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Saint Mary Magdalene
[caption id="attachment_272961" align="alignnone" width="1500"]
Christ depicted with Mary Magdalen in the Peace Window in the clerestory of Saint Thomas Church[/caption]
Almighty God, whose blessed Son restored Mary Magdalene to health of body and mind, and called her to be a witness of his resurrection: Mercifully grant that by thy grace we may be healed of all our infirmities and know thee in the power of his endless life; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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Saint Mary Magdalene
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Scripture citation(s): John 20:1-2, 11-18
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
John 20:1-2, 11-18
✛
Mary Magdalene: Her Heart's Desire
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To put it in a word, what Saint Mary Magdalene means to us is that, in the end, God will grant each of us our heart’s desire.
+ + +
She appears in every Gospel as one of the women at the crucifixion of Jesus and as the first human being to go to his tomb. Every Gospel tells us that about her, yet nothing about her prior life is given to us except for a very short mention by Saint Luke. At the beginning of his 8th chapter, Luke says that as Jesus went through cities and villages preaching and healing, the twelve disciples went with him, and “also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out”—and then two other women, and then Luke says of the three that they “provided for [Jesus and the disciples] out of their means.”
Now that is mighty little information, yet but a few words can suggest many things.
She is called “Magdalene,” after the town she came from; she is not identified in relation to a man, either husband or son. Furthermore, she has control of her wealth, which suggests independence. Luke tells us, in a mere prepositional phrase, that from her “seven demons had gone out”—we don’t witness this exorcism; we are not told what she suffered while she was oppressed with that condition; we see her obliquely only but that as a strong woman whose intelligence and gratitude, we may suppose, led her to support Jesus and to follow him more tenaciously than any other person, man or woman, all the way to the resurrection.
It is right for us to use our imaginations when we read the Bible. The style of biblical narrative is deliberately spare, and that draws us inside to explore what might be the feelings and motivations of biblical characters. We are invited to go inside Mary Magdalene, as it were, so that, God willing, with a biblical imagination we can think and feel with her.
One historical result of Christian imagination at work was to conflate Mary Magdalene with two other women in the Gospels. The first is a woman without a name, whose story is told at the end of the 7th chapter of Saint Luke, thus just before the naming of Mary Magdalene. This unnamed person, identified as a woman of the city and a sinner, pours out her tears upon Jesus’ feet and kisses and anoints them and wipes them with her hair; Jesus pronounces forgiveness of her sins. The other is Mary of Bethany, who, in Saint John’s gospel, anoints Jesus’ feet with costly nard and wipes them with her hair. I am told that it was Tertullian who first conflated the two women who anointed Jesus’ feet, and Gregory the Great who finally equated both of them with Mary Magdalene. The Western church’s iconography continued this identification until recently; it is, however, generally rejected in modern scholarship and liturgical calendars.
+ + +
So Luke tells us that Jesus delivered Mary Magdalene from demonic possession and she then ministered to him and his disciples. From that moment of deliverance on, she never abandoned Jesus or ran away. She did not even turn away during the painful and excruciating hours upon hours of his dying. And at the first opportunity, on Sunday morning when it was still dark, she went to Jesus’ tomb and found the stone taken away. It is she who brought news of Jesus’ resurrection to the disciples. And Saint John draws out the story in a drama that is unforgettable.
She ran and told Peter and John that the stone was gone, and that “They [unnamed persons] have taken the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter and John run back to the tomb. They look into the tomb and see the empty burial cloths, and John believes, and they go back to their homes—going right past, and not seeing, the woman who stood weeping outside the tomb.
She sees angels in the tomb—she is the first and only one to see them—and they ask her why she is weeping. She says to them what she said to Peter and John: “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” She turns around and there is Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him. He asks her why she is weeping; “Whom seekest thou?” She supposes he’s the gardener; she supposes he may have moved the body; she says, “tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”
And then Jesus says her name. “Mary.” And at once she recognizes him. “Rabboni,” she says, which means Teacher.
And let us fill in the blanks. Jesus has said he is the good shepherd who knows his sheep, and that his sheep know him. Why? Because he calls them by name.
“Mary,” he says. Because he calls her by name, she now sees him for who he is.
And hearing that, what do we see? I see her embracing him. She clings to him. She wants him to come back now, back to the fellowship of his disciples and friends.
But he says (literally), “Don’t cling to me, don’t continue touching me.” And what he reveals to her is that his glorification, his lifting up, that great process of salvation that began with the Cross and continues through resurrection and ascension to the Father from which he came, that great lifting up has been interrupted, just for her sake, just so that she could understand something very important. She can’t have Jesus back the way he used to be. But once he has been lifted up, once the lifting up is complete, he has promised to give the Holy Spirit. And what does that mean?
He explains it to her. “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
Does Mary, hearing between the lines, realize the import of that word “brethren”? [Note: For background on what follows, see Raymond Brown’s commentary.] It is the first time Jesus has named the disciples with this family word. They are now, like Mary, like you and me, Jesus’ brothers and sisters. And he is going, he says, not to his Father, but “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The gift of the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus once he was lifted up, is now coming. The sequel shows that Mary gets it. There is that great crucifixion psalm, number 22, that Mary, like Jesus, would have held in memory: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” it begins, but at the end: “I will declare thy Name unto my brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.” Mary returns and tells the disciples: “I have seen the Lord.” “Lord,” she says, Kyrios: the Greek translation for the name of God, Yahweh. I have seen the Lord, and he is risen, and he is God, and his Father is now our Father, and he is giving his Spirit to us.
+ + +
What is it that you really want?
“I’ve felt this oppression all my life, like demons. I want it to go away.”
Done: Jesus has taken it away. But what do you really want?
“I am full of gratitude; I want to be with Jesus and minister to him.”
Done: you will go with him for the rest of his life. But what do you really want?
“I want to have courage and faith so that I don’t turn away when it gets hard at the end.”
You will have courage and faith. Is that really what you want?
“There’s more. Even after he dies, I don’t want to lose him.”
You won’t lose him, but you won’t be able to hang on to him. Is that what you really want?
“No. My heart’s desire is to have his Spirit.”
It is yours: you will proclaim his resurrection; you will praise him in the great assembly.
