Learning from Jesus will always be something amazing!
Only one thing is necessary, "says Jesus, but presumably the two sisters, Mary and Martha, have thought what we like to think: not only do we need one thing, but many, and we must still have more: money and other useful things. There is a lack of consolation that our neighbor already has.We also have all kinds of beliefs, religious or political or educational, that we want other human beings.When we think about it, it is with us, as perhaps Mary and Marta.
We needed a lot, not just one, was not it?
But now Jesus is in the middle of where these two live, worry and work hard. He comes to them with the message that surprises them completely: not much, a thing is necessary for you! This message says: if only one thing is important, then the many that occupy us are no longer necessary with such urgency.
Then we are free from the compulsion and spasm of everything that keeps us so busy. In that sense, this message also helps us. For what we generally consider necessary, it is like some people who furnish their new apartment and then repel the furniture after a while. On the other hand, the only thing that is necessary is as the only delicious pearl that Jesus spoke of, behind which everything else has returned (Mt 13: 45).
What is this, what is necessary, what really needs us? Well, we do not have to look for a long time, at any altitude or depth of the soul. Because it is exactly what tells us: a thing is necessary, that is also what is necessary for us. He tells us in always new variations the only thing: God loves us. And he does not just say that.
In our story it is Jesus to listen. It is important to listen to him because he has something to communicate. And now we understand why Martha chose the bad part. Without a doubt, he has done many things, done a lot, accomplished many things. I would get a Cross of Merit for this from other places or I would have been praised by others as a role model. But one thing he definitely did not do, and that would have been crucial. She did not bother to listen to Jesus.
She has not been diligent in all her meritorious diligence, to cling to the message of God's love, on which everything depends. I was so eager to achieve something decent that I lost it, and that's what I live in what God does in his love for her and for all people.
She was so busy with the many that pass by, the flowers wither, and that is why she has not heard the word of God that lasts forever. Poor Martha!
Maria, she is no less diligent than Martha. But she is different worker. She is diligent in listening to what Jesus has to say. For him, he is someone we can not honor better than allowing us to leave everything that is urgent. She has understood that through Jesus a different order enters into our lives in what is important to us. She understands that we have something else to do when Jesus enters our lives. And that is another thing that now she recognizes as her task and has to do: listen to Jesus, be attentive to what is necessary, what no one can say to herself. But let it be said of him, that's all.
Listening is also an activity and, as is well known, a very arduous work, in which one is too easy to digress, in which it happens that what one hears enters through one ear and out through the other. But once you have started this work, you may experience that it does not let you go.