Gospel: John 20:1 - 18
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. 2 So 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.’ 3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12 and 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. 13 They 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.’ 14 When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus 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.’ 16 Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus 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.”’ 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her…’.
In our gospel, Mary Magdalene is the first at the tomb “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark”, Mary Magdalene is the one who sees stone had been removed from the tomb and she then 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. Tradition has it that John is “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” as he is modestly portrayed in the gospel that bears his name.
John describes how only Mary Magdalene remains at the empty tomb, and that Mary Magdalene is the first to hear from Angels that Jesus is risen, and she is also the first to see and talk to the resurrected Christ! Clearly, she was a woman of great faith, and great love.
Tonight we’re reflecting on the example of Mary Magdalene – she is someone who truly loved Jesus, someone who truly went the extra mile for Him, and yet she has been so vilified by the church over the years… WHY? Can she show us how we too can follow Jesus more fully?
Firstly, who was Mary Magdalene, really?
Mary Magdalene has been represented in many different ways throughout history, from the writing of the New Testament to the filming of “The Da Vinci Code”, her image has been repeatedly conscripted, contorted and contradicted….
For many centuries the most revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, yet she was only elusively identified in Scripture, and, in one age after another, her image was reinvented, from prostitute to mystic to celibate nun to feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty.
How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination—all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth.
Who was she? From the New Testament, one can conclude that Mary of Magdala (her hometown, a village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee) was a leading figure among those attracted to Jesus.
When the men abandoned Jesus at his hour of mortal danger, Mary of Magdala was one of the women who stayed with him, even to the Crucifixion. She was present at the tomb, the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection and the first to preach the “Good News” of that miracle, as we read in John’s Gospel earlier. An example of how we too can follow Jesus more fully…
These are among the few specific assertions made about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. From other texts of the early Christian era, it seems that her status as an “apostle,” in the years after Jesus’ death, rivaled even that of Peter.
This prominence derived from the intimacy of her relationship with Jesus, beginning with the threads of these few statements in the earliest Christian records, dating to the first through third centuries, an elaborate tapestry was woven, leading to a portrait of St. Mary Magdalene in which the most consequential note—that she was a repentant prostitute—is almost certainly untrue.
On that false note hangs the dual use to which her legend has been put ever since: discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular. NOT how to follow Jesus!!
Confusions attached to Mary Magdalene’s character were compounded across time as her image was conscripted into one power struggle after another, in conflicts that defined the Christian Church:
- over attitudes toward the material world, focused on sexuality;
- the authority of an all-male clergy;
- celibacy;
- the branding of theological diversity as heresy;
Through all the ages, reinventions of Mary Magdalene played their role.
Her recent reemergence in a novel and film as the “secret wife of Jesus and the mother of his fate-burdened daughter” shows that the conscripting and twisting are still going on.
But, in truth, the confusion starts with the Gospels themselves – there is a powerful message of feminism in the New Testament, as well as attempts to repress women.
In the gospels the confusion regarding Mary of Magdala, begins in the eighth chapter of Luke: “Now after this [Jesus] made his way through towns and villages preaching, and proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom of God. With him went the Twelve, as well as certain women who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments: Mary surnamed the Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and several others who provided for them out of their own resources”.
Two things of note are implied in this passage. First, these women “provided for” Jesus and the Twelve, which suggests that the women were well-to-do, respectable figures.
Second, they all had been cured of something, including Mary Magdalene. The “seven demons,” as applied to her, indicates an ailment (not necessarily possession) of a certain severity.
This otherwise innocuous reference to Mary Magdalene takes on a kind of radioactive narrative energy because of what immediately precedes it at the end of the seventh chapter, an anecdote of stupendous power:
“One of the Pharisees invited [Jesus] to a meal. When he arrived at the Pharisee’s house and took his place at table, a woman came in, who had a bad name in the town. She had heard he was dining with the Pharisee and had brought with her an alabaster jar of ointment. She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who this woman is that is touching him and what a bad name she has.”
But Jesus refuses to condemn her, or even to deflect her gesture. Indeed, he recognizes it as a sign that “her many sins must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love.” “Your faith has saved you,” Jesus tells her. “Go in peace.”
This story of the woman with the bad name, the alabaster jar, the loose hair, the “many sins,” the stricken conscience, the ointment, the rubbing of feet and the kissing would, over time, become the dramatic high point of the story of Mary Magdalene. The scene would be explicitly attached to her, and rendered again and again by the greatest Christian artists.
But even a casual reading of this text, however charged its juxtaposition with the subsequent verses, suggests that the two women have nothing to do with each other—the weeping anointer is no more connected to Mary of Magdala than she is to Joanna or Susanna.
Across time, this Mary went from being an important disciple whose superior status depended on the confidence Jesus himself had invested in her, a woman who shows us how we too can follow Jesus more fully, to a repentant whore whose status depended on the erotic charge of her history and the misery of her stricken conscience.
In part, this development may have arisen out of a natural impulse to see the fragments of Scripture whole.
This “composite Mary Magdalene” lives on as Mary in Western Christianity and in the secular Western imagination, right down, say, to the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, in which Mary Magdalene sings, “I don’t know how to love him...He’s just a man, and I’ve had so many men before... I want him so. I love him so.”
The story has timeless appeal, first, because that problem of “how”—whether love should be eros or agape; sensual or spiritual; a matter of longing or consummation—defines the human condition.
For women, the maternal can seem to be at odds with the erotic, a tension that in men can be reduced to the well-known opposite sterotypes of women as either “the Virgin madonna” or “the whore”, and while Mary, the mother of Jesus has been forced into the role of the “Virgin Madonna”, Mary of Magdala has been forced into the role of the “whore”.
Both sterotypes, though, ignore the example of Gospel love - Jesus, the Jesus whom both Maries loved, the Jesus who rose from the dead, treated them both with the same dignity, honesty and respect that he treated all people.
The truth is that Mary Magdalene was undoubtedly not only a brave follower of Christ, but also a prominent leader in the early church, a woman who lived the resurrection life Jesus is calling us all to live, as we too face the prejudices and cultural, social , economic and political evil of our time bravely, even if it means we’ll be vilified too.
Amen!
Rev Gavin Smith
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