St Mary Magdalene, whose feast day falls tomorrow, plays a central role
in Jesus’s ministry.
Her name tells us that she came from Magdala, now called Migdal, then a
small fishing village on the Western shore of the Sea of Galilee, a little over
15 miles as the crow flies from Nazareth.
Luke tells us that she was one of several women who supported Jesus during
his ministry in Galilee, after being cured of 7 demons. In those days all kinds
of psychiatric illness were blamed on evil spirits. I think she must have been
in great distress when she encountered Jesus, to need so many demons to be
exorcised! We don’t know what her illness was, but perhaps she experienced psychotic
hallucinations or something like that.
Mary was one of the women who accompanied Jesus on his last trip to
Jerusalem. All 4 Gospels tell us she was one of those who watched and waited as
Jesus was crucified, and we are told that she was close by when he was put in the
tomb prepared for Joseph of Arimathea and the tomb was sealed with a stone on
Good Friday evening.
In the early morning of the first Easter Sunday she went to the sepulchre
with sweet spices to anoint Jesus’s body, and saw that the stone had been
rolled back. She ran back to tell Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved. She
returned to the tomb, weeping, and saw a vision of angels. And she said to them
‘They have
taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him’.
Turning around, she was the first to see the resurrected Jesus. She
didn’t recognise him at once. She thought he was the gardener, even when he
spoke to her. It was only when he called her by name, ‘Mary!’,
that she knew who he was, and responded ‘Rabbouni’, meaning teacher in
Hebrew.
And then she went to tell the disciples what she had experienced: ‘I have seen the
Lord’.
That’s all we hear of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, though no
doubt she was one of the women who joined the Apostles in the upper room after
Jesus’s ascension, as Acts tells us.
Many traditions and stories grew up about Mary Magdalene over the years.
Hundreds of years after her death, leaders of the Western Church
identified Mary Magdalene as the same person as John’s Mary of Bethany, and
Luke’s woman who was a sinner, who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears, dried
them with her hair, and anointed them with perfume. Pope Gregory the Great preached
a sermon about it in 591. But there is absolutely nothing in scripture to
support this.
Quite unfairly, Mary Magdalene
came to be seen as a prostitute who repented of her sins. There are many
beautiful pictures of her, traditionally with long red hair immodestly worn
down over her shoulders - other female saints have dark hair kept under a
scarf. And her name
was used for institutions for “fallen women”, including the notorious Magdalen
Laundries here in Ireland.
The Eastern Churches are quite sure Mary Magdalene is different to the
other two. In their tradition she retired to Ephesus with Mary the mother of
Jesus and died there.
But in Provence a quite different tradition arose in the late middle
ages. Mary Magdalene is supposed to have travelled with her brother Lazarus
across the Mediterranean in a frail boat without rudder or mast to land near
Arles. After converting Provence, she lived a life of penance in a cave for 30
years until her death, when angels carried her to her burial place in the
oratory of St Maxime at Aix. The monks of Vézelay in Burgundy competed for
years with the monks of St Maxime as to who had her real relics. They embellished
their stories as they relieved pious pilgrims of their money.
To do the real woman justice, we must chisel away the later legendary
incrustations, and get back to the simplicity of what we read in the gospels.
We should remember and celebrate Mary Magdalene, because as well as
being a close friend of Jesus and supporting his ministry, she walked with him on
the road to Calvary. She watched as he was cruelly murdered on the cross. She
was there when he was laid out in the tomb. And she was the first person to
experience his resurrection.
She was also the first person to carry the message of the resurrection,
when she rushed to tell the news to the disciples. She was literally the Apostle to the Apostles. Let us put
ourselves for a moment in her shoes that first Easter morning.
She was a seeker after God’s Kingdom. Jesus was her teacher. She
believed he was showing her the way to the Kingdom. But he had been arrested,
subjected to a show trial, and cruelly crucified. It must have seemed that all
she hoped and prayed for had been dashed. Yet she loved him, so she couldn’t
let him go without the proper rituals of mourning.
When she found the tomb apparently desecrated and the body gone, she
must have felt she was living a nightmare. But she didn’t give up - she kept on
seeking. She asked the person she thought was the gardener where the body had
been taken to.
Then Jesus called her by name. Jesus found her - only then did she find
him.
She heard Jesus say ‘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 did as he asked. She
must have felt an overwhelming joy, when she announced to the disciples ‘I have seen the
Lord’.
What Mary Magdalene teaches us can be summed up in three words: Seek,
Find, Tell.
If we seek God, we shall find him - but only when he calls us by name. And
then we are compelled to repeat his message to others.
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