Our lives are to be lived out with the urgency inherent in Mark’s ancient words not that we might be saved for future reward but that we might live now in the fullness to which God in Christ has called us by doing our part to bring God’s realm on earth.
There is a spark of the divine image in every life. And if that spark is to burn on and burn a little more brightly tomorrow than it does today, it simply has to find some place of welcome in this world, a place where hospitality has been extended even to it. It’s how we were made by the loving source of that spark. All of us.
Both Martha and Mary truly see Jesus. It’s striking how truly seeing is a porthole into the presence of divinity. One wonders if it is no accident that our Creator attached the ducts from which our tears flow to the organ of sight–the eyes–our windows into the divine.
What healing in ourselves and in our world might result if we, like a son of Timaeus on the roadside one day, walked away from all the false and lesser stories and into the good and blessed cosmos of Jesus?