In this painting, Christ sits in the house of his close friends, the sisters Martha and Mary. While Martha is busy cleaning, cooking for, and serving the son of God, Mary sits calmly and contentedly at his feet and listens to him preach. Martha rebukes Christ for not encouraging the other sister to get up and help with the chores but Christ explains that while Martha is "worried and upset by many things," Mary needs "only one," that being the word of God. Martha was seen to be a personification of the active Catholic path where good deeds and humility led to salvation, but Mary is thought to be a symbol for the quiet, contemplative life of Protestantism, which required only the word of God for redemption. 

This is one of the rare Biblical depictions by Vermeer, the painting radically depicted an intimate scene with Christ as if it were an ordinary, everyday scene. The artist Diego Velázquez would go on to recreate his own version of this iconic scene.

In his own way, Vermeer was conveying the theological struggle between Protestants and Catholics that raged not only within his own country, the Netherlands, but also within himself. As a recent convert to Catholicism, after his marriage  in 1653, it is unsurprising that one of his first works would depict this Biblical scene. Interestingly, some art historians have suggested that owing to the canvas size, which is the largest of all Vermeer's surviving works, it seems likely that this was a commission for a hidden Catholic church. People who followed the Pope's religion were persecuted in much of Northern Europe and forced to hide their spiritual convictions and services in secret basements or disguised lofts.