One Necessary Thing

In the tenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, we hear the story of Mary and Martha. The two sisters (along with their brother Lazarus) are good friends of Jesus. He is a frequent visitor to their home. He gives us a glimpse into the depth of His love for this family when He weeps at the death of Lazarus and the grief of the sisters (Luke 11:1-44).  

Before we get there, we see Jesus at dinner with the family. Mary sits at Jesus’s feet while Martha works in the kitchen. Martha raises her hand to protest the inequality of the situation, to which Jesus responds: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are needed – indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” 

There is one necessary thing: to sit in the Presence of Jesus and to bask in the Glory of God. 

We all wake up with a million things on our to-do list. Some of us wake up in what Oliver Burkeman calls “productivity debt” because we feel we are already behind when we first open our eyes. We spend the whole day running at full speed on a treadmill trying to get ahead on our list. We fall into bed with a low-grade sense of incompletion and a high-grade sense of exhaustion before waking to another round of to-dos.  

Jesus’s words to Martha and Mary may feel like a challenge to those of us who operate in this frenetic, productivity-seeking way. I believe they should feel like a challenge because we were not created to live this way.  

We are not machines.  

Efficiency, optimization, and output are not fruits of the Spirit.  

We were created to walk slowly through a garden with God. When humanity fell, there were surely much more efficient ways to save the world, but God chose to arrive as a helpless, inefficient human baby. 

God’s grand plan for salvation included thirty years of unremarkable life in a backwoods town. Jesus, the Messiah, spent two decades walking to work and synagogue with his parents, learning the slow work of crafting wood by hand and memorizing scripture with his own mind. He learned the effervescent joy of a shared meal, the paralyzing shock of grief, and the unique beauty of every single sunrise. Taken as a whole, His life featured more mundane than miraculous moments, yet every moment was infused with the Presence and Glory of God. 

What would it take for us to choose the better part in 2025? What would it look like to plant ourselves at the feet of Jesus? What would happen if we wrote “Be with God” at the top of our to-do list? 

There is plenty to do. The emails will keep arriving. The kids will need lunch made again tomorrow. The grass will need to be cut again next week. 

May we trust Jesus enough to make the “one thing necessary” the first item on our to-do list.