Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus

Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus were siblings from Bethany, a village near Jerusalem. Jesus came to their home as a friend, and the Gospel of John says plainly that he loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. The Church commemorates all three on July 29.

Everything known about them comes from the Gospels; we do not know their ages, their occupations or the dates of their lives. Saint Luke relates that Martha welcomed Jesus into her home, and her sister Mary sat at his feet and listened to his word. Martha, busy with serving, asked Jesus to tell her sister to help her. She was told that she was anxious and worried about many things, but there was need of only one thing, and that Mary had chosen the better part, which would not be taken from her.

When Lazarus fell ill, the sisters sent word to Jesus that the one he loved was ill. Jesus came to Bethany when Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. Martha went out to meet him, and he said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Martha answered with a profession of faith that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world; the Roman Martyrology quotes it in its entry for the day.

Then Mary came, fell at Jesus’ feet and wept, and he, seeing her weep, wept too. At the tomb he had the stone taken away and cried out, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with burial bands. Many of the witnesses came to believe in Jesus, and the Sanhedrin resolved to put him to death.

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany again. A dinner was given for him there: Martha served, Lazarus was among those at table, and Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfumed oil of nard and dried them with her hair. Because many came to believe in Jesus on account of Lazarus, the chief priests resolved to kill him as well. The Gospels say nothing of the siblings’ later lives or of their deaths. The medieval legend that they came to Provence, where Lazarus is said to have become bishop of Marseilles, is late and has no firm basis in the sources.

The place where Lazarus was raised has been venerated since antiquity. By the end of the fourth century a church called the Lazarium stood there, and the pilgrim Egeria described how on the Saturday before Palm Sunday the clergy and the faithful of Jerusalem gathered in it.

In the Latin Church there was long uncertainty whether Mary of Bethany was the same person as Mary Magdalene or the sinful woman whose sins the Lord forgave, and so only Martha appeared in the Roman calendar on July 29. By a decree of January 26, 2021, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments declared that more recent studies had resolved this doubt and, by decision of Pope Francis, inscribed the memorial of Martha, Mary and Lazarus in the General Roman Calendar. It gave their witness as the reason: they welcomed Jesus into their home, listened attentively to him and believed that he is the resurrection and the life. The Church honors Mary Magdalene separately on July 22.