to be dragged in every direction: so overloaded with tasks that one's attention is pulled away from what matters most
The word paints a physical picture. It is built from a verb meaning to drag, pull, or tear (the same word used for drawing a sword from its sheath) and a prefix meaning around. So at its root it means to pull someone around, even to spin them in circles. In the everyday Greek of the New Testament era it became the ordinary word for being dragged around by work, errands, and officials: something has successfully pulled you off the course you meant to keep.
Luke uses it once, of Martha, and the grammar keeps her in motion: she was being pulled around, on and on, the whole time her sister Mary sat still at Jesus' feet. She is not seized by a single moment of panic. She is tugged this way and that by more serving than she can hold, unable to stop long enough to listen.
The verb pulls in two directions at once. Martha is being drawn away from one thing, the words of Jesus, and absorbed into another, the many demands of hosting. That double pull is the heart of the scene. The Greek translation of the Old Testament had used this same word in Ecclesiastes for the tiring business God gives people to keep them occupied, and Paul later used its exact opposite, ἀπερισπάστως, a word meaning undistracted, for undivided attention on the Lord. Martha embodies the failure of that ideal; Mary, sitting quietly, embodies its attainment.
What Luke signals by describing Martha as pulled around by her serving: an implied correction of anxious distraction, or a narrative move that downplays a woman's ministry.
- majorityLuke describes anxious over-occupation, and Jesus gently reorients Martha rather than condemning her service: she is pulled away from the one thing needful by her many tasks.; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV, AB 28A (1985), 891-94; Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (1978), 452; Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, BECNT (1996), 1039-43
- minorityThe serving Martha is pulled around by is ministerial leadership, not kitchen work, and Luke's language of distraction functions to sideline a woman leader in the early church.; Schussler Fiorenza, "Martha and Mary: Luke 10:38-42," Religion and Intellectual Life 3.2 (1986): 21-36; Carter, "Getting Martha out of the Kitchen: Luke 10:38-42 Again," CBQ 58 (1996): 264-80; Collins, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources (1990), 245-47