Today’s reading is very familiar, not only because we may have heard it quite a few Sundays at church, but because every one of us has had experiences like Martha’s. Martha clearly had her priorities reversed, prioritizing her tasks as a hostess over giving her full attention to Jesus.

Perhaps Martha overdid her serving due to cultural obeisance or overzealous hospitality. We cannot know Martha’s motives, but her experience should be familiar to each of us when we mistake busyness for love or productivity for relationship.

Pointless busyness and incessant distractions are on orders of magnitude worse in our day, in the 21st century, than in the 1st, in Martha’s time. Our attention is in high demand by everything that is not important, and large swaths of the economy depend on exploiting this “attention economy.”

Resisting such relentless temptations requires much more countercultural courage and fortitude than what Martha faced, but the stakes are equally high, if not higher. Our attention is a precious, limited resource. Proper allocation of those resources requires skill and discernment in the face of stiff competition.

In the famous book, Screwtape Letters, Screwtape’s advice to his nephew, an apprentice demon named Wormwood, was spot on in 1942, when C. S. Lewis’ story was first published. Screwtape emphasized the importance of separating man from God by capturing his attention. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to suspect that the internet, and all its content and apps, including social media, is Screwtape’s dream invention.

In the end, the hardest piece of advice in the whole Bible is in Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” That was Jesus’s challenge to Martha, and to us, for our every waking minute.