Mary: sat at his feet

 I love the story of Mary and Martha. Jesus has come to spend time with his friends and is staying with Lazarus and his two sisters. Martha is busily running around being the hostess with the mostest as was normal at that time. Mary had sat herself at the feet of Jesus.

So far, so familiar.

Except to do anything at this point but hold your hands up in wonder at just how counter culture this was would fall short of the attention it deserves. First century Israel was a time of segregated patriarchy. Men spent leisure, work and religious time with men. Women likewise with women. Learning and teaching was at that time within the exclusive remit of men. And yet here we have Mary, brazenly sat at the feet of Jesus.

To sit at the feet of someone at these times was to demonstrate your discipleship. It was a posture of willingness to learn and a desire to be like the person of your focus. This was not the normal posture of women at this time because the structure of society determined the worth of women by their ability to produce children, not by how 'learned' they were as was the expectation of men of 'worth'.

So Jesus has allowed Mary to sit at his feet and is teaching her alongside the other disciples and make no mistake, Mary is a disciple in every sense of the word. No one has mentioned this is a problem up to this point which makes me think that this was a relatively normal occurance for them as a group.

It's only when Martha gets a bit hot and bothered in the kitchen that things get a bit tense. Except Jesus is totally unflustered and admonishes Martha that Mary is just where she needs to be, reminding Martha that the kitchen is not the place she finds her worth.

Yet again Jesus affirms women as equal in his eyes (the only eyes that matter) and leaves us in a 'mic drop' moment. Jesus encouraged women to learn. In today's western culture this is a relatively 'soft' point to make where most female children have the opportunity to learn/be taught, (not so the case on a worldwide stage of course) but Jesus was making a point across the ages, speaking to our disordered and broken time and re-establishing the original Genesis blueprint of equality between the sexes.

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