In the cinematic buddy adventure City Slickers, Billy Crystal plays Mitch Robbins.
Mitch is having a classic mid-life meltdown.
His marriage, his job, and his passion for life are all flatlined. When it’s Mitch’s turn to talk to his son’s elementary school class on Career Day, he can’t muster any enthusiasm for describing what it’s like to write radio commercials. This is what he says instead:
Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so fast.
When you’re a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur.
Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, “What happened to my twenties?”
Your forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud. One of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.
Fifties, you have a minor surgery. You’ll call it a procedure, but it’s a surgery.
Sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud, but it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it anyway.
Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, start eating dinner at two o'clock in the afternoon, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering, “How come the kids don’t call? How come the kids don’t call?”
The eighties, you’ve had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand but who you call Mama.
Any questions?
Actually, we have quite a few questions, beginning with this one: How in the world can we ever reclaim meaning and joy when they seem to have vanished?
Mitch and his two best friends decide to enlist as greenhorn cowboys on a cattle drive out west. There he meets Curly, the crusty trail boss, played by Jack Palance in the role that won him an Academy Award. As they ride alongside the herd, Curly counsels Mitch that he needs to find the “one thing, just one thing” that will give everything else in his life purpose and direction.
“What’s the one thing?” Mitch asks.
“That’s what you need to figure out,” Curly replies.
Jesus didn’t leave us to wallow in uncertainties about such a crucial issue.
He offers us direction in the midst of a conversation that almost always receives attention for a different reason – the contrasting choices of a famous pair of sisters.
Mary and Martha welcome Jesus into their home. There are, as usual, a million things to do to prepare a house and presumably a meal for such a distinguished guest. Martha (perhaps foreshadowing Martha Stewart by 2,000 years) hops right into action.
Maddeningly, Mary chooses not to join her. Instead, she sits at Jesus’ feet, listening to him speak.
Sitting at the feet of a rabbi is the traditional posture of a student or disciple. Mary has apparently enrolled herself as one of Jesus’ apprentices. At a time in which some of Israel’s most esteemed rabbis have declared that teaching a woman is, by definition, an utter waste of time, Mary’s boldness is extraordinarily countercultural – and Jesus clearly welcomes her presence.
Here’s how the scene plays out in five short verses:
“Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her, then, to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are needed—indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:38-42).
If you’ve been to church more than a handful of times, you’ve probably heard a sermon on this text.
Preachers routinely conclude that the world has been blessed with both Marthas and Marys, and thank goodness we have both. So whether you’re a person of action who likes to cook casseroles and count salad forks, or a contemplative soul who prefers long walks and prayer meetings, there’s a place for you here at First Church.
But that’s not what the text says.
Hard work and service on behalf of others are wonderful things. But the frantic Martha in this account is hardly a model of spiritual health. She’s “worried and distracted by many things.” Frankly, she’s ticked off. Her sister has dumped the entire hospitality load into her lap. That’s not fair – and surely Jesus will use his divine authority to right this terrible wrong.
What a surprise she gets instead.
“Few things really matter,” he says – “certainly not all the things on your endless To Do list, Martha. Actually, only one thing is needed. Your sister has chosen that one thing, and there’s no way I’m going to make her give it up.”
What is the one thing Mary has chosen? She has decided to hang onto Jesus’ every word.
We’re called to do the same.
It’s true that we all have many things to do this week, including many good, useful, helpful, and necessary things. But if we allow such things to occupy center stage in our lives, and take on an importance they don’t deserve, they will become idols – cruel stand-ins for God that will inevitably torture us with guilt since we can never do them perfectly.
And even if we could, they are incapable of satisfying the deepest longings of our hearts.
Billy Crystal’s character in City Slickers ultimately discovers that the purpose of his life is so much richer than mindlessly following a middle class script.
No, the movie doesn’t depict him discovering the all-surpassing love and grace of Christ.
But we can.
In our real, not-stuck-in-a-movie lives that we get to lead today, hanging onto Jesus’ every word is the one thing that matters most.
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