This Sunday, the lectionary invites us to ponder Luke 10:38-42. The English Standard Version supplies the passage with the title “Martha and Mary.” J B Philips supplies “… the need for quiet listening to his word.”
Have you heard of Bono? His band, U2, wrote and produced the song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” It was released in 1983, in an album titled “War.” It may be one of the most discussed songs of all time.
39 years later, Bono said:
“It was an odd song because we were trying to contrast this bloody event in Irish history with Christ on the cross, and the stupidity of religious violence.”
Bono said that in an interview about a book he wrote, his memoirs, which he titled “Surrender.” The interviewer, David Remnick of The New Yorker magazine, asked him whether writing the book was therapeutic. Did it heal him in some way? Bono replied cryptically:
“I’m such a shy typist. When I talk, I talk too quickly, throw the paint at the canvas. When I’m typing, I have to slow down my thoughts, and they make more sense of me, and I make more sense of them.”
What happens when we think slowly? What happens is that we consider more things as we make our decisions or shape our conclusions.
I think that’s why Matthew tells the story of Mary and Martha. Matthew wants us to slow down and recognize Jesus like Mary did, he wants us to go beyond Martha’s recognition of Jesus. He wants us to serve Jesus not by feeding him, but by shaping our lives by his godly wisdom.
Here’s a quick summary of the story of Martha and Mary:
Jesus entered a town. Martha brought him into her home and started preparing food. Her sister, Mary, sat at Jesus’ feet, “hanging on to every word he said.” She left Martha all alone to cut onions, grind chilli, whatever. Martha complained to Jesus. Jesus replied that Mary had got her priorities right, for she saw that he had come not for tea and snacks, but to offer wisdom to make meaning of life.
I return to Bono. In the interview, we hear that he and two members of his band became happily infected with Christian faith a few months before Sunday Bloody Sunday was born.
While fellow U2 member “The Edge” started writing Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bono went on honeymoon to Jamaica, homeland of Bob Marley.
Among conservative Christians, Bob Marley is as controversial as Bono.
But activists around the world sing Marley’s song, Get Up, Stand Up. Irene Fernandez sang it to her children. Irene’s the one who exposed maltreatment of Vietnamese boatpeople in Malaysia, in the 1980s. For this, she was hounded by the Mahathir government for many years.
I mention Marley because Bono credits Marley with contributing wisdom to him as he was shaping his decision on what to do with his life.
After Bono, Edge and Larry were renewed, some Christians suggested they should give up their kind of music and focus on praise songs.
That didn’t seem right to them. Bono, like the prophets of old, put his response in words which strike conservatives Christians as criminal:
“Bob Marley wanted to sing to God; Bob Marley wanted to sing to girls; Bob Marley wanted to sing to the world around him and protest it. There was the three-chord strand that became U2, and that started with Edge and Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Sunday Bloody Sunday was written as a response to the faith which had invaded Edge, Bono and Larry. It’s a song about the value of life; about the wrongness of sacrificing life; about love. It’s a protest in Ireland, then, against the likes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Israel, now.
Many in the USA supported the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, who remind me of today’s Hamas. This American support frustrated U2.
The day they played a concert in Denver USA, in 1987, was Remembrance Day: a day for remembering those who fought and those who died during the world wars. On that day, the IRA exploded a bomb in the town of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. 11 people were killed, 63 were injured.
The band heard the news a few hours before they began playing the concert. Midway through the concert, Bono said:
“I’ve had enough of Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home … and the glory of the revolution … and the glory of dying for the revolution.
“Fuck the revolution! They don’t talk about the glory of killing for the revolution.
“What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where’s the glory in that? Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of a revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want. No more!”
I hope that resonates with Malaysians who claim one side is better than the other in the land once known as Palestine.
What does it mean to sit at Jesus’ feet?
I think people who sit at Jesus’ feet sing praise to him and worship him. I think they also resonate with how Bono marks the difference between happy-clappy praise and storytelling, reality-shaping praise. We have to be careful not to patronize, or talk down, to God. Bono said:
“Every song we sing is a praise song, [ask] what is the story on this? I can’t do the happy-clappy … I think God might object to being patronized.”
Recently, Bono and Edge visited Ukraine, to show solidarity with the people who are suffering due to the invasion by Russia. Remnick asked Bono why they did that. Bono answered:
“It goes back to Sunday Bloody Sunday. Charity is a thing that we all are part of, but justice is something that really is a reason for me to get out of bed. The injustice of what’s happening in Ukraine was so hard to take. We just wanted people to know that we were with them.”
I think people who sit at Jesus’ feet, people like Mary, write and sing songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday, and get out of bed in order to expose, shame, and bury the causes of tragedies in our world.
Some of you may be surprised to know that Bono was a friend and collaborator of Eugene Peterson, who paraphrased the Bible into the version called The Message. If you’d like to learn more, you can click this link to the thinkChristian website.
Peace be with you.
To learn more about Rama, click here.