Mary the Thought-Reading

Tittary the sister of Lazarus is commonly known to us only as the foil of Martha. I do not think in a book of this kind it is fair to either of these women to let them live merely by being bracketed together. I have always objected to such bracketing as an adequate description of character. I would in every case have a figure stand for itself alone. Anything else is misleading. A man of good average stature if placed side by side with an individual of abnormal height will look small; a woman of pleasant appearance if standing beside a great beauty will look plain. If these are constantly viewed in this relation and only in this relation, the inferior of each pair will come to be spoken of as “the small man” and “the plain woman.” Yet neither of these descriptions would be accurate; the essential part of the truth would be hidden by the contrast. Martha and Mary have both suffered from being uniformly viewed in combination. And, strange as it may seem, I think the bracketing has been more injurious to Mary than to Martha. To say that Mary stands in contrast to Martha is true, but it is inadequate. Mary stands in contrast not only to Martha but to all the disciples of our Lord in the first stage of their intercourse. She has something which they have not, something, indeed, which neither the men nor the women possess. She is a unique figure in the Bible Gallery. It is vain to speak of “Mary and Martha” when we can equally well say, ‘’Mary and Peter,” “Mary and John,” “Mary and James,” “Mary and Nicodemus.” Measured by Christian beginnings this woman is the flower of a distinct species. What is the nature of that distinction? What is the secret of that uniqueness which marks her out from the opening lives of Christ’s first followers? Such is the question which concerns us in this chapter. It has cost me some trouble to assign this quality. I have been at a loss what epithet to affix to the name of Maiy in order to indicate her distinctiveness. And I think I cannot do better here than begin by chronicling the grounds of my perplexity. I once thought of calling her “Mary the Meditative.” But everybody is meditative. There is far more thought than action in the world even among men and women of action, nay, even in the very prosecution of their deeds. Take, for example, a sphere where you would imagine meditation to be out of place, the sphere of worldly pleasure. I have no hesitation in saying that meditation occupies the greater part of it. The richest gem of every pleasure is the foreshadowing of it in the heart; and, if the fact realizes the anticipation, that which began with a hope ends with a memory. Pleasure has a very small hold in the present or actual; it dwells mainly in the past and in the future — the joy of retrospect and the joy of looking forward. The common view is that meditation belongs more to the philosophic than to the realistic mind, that it is comparatively foreign to those who are taken up with mundane things. It is a great mistake. The man who is constructing a theory of the universe is not more intensely meditative than is the woman who is weaving a plan of marriage for her daughter. In both cases the process is a brain process and both may occupy years of thinking. The former may issue in a Charles Darwin and the latter in an exhibition of festive vanities; but the loom in which both were woven was the meditation of a human soul. I was unable, then, to designate this woman “Mary the Meditative.” Meditate she did, and deeply; but so did Martha when she was careful and troubled about many outward things. I cast about for another designation. I thought of calling her “Mary the Sympathetic.” But I asked myself, Does the difference between Mary and Martha really lie in the fact that the one sympathized and the

other did not? I was compelled to answer, No. Every article on Martha’s table was constructed out of sympathy, built of the fibres of her heart. The feast which she devised was the fruit of solicitude for Jesus and would have had no existence apart from that solicitude. I felt it would be unkind not only to Martha but to all who were privileged to minister to the physical wants of Jesus if the monopoly of sympathetic feeling were assigned to this woman alone.

I cast about once more to discover the epithet characteristic of Mary. And suddenly there flashed the thought that the search had been in the wrong direction, that Mary’s distinction was something intellectual, not mystical nor emotional. The truth began to dawn that her peculiarity was not sympathy, but the power to detect in those she met what was the main thing to be sympathized with. This is what I call thought-reading or mental tactfulness: the ability at a special moment to put the hand intuitively and spontaneously upon the special want of a human soul. It is the distinct gift of Mary, the sister of Lazarus. Of all that primitive band she is the only one that instantaneously touches the special longing in the heart of Christ. I have therefore called her “Mary the Thought-reading.” She read the thought of Jesus. She did what originally Martha and Peter and John and James could not do. It was not that she had more sympathy than they; it was that she saw better the ground ,for sympathy. Martha, Peter, John, James, all mistook the cause of Christ’s solicitude. They thought it was the resistance to His Messianic claim; it was the resistance to His ideal of righteousness. Mary sat at His feet and read the secret of His pain. As a physician diagnoses the precise nature of a disease, she selected from life’s many ills the ailment which in Him demanded her sympathy. That is her triumph, that is her glory, that is the power by which she being dead yet speaketh.

You will observe that my view negatives the common representation of Mary as an inward or dreamy character. We see Martha preparing the feast; we see Mary sitting quiescent at the Master’s feet and listening to His words; and we say, “The one is an outward worker and the other an internal mystic whose sympathies are all beyond the veil.” Mary’s sympathies are nothing of the kind. Mary has realized as much as Martha that Jesus is her guest, and as much as Martha her object is to minister to her guest. She also feels that she is making a contribution to the feast. She has set herself to ascertain where the sympathy of her guest lies. She finds it does not lie in the desire for any personal distinction such as the many guests at the groaning table would emphasize. She at once discerns that this is not the craving of Jesus. But on the other hand she discovers that the desire of Jesus is for something equally external. His heart is bent, not on something dreamy but on something outward — the service of man. It is this world He desires to save, not another. It is the man in the street, the man in the exchange, the man in the mart of commerce, the man in the slums of poverty, that He wants to find and redeem; His eye is on the life of common day. And Mary says, “If I am to sit beside Him at the feast I must talk of that which will interest Him, that which will be nearest to His heart. It is for this that I have tried to read His heart, to make it a subject of study. Not that I might retire within my soul have I sat at the feet of Jesus. I have done so for the contrary reason, that when I meet Him at the banquet I may be able to come out from the recesses of my own soul and minister to His joy. And I am confirmed in this by finding that what He seeks is an outward joy, the joy of human fellowship, the establishment of an earthly brotherhood, the kindling of a Divine love which will result in the communion of soul with soul.”

Our Lord makes a strange remark about this attitude of Mary. He says that her contribution to the coming feast will be the most permanent of all, that, so far from casting a damper on the hospitality, she and such as she will be the best remembered of all the entertainers. Mary has chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her. And is He not right! Does not experience prove it a thousand times! Is not Mary’s gift of thought-reading more important for a feast than the courses! A moment’s reflection will make it clear that such a gift is essential to the very existence of a social gathering. Let us take what I may call the three stages in the development of a dinner party. You will find that Mary’s gift is in some form required for them all.

Let us begin with the selection of guests. That is a problem to every host. I am not speaking of the selection of the social caste — that can be done with very little mental effort. The grouping here alluded to is the assortment ‘of characters that will not clash. I know of two individuals whom I very highly esteem, equal in social position and in social eligibility, but whom by no possibility could I bring together at the same board. The reason of their dissonance lies not in their unlikeness but in their resemblance. They have points of unlikeness, they differ in their views of Church and State; but that in itself would be no barrier. The barrier lies in their similarity of vehement temper, in their common inability to exercise self-repression, in the ungovernable heat by which each is equally impelled. Now, this is a case in which Mary is better suited to the feast than Martha. It is easier to provide viands for the people than to provide people for the viands. To consume the banquet there must be not only guests but an assortment of guests, a choice of consumers who will not eat up one another. And this requires the gift of Mary, the gift of thought-reading. To make a happy meeting we must study beforehand the characters of those who are to meet. We must estimate their power of assimilation, their chemical affinity. We must consider whether they possess the elements to produce congruity, whether beneath their difference there be a chance of amalgamation. We must call in the services of the sister of Lazarus.

We pass to the second stage. It is also a preliminary stage; it is the pairing of couples, and it is arranged before the guests assemble. Nobody that has ever had to do with this kind of hospitality can fail to realize what anxious study this involves on the part of the entertainer. The companion by your side is of more importance to you than any other guest at the board. It is not enough for your comfort that the companion should say nothing disagreeable. The main object in pairing couples is to prevent nothing being said at all. The absence of sympathy between two people commonly finds vent in silence. It is to secure speech at a feast that we try to bring together those who* are mentally related. And how are we to do this? We must call in the gift of Mary, the power to pierce behind the veil of another. Nobody but Mary can do this. Martha cannot; no hospitable fare can achieve it. Peter cannot; he periodically says the wrong thing. Nicodcmus cannot; he offends Jesus by the inadequacy of his remarks at the very time when he thinks he is paying Him a compliment. The thought-reading Mary and those who possess her spiritual discernment are alone to be trusted for the assortment of couples at a feast either at Bethany or elsewhere.

But there is a third requirement for the welfare of the feast. It is not enough that the guests should be well assorted nor that you should have a companion suited to you; you yourself must be in a mood to do justice to your companion. After the selection of guests, after the pairing of couples, everything may be spoiled by the individual. You may be in a bad temper, distracted from your natural cast of mind. You may have heard during the day something which has disconcerted you. You may have met recently with a bitter disappointment to your hopes which has caused your attention to wander from the things around you and made your interest in life abstracted and languid. The result will naturally be that when you sit down at the feast you will be no companion for the one by your side, spite of the fact that in other circumstances there would have been a congruity between you. I say this will be naturally the result. But we want grace to counteract nature. It may seem strange to speak of a dinner-party as a sphere for the exercise of grace; but it is. There is no sphere which to my mind gives so much scope for it. It is a process in which the best of us will have to sink ourselves, to practise the spirit of sacrifice. Mary might have had by nature all her sympathy with the mind of Jesus and yet might have been unfit to be His companion at the banquet. She might have allowed her natural mind to be distracted by a foreign influence which would have made her heart a sepulchre with a stone over it. If there was such a stone an angel rolled it away. She surrendered herself to the moment, to the hour. She shut all doors that might let in competing thoughts. She strove to forget any alien past. She banished from her mind everything in yesterday which could divert her attention from the day or detract from the interest of the festive scene. For every festive scene we need the individual gift of the spirit of Mary. In the last result it is to the individual that the banquet makes appeal. The man or woman must for the hour sacrifice himself, herself. There must for the moment be an emptying of self-thought, a surrender of self-will, a subordination of self-consciousness, a throwing open of the gates of the heart so that the impressions of another may enter in.

It is a singular thing that in this picture of the Great Gallery the opening and closing scenes of Mary’s portraiture are both laid in a place of festivity. We first meet with her in the preparation for a feast, a feast whose actual history is not recorded. Her final portrayal is also at a feast, a feast which, as I think, belongs to a later stage of Christ’s Jerusalem ministry. The first banquet was an expression of love and loyalty to the Master; the second was an expression of gratitude. In the interval the sisters of Bethany have been through the valley of the shadow. Their brother Lazarus has been dead and is alive again. In the graphic delineation of a picture which has left its impress on the eye of every spectator, the grave has yielded up one of its latest victims; its trappings have been rent asunder and the man has gone forth unimpeded, free. He has risen not to heaven but to earth. He has ascended into no transcendental region beyond the clouds and beyond the tomb. He has gone back to the world of men to resume his former occupations, to tread the old scenes, to mingle with the old comrades. The fact is prosaic; but it is joyously prosaic. The sisters want to mark the occurrence by a prosaic thanksgiving, something which will suggest, not a translation to the New Jerusalem, but a rehabilitation for the old. They might have chosen a prayer-meeting, they might have selected a church-service; but that would have implied something mystical. They want to express their sense of realism. Accordingly, they choose a supper at which Lazarus shall sit and Jesus shall be guest and Martha shall serve. They desired to show that the world had been given back to Lazarus, and therefore they chost, for their thanksgiving* a worldly medium. I read that the supper was given ‘’ in the house of Simon the leper.” I take this to be the name of an inn which some man called Simon had built in gratitude for the cure of his leprosy by Christ’s 1-iand and which he had dedicated to the Christian cause by giving it a name suggestive of his Itealing. The idea I take to be that there were too many guests for a private dwelling; they required a larger accommodation.

And now again Mary stands before us; and in a new environment she maintains her old attitude. She is still the thought- reader of the company. She looks into the heart of the chief guest, Jesus, and sees there what nobody else sees. Everybody thinks His earthly affairs are in a state of triumph. Has He not brought back a man from within the gates of death; had He not vindicated His claim to be the Messianic kingl Jesus knew otherwise. He knew that at no time in His earthly ministry had His Messianic claim been so much in danger. He knew that the raising of Lazarus was regarded by the authorities as an act of imposture and that the priesthood was clamouring for His death. When others at the feast were thinking of the buHal and resurrection of Lazarus, He was contemplating the prospect of His own burial. AH the guests thought He was exulting in the hope of immediate success; but one of the entertainers knew better, it was Mary. In the hour of her joy she read the pain of Jesus. One would think the thought of the risen brother would have drawn her away from every other thought; but the cloud over Jesus veiled her individual gladness; her soul sat side by side with Him. She knew He felt Himself under the shadow of death; and she knew that to Him death was a shadow. Where had she learned that? In a way which I think has generally escaped attention — in one of the striking episodes of the bereavement hour where Mary herself had been the special actor.

It was in that hour when Jesus had arrived at Bethany and had seemed to arrive too late, after Lazarus was dead. Mary had gone out to meet Him. She had thrown herself at His feet and cried, ‘’Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died!” Then follow the words which our version mistranslates, ‘* When Jesus saw her weeping He groaned in the spirit.” It ought to be rendered, “He breathed indignation.” Indignation at what? At the fact that death was in the world at all. It presented itself as a blot upon the creation that man should die, that this noblest and yet most unfinished of beings should be swept away ere his work had well begun. That is a unique revelation even in the unique Gallery of the Bible, Christ’s indignation at the fact of death. You will not find it in any other scene but the scene of Bethany. Gethsemane will not give it; Calvary will not give it. It belongs to one little plot of ground and one alone, the ground where Lazarus lay. It was received by one human soul and one alone, the soul of Mary. Other revelations came to other minds; but this woman was permitted to see an elsewhere unrecorded phase of Christ’s experience, His sense that death ought not to be.

And on the day of the feast Mary remembered this and by her remembrance of it she read the thought of Jesus. She turned aside from her own joy to read it. She heard Him saying in His heart, “The unburying of your brother will be a burial to me;” and there came into her mind the memory of His antagonism to death. She resolves to strengthen Him by a preliminary joy, by a symbolic deed which will represent the impossibility that death should bury His influence. She takes a box of the costliest ointment; she breaks it in fragments and pours it upon His head. It is the image of outward death and of inward immortality. The box is shattered; but with the shattering the fragrance only begins. While it was whole its perfume was confined; but the breaking gave it wings, it filled all the house. The act told Jesus He would never really be buried, and it told Him truly. It said that His fragrance would come from His shatteredness, that the perfume would spread widest where He had touched the common lot of humanity. It symbolized to Him the truth that His crown would come from His cross and that men would wreathe Him on the mount just in proportion as they had met Him in the valley. And Jesus felt the power of the symbol. “She has wrought a good work in ‘me;” He cries, “she did it for my burial!” He felt that for once death might not be unworthy of man, might not be a subject for indignation. It seemed to Him that at last a flower might be planted on a grave, that in reaching the lowest rung of the descending ladder He could in the spot where all men meet touch a cord of universal sympathy.

Here again as at the former feast Mary has chosen the good and abiding part, and it is the same part, the sympathetic thought-reading of the guest at her side. Jesus said on this occasion as on the former that her contribution to the banquet was the permanent one, “Wheresoever the Gospel is preached throughout the whole world, there shall that which this woman has done be spoken of.” The viands will be forgotten, the jests will be forgotten; but the sympathetic thought-reading by a human heart will remain. To those around her Mary seemed to be lending no voice to the entertainment. Her act was deemed unpractical, a waste. To Jesus it was the one memorial of the festive scene, the thing which did not pass away. It will ever be so. Your memory of a festive hour will be sweet or bitter not according to the viands, not according to the splendour, not according to the costumes, but according to the companionship. It will depend on the amount of self-sacrifice in the one by your side. It will rest on the presence or absence, in either sex, of the spirit of Mary, on whether you have fallen into the vicinity of those who have read you, felt with you, sympathized with you, entered into your thought, or, as the etymology of the phrase wonderfully expresses it, “made themselves agreeable to you.” All this on their part demands sacrifice. * * *

Bring Mary to our banquets, O Lord! Our modern life is a day of hospitality; some think its festivities make it alien to Thee. But in truth its gaieties may be Thy gateways. Teach me that in the festive hour there is room for sacrifice! Teach me that without Mary the grandest feast is like the splendour of a winter sun! If I am going to a feast I think of the garments with which I must clothe myself; teach me that there are also garments of which I must divest myself! My first prayer should be, “Disrobe me for the banquet.” I would ask Thee to begin my toilet by taking away the robe of self-thought. I can never enter into another’s thought if I am preoccupied with my own. I do not wonder that in times of old Thy sacrificial days were feast days, for there is nothing which needs such sacrifice as a feast. Therefore we reiterate our prayer, “Bring Mary to our banquet 1” Bring souls that can sympathize with another because they have forgotten themselves! Bring hearts that have crucified their pride! Bring spirits that have ceased from their envying. Bring men that have conquered their jealousy, women that have put away their vanity, maidens that have smashed their mirrors in the preparation hour! Make room for each soul to get out, out from its own environment into the environment of another! Break the box that the ointment may flow! Shatter the thought of self that there may be the fragrance of thought-reading! Imprison life’s worries that sympathy may be free! Fetter personal care that love may have wings! Veil my own image that my brother’s or my sister’s may be lighted! Deafen my own footsteps that I may respond to the music in other hearts! Empty my soul of self-consciousness that I may be conscious of a companion’s need! I shall be fit for every banquet if I have the spirit of Mary.