![]() ![]() Let's think about Mary and Martha as a family unit. This is the famous story of Mary and Martha, which is used in Christian thinking to characterise different personalities, and we'll leave that story aside for the moment. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”’ Luke 10:38-42, NIV She came to him and asked, “Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” 41“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42but few things are needed-or indeed only one. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. 39She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. ‘As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, they came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. Let's read that because this gives us the background that helps us to understand the relationships between this family and Jesus. It would be good to refresh our memories and go back to this brief description which appears in Luke 10: 38 - 42. This is an example of that, but in fact we know from an earlier episode, that Jesus has already, once before, been to the home of Mary and Martha. ![]() Bearing in mind that John was the last one to write his Gospel, he tended to assume that people had a working knowledge of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and he added in significant details and stories such as this one, but didn't always refer back to material that related to them. You gather the information together, and you get a fuller picture. The wonderful thing of studying the Gospels together is that they provide information that help us to understand the other accounts. The message comes to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ This immediately indicates to us a significant relationship between Jesus and this family. That's another well-known incident about Mary which we'll come to later on in our studies, but which John just refers to briefly here. This refers to an event later on in John's Gospel (John 12: 1-18), during the last week of Jesus' life when in Bethany at a meal, where Jesus was a guest, Mary poured perfume on Jesus, and it was symbolic of preparing him for his death in Jewish culture. This Mary, of Mary and Martha, is mentioned here by John as also being the Mary who poured perfume on Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. ![]() We don't know what it is, but they are worried that he is going to die. This isn't a virus or a cold or a throat infection or something small. Jesus is summoned, and he's elsewhere in the country at the time, but a message is sent to him by Mary and Martha, because they're very worried about Lazarus. We have three members of the family mentioned, and we have a location, which is Bethany, a village that's just outside Jerusalem, which features significantly in our story later on. We'll comment on that perhaps in a moment. We don't know much about the rest of the family, or their relatives, or whether they were married or single. Here we have a family - two sisters and a brother. 2(This Mary, whose brother Lazarus was now sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) 3So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”’ John 11:1-3, NIV The Family in Bethany He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Let's introduce the story by reading John 11: 1 - 3, Mary and Martha have appeared in the story already. We now switch from Luke to John, and we're going to focus on a very well-known and important story that John tells in great detail, concerning a man called Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha. It's between Luke and John that we get most of the story of the events that took place as Jesus left Galilee and headed to Jerusalem. If you've been following Series 9, you'll be aware that we've been following Luke's Gospel for several episodes, and in fact, Luke provides much of the material for this part of Jesus' life, and in the slightly earlier period. Hello, and welcome to Series 9 and Episode 9, the Tragic Death of Lazarus. ![]()
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