence.
He was already there.
That is where I think so many of us struggle.
Earning our way feels natural. We understand effort and achievement. We understand proving ourselves. We understand the quiet belief that if we work hard enough, serve faithfully enough, and do enough good things, we will finally be worthy of whatever it is we’re seeking.
But grace does not work that way.
Before Martha lifted a hand to serve, Jesus had already come into her home. She didn’t have to earn the privilege of being in His presence. He was sitting right there, and in her concern over everything that needed doing, she was missing the opportunity to simply be with Him.
You are not loved because you serve. You serve because you are loved.
There is a world of difference between those two things.
When I begin to measure my value by what I accomplish, stopping becomes surprisingly difficult. There is always one more useful thing I could do, one more person I could help, one more problem I could solve.
Or, in my case, one more idea I could have that Mom would apparently prefer I keep to myself.
But there is another complication I’ve begun to notice as I’ve gotten older.
When you are accustomed to being useful, you can begin assuming that every need you notice belongs to you.
That is not quite the same thing as serving.
And I think Martha’s story gives us something to consider there too.
By the time Martha appealed to Jesus, she wasn’t only concerned with what she was doing. She was concerned with what Mary wasn’t doing.
“Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.”
I understand that sentence more than I would probably like to admit.
Martha had identified the work. She had determined that the work needed doing. She had apparently determined that Mary should be helping her do it. And then she asked Jesus to straighten Mary out.
This is a system I can appreciate.
The problem is that Jesus didn’t cooperate.
Instead, He turned Martha’s attention back toward Martha.
“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.”
He didn’t tell Mary to get up and help. He didn’t rearrange the responsibilities to suit Martha’s expectations. He reminded her that, in all her concern over what needed doing, she had lost sight of what mattered most.
And I wonder if there is something there that I have needed to learn for most of my life.
Not every need I can see is mine to meet. Not every problem I know how to solve is mine to solve. And not every person doing something differently from the way I would do it needs the benefit of my management.
That last one seems particularly unfortunate.
Because competence can make the line difficult to see. If I know how to fix something, doing it can feel like responsibility. If I can make something easier for someone, helping can feel like responsibility. If I can see three steps ahead and know where something is probably headed, stepping in can feel like responsibility.
Sometimes it is.
There really are meals that need to be made. There are people we are responsible for caring for, promises we have made, and obligations we have accepted. There are moments when we are uniquely positioned to help, and refusing because we have decided everything is “not mine to do” would be selfishness dressed up as discernment.
I don’t think the lesson is that Martha should never have prepared the meal. I think there is a harder question here about how to serve without quietly assuming responsibility for the entire room.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me because there are at least two ways to get this wrong.
I can neglect something that genuinely belongs to me and call it surrender. Or I can pick up things that never belonged to me and call it faithfulness.
I have probably done both.
The second one comes more naturally.
I am quite comfortable with responsibility. Give me something that needs to be handled and I will handle it. Give me nothing that needs to be handled and there is at least a reasonable possibility I will have an idea and create something.
Hence the phone calls.
“I had this idea—”
“No, you didn’t.”
They know me.
But perhaps knowing what is mine to do requires more than noticing what could be done. It requires being willing to ask some questions that don’t always have particularly comfortable answers.
Is this mine because I have actually been entrusted with it, or have I simply noticed it? Am I helping because help is needed from me, or because being useful is comfortable? Am I serving someone, or am I beginning to manage them?
And perhaps the hardest one for me: Am I carrying someone else’s responsibility because I don’t particularly trust what will happen if I put it down?
Those are harder questions than simply asking whether something is good.
There are many good things I could do. I am capable of having an astonishing number of ideas about them.
But capacity is not calling.
And seeing a need does not automatically assign my name to it.
That realization doesn’t come naturally to a Martha heart, because the work itself often feels safer than leaving something undone. Work has edges. It has tasks and outcomes and things that can be crossed off a list.
Trust is less cooperative.
Trust sometimes means doing the work in front of me and allowing somebody else to do theirs differently. It means offering help without requiring that it be accepted, telling the truth without controlling what another person does with it, and serving faithfully without believing the entire outcome rests on whether I remembered every detail.
Sometimes it even means sitting down while there are still things that could be done.
I don’t particularly care for that one.
But maybe the invitation of Jesus was never for Martha to become less of a Martha. Maybe it was for her to recognize that even good work could become a distraction when she allowed it to take the place of what mattered most.
I think about what that might look like in my own life.
Preparing the meal because hospitality is something I love to offer, without believing the success of the entire evening rests on my shoulders. Helping someone because I genuinely have something to give, without making their response my responsibility. Noticing that someone else has made a different choice and allowing them the freedom to make it.
And perhaps most importantly, remembering that my place with Jesus was never dependent on how much I managed to accomplish for Him.
He was already in Martha’s house.
She had been so busy making sure everything was ready that she was missing the very One she was preparing for.
I wonder how often I do the same thing.
How often do I become so concerned with doing something good that I forget to ask whether it is actually what God has asked of me? How often do I fill every available space with something useful, then wonder why I feel so responsible for things that were never mine to carry?
Perhaps that is where the question begins to change.
Instead of asking, What else can I do?
I can ask, What is mine to do?
Those questions sound remarkably similar. For a Martha, I suspect they can lead to entirely different lives.
I will probably always have ideas. Mom will probably continue attempting to stop them before I’ve finished the first sentence. I will probably always notice the empty chair, the unfinished task, the thing that could work better, and the person who might need help.
I don’t think I need to stop being that woman.
But I am learning that faithfulness does not require me to become responsible for everything I can see.
Sometimes what is mine to do really is make the food. Sometimes it is help. Sometimes it is serve.
Sometimes it is sit down.
And sometimes it is to let Mary have her own conversation with Jesus while I tend to mine.
Maybe that’s what a Martha heart eventually learns.
Not how to stop serving.
How to stop believing everything depends on her.
