This was the chance of a lifetime: to sit at the feet of Jesus. And Just a note here on historical context: "sit at the feet of" a rabbi was a formal term in the religious language of Judaism. To "sit at the feet of" meant to be "a student of" a rabbi. So in other words, Mary had not just sloughed-off her kitchen duties for an hour or so one afternoon, but had become a regular student of Jesus, spending significant amounts of time with him absorbing his teaching. Her life routine had changed noticeably. So what we read in Luke 10:38-42 not a spontaneous outburst of sisterly anger, but the flashpoint of a long-building tension between these two sisters.

 Mary had leapt at the opportunity, Martha had not. This is not a good sister/ bad sister story. Nor is it about spiritual people vs worldly people. If nothing else, this is a story of radical social behaviour for there is no record that any Jewish rabbi had ever before accepted a female student. And if a rabbi allowed someone to "sit at his feet" it was for the sole purpose of grooming that person to be a rabbi themselves. The social implications of kingdom of God living here are immense! For Jesus to allow women to sit at his feet speaks of the incredible empowerment he gives them in the church. And perhaps Martha was still unable to bridge that kind of a cultural gap. And so her sister’s behaviour offended her.