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.
