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“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”
—Henri J.M. Nouwen
Luke 10: 38-42, Psalm 52
You have probably heard of the Seven Virtues. The Greeks identified Four Virtues: Wisdom, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. Later, the three “Christian” virtues were added: Faith, hope, and love. These comprise what tradition has held to be the “Cardinal” virtues.
You may perhaps be unaware that there are many lists of virtue, and they don’t always include the same qualities. For instance, there’s another list of virtues that is meant to be the opposite of what became known as the Seven Deadly Sins. You’ve heard of the Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Gluttony, and Envy. The Seven Heavenly Virtues, by contrast, are the opposite of these Seven Deadly Sins. We’ll consider each in their turn, but today we’re looking at the virtue of Patience, the virtue which Jesus’ friend Mary demonstrates, and which Mary’s sister Martha seems to find in short supply.
It may not be immediately obvious that patience is the virtue that Mary is demonstrating. To a certain extent, we discover that she is demonstrating patience by discovering what she’s not demonstrating, which is sloth. In the traditional virtues, patience is the mirror image of sloth, or laziness, and therefore they are easy to mistake for one another. Martha thinks that Mary is lazing around, slacking off, not doing what’s required to get dinner set up for their special guest, Jesus. And who knows what other bits of family history go into this sisterly disagreement. One suspects that for years these two have griped at one another over this issue, with Mary saying, “Oh, Martha, you need to stop and smell the roses! All work and no play makes Martha a dull girl!” and Martha replying, “All play and no work makes Mary a jerk!”
So Martha tries to rope Jesus into this argument. But Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, there’s only one thing needful—and it’s what Mary is doing.”
And no doubt Martha is thinking, “What in the world is ‘needful’ about sitting around and doing nothing? That’s the opposite of needful!”
To Martha, what Mary is doing is slothful, lazy; but the strict term for the ‘deadly sin’ Martha is accusing her sister of is acedia. Acedia is a far deeper spiritual illness than simply laziness. Acedia is a listlessness and laziness that afflicts the very soul. It’s a deep feeling that nothing is worth doing. Acedia strictly speaking isn’t depression, even though it looks a lot like depression. As Kathleen Norris puts it, acedia is a ‘paralysis of the soul’ that results in ‘the aversion of the appetite from its own good.’ It is different from depression, or despair. “For despair, participation in the divine nature through grace is perceived as appealing, but impossible; for acedia, the prospect is possible, but unappealing.”[1]
To clarify by an example: if one is in despair, one might hear that God loves them—might hear the good news that Jesus died for them—might hear that she is made good and beautiful in God’s image—and may even believe that’s true for everyone else in the world—except herself.
If one is afflicted with Acedia, however, then one might hear the same good news, and even believe it’s true—but simply decide, “I don’t care. It’s not worth it to me.” Acedia manifests as a kind of self-centeredness that says, “What I want is more important than what anyone else wants, even God—and what I want is to just be left alone–by God, by other people, by expectations, by other people’s needs, by all of it. Just leave me alone.”
Let’s be honest—we all have a touch of Acedia now and then. We all want to say, “Leave me alone!” to God and to the world now and then. And no doubt when Martha would ride Mary about getting the chores done, Mary’d probably yell, “Leave me alone!” at the top of her lungs. Sometimes life doesn’t feel like a gracious good gift for which we should be grateful, but a series of dull demanding chores that must be done, and all we want is for everyone to go away and leave us alone. That’s acedia.
What Jesus celebrates in Mary, though, is not acedia, obviously, but its mirror image—patience. Patience here means “waiting.” Waiting is one of the classic Biblical virtues. We hear it all the time: “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength!” Isaiah says. Or Psalm 40: “I waited patiently upon you, O Lord: You stooped and heard my cry.” Waiting on God is one of the central metaphors of Scripture. Waiting on God is compared to watchmen waiting for the morning—it is dark now, but dawn will surely come; it is compared to a mother in labor pains—it is hard now, but joy and new life are on the way; it is compared to a seed planted in the ground—it is hidden away, and its growth is beyond our control, but one day a great harvest will result—if we wait on the Lord.
This kind of waiting is what Mary is good at and Martha is not so good at, at least not in this story. Martha is wrapped up in doing. She seems to think her entire worth to Jesus at this moment is measured by how hard she is working. And that, in my experience, is one of the great afflictions of the church. We do—we do a lot. But we don’t often reflect on why we do what we do. We don’t often sit back and evaluate, does what we’re doing work anymore? Did it ever work?
And we get so caught up in the doing, that we’ve lost sight of the being—why do we do what we do? We need to step back—to look more deeply at the world and at ourselves—and most of all, look at Jesus, and understand exactly what it is that He is saying to us. When we work so hard, we lose sight of the mission, the purpose, the calling—and Jesus calls us back to that.
Patience–waiting on God–is one of the key markers of faith in God. Crises in life inevitably come. Almost always they are far larger than anything we have the ability to fix. Death or disease—we can’t wish or work those things away. An economic crisis—no one of us can fix that, not even Ben Bernanke, apparently! And of course the world has changed so rapidly and so radically that the entire mainline church—even all of Christianity itself—is struggling with how to define itself and renew itself in response to all the changes.
The point is that we don’t define ourselves—Christ defines us. And we don’t renew ourselves—Christ renews us. We are called to trust Him—and wait.
There is so much more in life that is OUT of our control than is IN our control. We often turn to work and to blind action out of a need to control the uncontrollable. But that’s the point: we can’t control it.
So we wait on God. We trust that God is good—that God is in control—that God will act, and act to redeem, and renew, and save.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t called to act—but our actions should reflect our confidence that God is faithful who will finish the good work God has begun in us in Christ. Paul said that, and it’s worth remembering: God is faithful who will finish the good work God has begun in us in Christ.
God is faithful. That’s why we wait.
Waiting is not something we Americans are naturally good at, and it’s a good spiritual discipline to learn to be good at it. Examine your own patience and see how you’re doing. Can you wait patiently in a long line at the supermarket or for an extra-long red light? When someone drops a bad piece of news on you can you pause for one second before you react, and by doing so change from an explosive response to a more careful one? Instead of fast-forwarding through the ads on TV, can you force yourself to wait til they are over? These may not seem like much, but these kinds of things are conscious acts of spiritual discipline that teach us to observe our natural impatience, to understand what causes it, and to control it; and they prepare us for more important times when our ability to be patient is critical for the sake of our souls.
I was struck by Psalm 52’s analogy of a faithful person to a healthy Olive Tree. When Margaret and I were in Jerusalem a few years ago, we visited the Mount of Olives, the very olive grove where Jesus said his famous prayer in Gethsemane right before his arrest. Those trees are old. They’ve lived a long time. Some of these trees very likely were there when Jesus prayed there that night. They are so old that there are layers of old bark and wood cracked around them, where the newer version of the tree slowly burst its way through the older version.
Olive trees live a long time. I think that’s part of the psalmist’s point in comparing himself to an olive tree. If you’re an olive tree, you are patient. You wait. You endure, because the new is coming. And you bear fruit. It may mean that God will throw off the old husk. That’s okay, because it’s God who is doing it, who is saying, remember what you are here for. Focus on that. In the case of the Olive Tree, the point is not the husk, but the fruit. In the case of the church—and of you and me—the point is, Jesus Christ. Pure and simple.
As Mary well knew.