Mary Magdalene

Today, July the twenty-first, is the eve of the feast of St Mary Magdalene,
if you are the sort of church that celebrates that sort of thing.
Methodists don’t tend to, of course, but nevertheless I can't resist having a look at Mary Magdalene today, because she is such an intriguing person.
We know very little about her for definite:

Firstly, that Jesus cast out seven demons from her, according to Luke chapter 8 verse 2, and Mark chapter 16 verse 9.

From then on, she appears in the lists of people who followed Jesus, and is one of the very few women mentioned by name all the time.

She was at the Cross, helping the Apostle John to support Jesus' mother Mary.

And, of course, she was the first witness to the Resurrection, and according to John's Gospel, she was actually the first person to see and to speak to the Risen Lord.

And that is basically all that we reliably know about her –
all that the Bible tells us, at any rate.

But, of course, that's not the end of the story.
Even the Bible isn't quite as clear as it might be,
and some Christians believe that she is the woman described as a “sinner” who disrupts the banquet given by Simon the Leper, or Simon the Pharisee or whoever he was by emptying a vial of ointment over his feet –
Jesus' feet, I mean, not Simon's –
and wiping it away with her hair.
Simon, you may recall, was furious, and Jesus said that the woman had done a lot more for him than he had –
he hadn't offered him any water to wash his feet, or made him feel at all welcome.

Anyway, that woman is often identified with Mary Magdalene,
although some say it is Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus.
Some even say they are all three one and the same woman!

So if even the Bible isn't clear whether there are one, two or three women involved, you can imagine what the extra-Biblical traditions are like!

Nobody seems to know where she was born, or when.
Arguably in Magdala, but there seem to have been a couple of places called that in Biblical times.
However, one of them, Magdala Nunayya, was on the shores of Lake Galilee, so it might well have been there.
But nobody knows for certain.

She wasn't called Mary, of course;
that is an Anglicisation of her name.
The name was Maryam or Miriam, which was very popular around then as it had royal family connections,
rather like people in my generation calling their daughters Anne,
or all the Dianas born in the 1980s or,
perhaps, today, the Catherines or Charlottes.
So she was really Maryam, not Mary –
as, indeed, were all the biblical Marys.

They don't know where she died, either.
One rather splendid legend has her, and the other two women called Mary, being shipwrecked in the Carmargue at the town now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer, and she is thought to have died in that area.
But then again, another legend has her accompanying Mary the mother of Jesus and the disciple John to Ephesus and dying there.
Nobody knows.

And there are so many other legends and rumours and stories about her –
even one that she was married to Jesus,
or that she was “the beloved disciple”, and those parts of John's gospel where she and the beloved disciple appear in the same scene were hastily edited later when it became clear that a woman disciple being called “Beloved” Simply Would Not Do.

But whoever she was, and whatever she did or did not do,
whether she was a former prostitute or a perfectly respectable woman who had become ill and Jesus had healed,
it is clear that she did have some kind of special place in the group of people surrounding Jesus.
And because she was the first witness to the Resurrection, and went to tell the other disciples about it, she has been called “The Apostle to the Apostles”.
So what can we learn from her?

Well, the first thing we really know about her is that Jesus had healed her.
She had allowed Jesus to heal her.
Now, healing, of course, is as much about forgiveness and making whole as it is about curing physical symptoms, if not more so.
One may be healed without necessarily being cured!
And Mary allowed Jesus to make her whole.

This isn't something we find easy to do, is it?
We are often quite comfortable in our discomfort, if that makes sense.
If we allowed Jesus to heal us, to make us whole, whether in body, mind or spirit, we might have to do something in return.
We might have to give up our comfortable lifestyles and actually go and do something!

What Mary did, of course, was to give up her lifestyle,
whatever it might have been, and follow Jesus.
We don't know whether she was a prostitute,
as many have thought down the years,
or whether she was a respectable woman,
but whichever she was, she gave it all up to follow Jesus.
She was the leader of the group of women who went around with Jesus and the disciples,
and who made sure that everybody had something to eat,
and everybody had a blanket to sleep under,
or shelter if it was a rough night, or whatever.
Mary gave up everything to follow Jesus.

Again, we quail at the thought of that, even though following Jesus may well mean staying exactly where we are, with our present job and our family. Almost definitely will, for the older ones among us!

But Mary didn't quail.
She even accompanied Jesus to the foot of the Cross,
and stood by him in his final hours.
And then, early in the morning of the third day after he was killed,
she goes to the tomb to finish off the embalming she hadn't been able to do during the Sabbath Day.

And we know what happened –
how she found the tomb empty, and raced back to tell Peter and John about it, and how they came and looked and saw and realised something had happened and dashed off, leaving her weeping in the garden –
and then the beloved voice saying “Mary!” and with a cry of joy, she flings herself into his arms.

We’re not told how long they spent hugging, talking, explaining and weeping in each other’s arms,
but eventually Jesus gently explains that,
although he’s perfectly alive, and that this is a really real body one can hug,
he won’t be around on earth forever, but will ascend to the Father.
He can’t stop with Mary for now,
but she should go back and tell the others all about it.
And so, we are told, she does.

She tells the rest of the disciples how she has seen Jesus.
She is the first witness to the Resurrection, although you will note that St Paul leaves her out of his list of people who saw the Risen Lord.
That was mostly because the word of a woman,
in that day and age, was considered unreliable;
women were not considered capable of rational judgement.
At least Jesus was different!

So Mary allowed Jesus to heal her, she gave up everything and followed him, she went with him even to the foot of the Cross,
even when most of the male disciples, except John, had run away,
and she bore witness to the risen Christ.

The question is, of course, do we do any of these things?
We don't find them comfortable things to do, do we?
It was all very well for Mary, we say, she knew Jesus,
she knew what he looked like, what he liked to eat, what made him laugh, and so on.
We don’t.
We often find it very difficult to even envisage him as a human being, someone just like us who we would probably have liked enormously had we known him on earth, even if we had been a little scared of him!

But we don't have to do these things in our own strength.
The Jesus who loved Mary Magdalene, in whatever way,
he will come to us and fill us with His Holy Spirit and enable us, too,
to be healed,
to follow Him, even to the foot of the Cross,
and to bear witness to His resurrection.
The question is, are we going to let him?
Amen.

Is God in this?

 

You probably know the story of the time there was a big flood,
and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape.
One guy thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so he thought, God’s power,
so he prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said
“Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend,
“I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And he carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for him to jump in,
but he sent them away, too,
and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but he still refused, claiming that he was relying on God to save him.

And half an hour later, he was swept away and drowned.

So, because he was a Christian, as you can imagine, he ended up in Heaven,
and the first thing he did when he got there was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God,
“What do you mean by letting me down like this?
I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter –
what more did you want?”

In a way, that’s rather what happened to Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning.
He has gone home for the weekend.
Big mistake!
Because on the Sabbath Day, he goes to the synagogue with his family,
and because he’s home visiting for the weekend,
they ask him to choose the reading from the Prophets.
Luke’s version of this story tells us that he read from the prophet Isaiah,
the bit where it says:
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn.”

Mark doesn’t go into such detail,
but he does tell us that Jesus’ friends and family were amazed.
“Where did this man get these things?” they asked.
“What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles!”
And we’re told they were rather offended.
“He’s only the Carpenter’s son, Mary’s lad.
These are his brothers and sisters.
He can’t be special.”
And they were offended, so we are told.
Luke says they even picked up stones to throw at him to make him go away.
But Mark says that he could do no miracles there, just one or two healings.

And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

After all, they thought, what did he know?
He’s just a local lad, a builder.
Ought to be home working with his brothers,
not gadding about the country claiming to be a prophet.
They couldn’t hear God’s voice speaking through him.
They didn’t expect to, and they didn’t want to.
Like the man in my story, they had very definite ideas about how God worked,
and working through a local boy they’d known since childhood wasn’t one of them!

So Jesus leaves them alone,
and goes off on a tour of the local country, teaching and healing as he went.
And then he starts to send out his disciples, two by two, giving them authority over “impure spirits”.
They are sent out with literally only their walking-staffs,
rather like modern-day trekking poles.
No food, he tells them, no money, no bag –
you can wear sandals, if you wish, but don’t take an extra shirt.
The disciples are to rely on God’s provisions for them,
staying wherever they are first welcomed –
and not moving next door if next door’s cooking is better!
And if they are not welcomed, they are to leave at once, without comment, but shaking the dust off their feet.

And, we are told, that’s just what the disciples did.
They drove out evil spirits, they anointed people with oil,
and healed people,
bringing the good news of God’s Kingdom far and wide.

We aren’t told how long they were on the road,
but I imagine not more than a couple of months.
We are told that when they came back,
Jesus tried to take them to a quiet place to debrief them,
but so many people were following them all by this time that it became impossible,
so he went on teaching the crowds,
and eventually fed them with the contents of a small boy’s lunchbox!

For the disciples, this must have been an exciting interlude in their lives.
But in the other gospels we are told that when they were able to tell Jesus that even evil spirits responded to them,
Jesus said that really, what mattered was that their names were written in the Kingdom of Heaven.

A modern paraphrase puts it:
"All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God's authority over you and presence with you.
Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing."

Do we have definite ideas about how God works, I wonder?
Do we expect to see God working in the ordinary, the every day?
Or do we expect him always to come down with power and fire from Heaven?
Do we expect Him to speak to us through other people,
perhaps even through me,
or do we expect Him to illuminate a verse of the Bible specially,
or write His message in fiery letters in the sky?

Because we are human, we do sometimes
long and long to see God at work in the spectacular,
the kind of thing that Jesus used to do when he healed the sick
and even raised the dead.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!” as the prophet says.
And very occasionally God is gracious enough to give us such signs.
But mostly, these days, He heals through modern medicine,
guiding scientists to develop medicines,
and vaccines,
and surgical techniques that can do things our ancestors only dreamed about.
And through complementary medical techniques
which address the whole person, not just the illness.
And through love and hugs and sympathy and support.

We do need to learn to recognise God at work.
All too often, we walk blindly through our week, not noticing God –
and yet God is there.
God is there and going on micro-managing His creation,
no matter how unaware of it we are.
And God is there to speak to us through the words of a friend, or an acquaintance.
If we need rescuing, God is a lot more likely to send a friend to do it than to come in person!

Another story concerns two men who were talking in their club.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” said the first man. “Have you been away?”
“Yes, I went on a trip to North Africa. It was very hairy! I got lost in the desert – my own silly fault, of course – and ended up calling on God to save me!”
“Oh really. How did God do that? I mean, obviously you were saved, as you’re here now.”
“Oh no, God didn’t need to do anything, because just at that moment a caravan appeared on the horizon, and they saw me and came to the rescue!”
We do need to be open to how God is working!

And conversely, we need to be open to God at work in us, so that we can be the friend who does the speaking, or the rescuing.
Not that God can’t use people who don’t know him –
of course He both can and does –
but the more open we are to being His person,
the more we allow Him to work in us,
to help us grow into the sort of person He created us to be,
then the more He can use us, with or without our knowledge, in His world.
Who knows, maybe the supermarket cashier you smiled at yesterday really needed that smile to affirm her faith in people, after a bad day.
Or the friend you telephoned just to have a catch-up with was badly needing to chat to someone –
not necessarily a serious conversation, just a chat.
As a friend of my daughter’s who was going through a tough time once said, “So nice to talk about general shit, not just the shit shit!”
You will never know –
but God knows.

We are, of course, never told “what would have happened”,
but I wonder what would have happened if the people of Nazareth had been open to Jesus.
He could have certainly done more miracles there.
Maybe he wouldn’t have had to have become an itinerant preacher, going round all the villages.
Maybe he could have had a home.
I think God may well have used the rejection to open up new areas of ministry for Jesus –
after all, we do know that God works all things for good.

And, finally, what happened to the people of Nazareth?
The answer is, nothing.
Nothing happened.
God could do no work there through Jesus.
Okay, a few sick people were healed, but that was all.
The good news of the Kingdom of God was not proclaimed.
Miracles didn’t happen.
Just. . . nothing.

We do know, of course, that in the end his family, at least, were able to get their heads round the idea of their lad being The One.
His Mother was in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost.
James, one of his brothers, was a leader in the early church.
But were they the only ones?
Did anybody else from Nazareth believe in Him,
or were they all left, sadly, alone?

I think that’s an Awful Warning, isn’t it?
If we decide we need to know best who God chooses to speak through,
how God is to act,
then God can do nothing.
And God will do nothing.
If he sends two boats and a helicopter
and we reject them because we don’t see God’s hand at work in them,
then we will be left to our own devices.
As the people of Nazareth were.

“Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing.”
And if you don’t allow God to do anything for you,
in whatever way,
what then?