Jul 22 | “I have seen the Lord!” (Sermon, July 22nd – Mary Magdalene)

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. ²So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ ³Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb.

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; ¹²and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ¹³They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ ¹⁴When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. ¹⁵Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ ¹⁶Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). ¹⁷Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ ¹⁸Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

John 20:1-3, 11-18

 

We’re in what the Godly Play curriculum refers to as “the green and growing time” of the church year, and yet we have this little slice of Easter peeking through at us, because today we celebrate Mary Magdalene, who some have called the Apostle to the Apostles. The name “Magdala” may refer to her place of birth, or it may refer to something more: in Aramaic Magdala meant “tower” or “elevated, great, magnificent.”

I feel a special connection with her for a number of reasons. I consider her the patron saint of my marriage, and a close friend also refers to me as “his Mary Magdalene.” I haven’t yet asked him what it means. I’m a little worried about what the answer might be!

After all, you might be familiar with her complicated history. She plays a role in all four Gospels and is one of the first people to see the resurrected Jesus. She also looms large in several of the documents discovered at the Nag Hammadi library, particularly the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, and in fact, among those documents is a Gospel that bears her name. The Nag Hammadi documents tend to have one thing in common: they tell of difficulties between Mary and the other disciples, particularly between her and Peter. We don’t know precisely what this means, but it seems to foreshadow the controversies that have followed Mary since the beginning.

It took several generations before Mary was merged with other characters in the Gospel stories, like the adulterous woman saved from stoning by Jesus; or Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus; or the unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’ feet. She went from being a disciple of Jesus who had received an exorcism of seven demons, to a penitent sinner, to a prostitute or woman of ill repute. Paintings of the era show a woman with fiery hair loose around bare shoulders, eyes rhapsodically cast upward toward heaven, made new in the light of Christ. I actually rather enjoy some of these pictures, which show her remaining wild, as she was imagined to be before following Jesus, and not hidden under miles of modest veils as a response to her salvation. However, it was never appropriate to conflate her with these other women. So at first it may have appeared to be a welcome correction to read The Da Vinci Code when it came out and slapped down the idea that Mary was a prostitute (even though it was rather presumptuous to assume that no-one had figured this out). However, in the book there was a similarly problematic assumption, which was that Mary Magdalene must have been married to or romantically involved with Jesus. We will never know that for sure. And again, it’s not as if this was a new hypothesis: the Cathars, a medieval sect, believed the same thing and suffered greatly under the rule of Pope Innocent III, who slaughtered many of them on the Magdalene’s feast day for slandering her.

I find that the problem of these visions of Mary Magdalene is that they render her eternally passive, very much like another famous Mary. The earlier movement of the church framed her story as one of a “defiled” woman who was made a new creation in Christ through being cleansed of her former liaisons with other men. The movement of society after The Da Vinci Code framed her story as the beloved wife of Christ, who bore him children and established a line of holy descendants. My question is, “Why are we so tempted to make Mary into an object who is acted upon, rather than ever letting her have a chance to be one who acts?”

After all, the Gospel today shows her quite active. She comes to the tomb. She sees the stone. She runs to the others and speaks to them. She weeps. She demands information of the stranger she sees standing there. And finally, she sees Jesus, and he calls her by name, because the Good Shepherd knows each of his sheep by name. He calls and the floodlights come on for her. And then, most intriguingly, she can’t hold onto him. He doesn’t let her.

She has to take charge now. She is told to go and tell the others, and she does.

Although other Gospels and traditions include stories about what Mary did after she talked to the disciples, we don’t see her again in this Gospel. Maybe that could remind us of the Samaritan woman in Chapter 4, who runs into the town to tell them about the mysterious stranger who met her at the well at noon, the way Isaac met Rebecca, and Jacob met Rachel. We never find out what happens to her afterward either.

For me the true beauty of the Magdalene is in her commission and her faith. You can see it in the gratitude she had for Jesus granting her freedom from those seven demons, her ability to stand beside him in the darkness and to welcome him in the morning (even if she didn’t know it at first) and her strength in going to the others and doing what she had been commissioned to do, even if, as some of the other Gospels suggest, none of them believed her at first.

My prayer for myself and all of us is that we follow her example – that we allow ourselves to be healed of the things that hold us back from discipleship and respond with joy and service; that we go to the dark places – the tombs – of our world and perform the rituals of care required by the forgotten and destitute (even if they eventually turn out to be unnecessary, as in Jesus’ case!), and that we have no hesitation in speaking out the truth:

We have seen the Lord.