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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 20:11-18
A Sermon by
The Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of New York
on
John 20:11-18
✛
A homily given on the joyful occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Episcopal Ordination of the Right Reverend Andrew St. John
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What a wonderful celebration this is! To gather in this beautiful and historical church with the Girl Choirsters singing with the Gentlemen of the Choir on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene in the context of the characteristic hospitality offered by this community, and, to top it all off, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Ordination and Consecration of Andrew Reginald Saint John as Bishop in Melbourne, Australia, well…the word that comes to mind is WOW! It is an honor and a privilege for all of us to be here, and I am profoundly grateful for it all.
Bishop Andrew: a simple thank you doesn’t do justice to appreciating your presence and witness to the love of Christ in this world. Yet I am particularly grateful for the association of the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene and your Consecration. You were the first bishop in Australia to have a woman preach at your Consecration, but to me it is more significant that it was on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene – Apostle to the Apostles, and Patron Saint of those of us prone to weeping.
All of us, women and men alike, can learn some things from the very human and moving example of Mary Magdalene. Perhaps the first thing we can learn from her is the value of staying with what makes us weep. Crying, for most of us, carries with it something of a stigma. We feel weak, self-conscious, embarrassed, vulnerable. We may be afraid that we will put other people off, or imagine that they’re saying – “God, what’s wrong with her? She really doesn’t have it together!” Maybe we fear that once we get started, we may never stop. It may seem easier, and be less self-revealing, to cover-up our grief. We can over-work, act-out, or obsess about something else. Maybe we will even get physically sick.
But sometimes to remain in the presence of whatever agonizes us is not unhealthy. To stay with what makes us weep can be healing. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, says this about the value of grief:
You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? Only those sadnesses are danger and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent. [1]
Mary Magdalene stayed at the tomb, weeping. And “As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb;…” Two angels ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” and she tries to tell them. Then the Risen Jesus himself asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” and she tries to tell him. Then Jesus says to her one word: her name. “Mary.” In order to experience the power of being called by name, we need to hear the Risen Jesus saying our own name. Andrew. Carl. Alison. Lizette. Jesus said to her, “Mary.” In a sense, the power conveyed in being called by name is what happens at our baptism – and it happens again when we renew our baptismal covenant. We are called by name. We are claimed by Christ. “I have called you by name, you are mine.”
When I was eight years old, I got lost in Yankee Stadium. In those days I was a much better Yankee fan than I was a Christian; and my parents and sister had graciously accompanied me into the South Bronx to witness my beloved Yankees lose to the Chicago White Sox, 2-0 (I still remember the score!). When the game was over, the 20,000 or more people who were there all moved herd-like into the parking lot surrounding Yankee Stadium to go sit in traffic for a while. Thinking I knew, absolutely, just where the car was parked, I told my parents I was going to stop at a souvenir stand to pick up a button or something. I would meet them at the car. When I emerged from the stadium, button in hand, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what section or row the car had been in. There were thousands of cars, and everything looked the same to me. People were still rushing around, cars were honking their horns. I didn’t know what to do, so I stood still and cried. A nice woman came up to me and asked me if I was lost. Sobbing, I shook my head, “Yes”. She handed me over to a policeman, who led me away out of the crowd and safely into a marked-off section of grass back near the stadium. The policeman, in an effort to get me to stop crying, said to me, “Don’t cry, little girl – You’re right by the clubhouse door here. You may see somebody you know!” I thought he meant my parents – but when the door I was watching finally opened, out came Elston Howard, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford – the losing pitcher of the day, but who cared?
The trouble was, after they left, I was still lost, and I began to sob again, this time in desolation. Then, out of the huge noise of the bustling crowd, I finally heard a familiar voice and a familiar name. “Mary!” I heard. The voice was my father’s. I looked out and saw him in the crowd with a very worried expression on his face, and I shouted, “Dad!” – and I knew I had been found.
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”, and the power of being called by name brought Mary Magdalene to recognition and connection – and gave her the power to name as well. “Rabbouni!” “Teacher!” “It’s you, it’s really you!”
Mary Magdalene teaches us the value of staying with what makes us weep, and the power of being called by name leading to being able to name and make the connection in return. A third thing she can teach us is that witnessing means not only observing or experiencing – but also being willing to tell about it, to share it with others. This, in fact, is what Jesus explicitly instructs her to do: “go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'” And she does just that.
The truth of this statement about witnessing becomes even clearer when we imagine someone witnessing a crime and not being willing to tell about it. Very often witnesses are required for the truth of a situation to be revealed. A witness is one who not merely sees or experiences something but who is prepared to say that he or she saw or experienced it.
If Christian Faith means something to us, then how do we choose to witness to it? Returning to the figure of Mary Magdalene, we can learn something more as we ponder our own ways of witnessing. For Mary, and possibly for many of us, the order of events was crucial. There’s a pattern here: staying, naming, and telling. She stayed with what made her weep first. She stayed with what she didn’t understand. Then being called by name gave her the power to recognize the Risen Jesus even from that place of emptiness and grief. It also gave her the power to do her own naming and make her own connection with the Risen Jesus. Then, finally, Christ commands her to go and tell the other disciples. Staying, naming, and telling. The order is important. Mary Magdalene had to stay with what made her weep before she could name anything. She had to experience the Risen Jesus before she could tell about him.
For us, there are times when, if we try to tell about something before we’ve named it – it’s too scary. If we try to name it before we’ve entered fully into the experience, it’s inauthentic. Our preaching, our sharing, our telling of our faith is most authentic when we are speaking from our own experience.
Staying, naming, telling. Weeping, recognizing, sharing. Healing, believing, proclaiming. Mary Magdalene is a wonderful role model for us – thank you, Bishop Andrew! There’s one thing more. It’s a little strange what the Risen Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, isn’t it? I don’t exactly mean the “Do not hold on to me”, part. I take that to mean that basically the future is the gift we’re being given – the arena of our vocation. But when Jesus tells Mary what to tell the other disciples, he says, (“Tell them) I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Do you hear it? He could have just said “I’m ascending to God” – and I’ll wager she would have known Whom he meant. But instead, he kind of spells it out: “My Father and your Father, my God and your God.” And I think we are meant to hear from this something very important. We can have just the same kind of relationship with the God who made us all as Jesus did. In fact, we must have that kind of relationship. The Risen Jesus is passing the baton, so to speak. Jesus, in his earthly life, taught God’s Love with his own life, right to and through the end. Now the Risen Jesus will teach God’s Love as he never has before, because now he will teach the disciples with their own lives. God’s Love and God’s Life will be taught through our lives, as it has through your life, Bishop Andrew.
We reach out, as Mary Magdalene did, to embrace the One who knows us each by name; but we discover that this is a gift for our vision. God’s Love, God’s Life, needs to be proclaimed and shared. And our voices too must be steady enough to move among disciples and proclaim with quiet confidence: “I have seen the Lord!”
Sermon Audio
References
| ↑1 | Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, tr. by Stephen Mitchell, New York: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 1984, pp. 81-83 |
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