Mary, Martha and the Kitchen Maid

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My mother is a Martha; her best friend, a Mary. My mother raised five children while working, for almost all of her adult life, as a schoolteacher. My mother’s best friend had, well, more fun.¹ Which is why my mother, as she cooked dinner or sat correcting spelling tests while her friend cheered on the Buffalo Bills in the next room, would recall the gospel story of Martha and Mary.

As recounted in the Gospel of Luke, the sisters Martha and Mary are intimate friends and followers of Jesus. When Jesus visits their home, Martha busies herself in the kitchen, preparing to serve him. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, listening to his stories.

Overwhelmed by the work before her, Martha complains to Jesus: “Don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me” (Luke 10:40).

Jesus reprimands her: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her” (Luke 10:41–42).

Of course Mary should be praised for her rapt attention to Jesus’ words and teachings. But, as a distracted, hardworking daughter of a Martha, I’ve retained a certain sympathy and respect for the sister in the kitchen.

Apparently, I am not the only one. For in the 16th and 17th century in northern Europe, artists began painting unusual scenes of Jesus in the home of Martha and Mary. At right is Joachim Wtewael’s The Kitchen Maid (1620–1625). It takes some looking to find Jesus and Mary seated at a table in a back room, for it is the cook who dominates this painting—the cook and the meal that she lovingly prepares: roasted duck, ham, pickled cucumbers, green and pink cabbages, fish, carrots fresh from the garden, wine, a mound of cheeses and a fresh loaf of bread.² The maid’s arms are strong, her thick fingers bloodied with work, her eyes bright, her expression calm, resigned, perhaps even content.

The background scene of Jesus and Mary sitting at the table is dull in comparison—as washed out as the pastel colors in which it is rendered. Mary seems bored, reaching back to pet a cat that pays her no heed. Both Mary and Jesus sit awkwardly at a cramped table. Chilled, they extend their bare feet toward the fire, while Martha attends to the flame. She does seem distracted as she bustles by the pair at the table, who are interfering with her work. The pale green and white of her costume link her with the woman in the kitchen.

Might the fleshy, almost sensual foreground image be a condemnation of Martha, the more worldly sister, the sister who is more interested in the here and now, in what she will eat for dinner, than in Jesus’ teachings? As one historian has written of this image, “Seductions can deflect one from the true spiritual path, just as the fascinating and gruesome foreground details can distract the viewer from the scene with Christ.”³

Perhaps. But if it is, it is a gentle condemnation, one that recognizes the pleasures and the good of this world and portrays them in careful, intimate, realistic and loving detail. As a champion of these pleasures, the artist has proudly signed his name in elegant script along the blade of the maid’s skewer.

My mother is a Martha; her best friend, a Mary. My mother raised five children while working, for almost all of her adult life, as a schoolteacher. My mother’s best friend had, well, more fun.1 Which is why my mother, as she cooked dinner or sat correcting spelling tests while her friend cheered on the Buffalo Bills in the next room, would recall the gospel story of Martha and Mary. As recounted in the Gospel of Luke, the sisters Martha and Mary are intimate friends and followers of Jesus. When Jesus visits their home, Martha busies herself in the […]