the issue with Martha is not her busyness but her lack of inner attentiveness. As West African theologian Robert Sarah wrote, Jesus rebukes Martha, not for being busy in the kitchen—after all she did have to prepare the meal—but for her inattentive interior attitude, betrayed by her annoyance with her sister….Christ tenderly invites her to stop so as to return to her heart, the place of true welcome and the dwelling place of God’s silent tenderness, from which she had been led away by the activity to which she was devoting herself so noisily.
