MARTHA: "Jesus loves Mary. He too is a spirit of cobweb and starlight, and I think his soul finds some answering echo in her that he finds nowhere else. They rarely speak, but they sit together long after everyone else is in bed, and their silence breathes some strange presence through the house, so that when I get up in the morning, I can still feel it lingering.​
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But Jesus loves me too, He's also a creature of the earth, a hungry, gregarious man who eats and drinks and laughs and sometimes talks too much, and says the wrong thing in the wrong place so that everyone takes offence. If Mary is his companion in silence and the solitude of night, then I am his companion in the laughter and the conversations of daily life, and for the first time ever I realize that my role is as important as hers."
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How did the women round Jesus experience the last supper? This imaginative retelling of the biblical account is narrated by sisters Martha and Mary. Lyrical, dramatic, strongly rooted in time and place, it imagines what it was like to be among the anarchic group of followers gathered around Jesus on the night before his death. Outside, Jerusalem broods in darkness, but what passions, hopes and fears swirl among the friends gathered in an upper room, as tensions rise and a terrible sense of foreboding creeps through them?
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REVIEWS OF
THE LAST SUPPER ACCORDING TO MARTHA AND MARY
Powerful, moving, original and well-written. ... It is both bold and beautiful. And the last two pages are completely wonderful - theology, poetry and humanity met together. "
Sara Maitland
novelist and theologian
... depicts two very real people and their own struggle in faith. ... The witness of the two women creates for the reader a very different picture of the night in question."
The Furrow
That there were more than a handful of men caught up in this extraordinary epoch is a point that is well known, but rarely so well articulated.
Nick Mayhew-Smith
