St Mary Magdalene: Walking on the Wild Side

Judith 9:1, 11-14

Psalm 42:1-7 


2 Corinthians 5:14-18

John 20:11-18 


The figure of Mary Magdalene with which many of us are immediately familiar is one created through years of overlaid tradition, and most usually a composite of many un-named characters in the gospel narratives.  Therefore, her identity is complex and complicated.  At the most fundamental level of the gospel text she appears in the Gospel of Luke as one, along with with other women who provided for Jesus and his disciples “out of their resources” (8:3) – we rarely think the extent to which the Jesus movement was subsidised by women – and she is specfically indentified as “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven spirits had gone out”. (Luke 8:2).  But, it is in the passion narratives – the oldest parts of the Jesus tradition – in which Mary comes to the fore.  Only in the Gospel of Luke is she not specfically named as present at the crucifixion.  In both Mark (15:47) and Matthew (27:61) she is present at Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea; and again, only in Luke is she is not among the first witnesses of the resurrection – all of them women.  In the Gospel of John, as we heard this morning, she is the first to see the risen Lord, privileged with the first of his post-resurrection appearances; and she is the first to carry the news to the disciples:  “I have seen the Lord”.  For this reason she is referred to from the 10^th century as the “apostle to the apostles”, a title which became commonplace by 13^th. 

At the same time, the figure of Mary – her identity, and her place in the life of the Jesus –seems to have sparked an almost limitless curiosity and reflection.  Several Gnostic gospels – including the Gospel of Mary, named after her – depict her as one of the most important of Jesus’ followers.  In the western Church at least, the gospel figure of Mary Magdalene has been conflated with another Mary from the gospels – Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, but also with the nameless woman who anoints Jesus’ feet shortly before his passion, and with the woman caught in adultery whom Jesus rescues from stoning and who, while not condemning her, sends her off saying, “from now on do not sin again”. (John 8:11)  This latter association has cast Mary Magdalene in the Western Church as a prostitute and adultress.  Depictions in art abound of her in her long luxurious hair lamenting her wicked past.  She is the archetypal penitent, and western tradition tells us she spent the last years of the her life as a hermit in France where she is buried. 

So the Gospel accounts of Mary Magdalene taken together with the traditions which grew up around her, present us with a complicated figure.  In the accretions made to the Mary Magdalene of the gospels, there seems almost an attempt to the diminish her power and primacy as apostle to the apostles by casting her in the role of the temptress, the adultress and whore who although she repents still maintains the sexy symbol of her seductive powers – her hair.  In this regard, she presents in the western tradition a figure far more complex than even the Virgin Mary.  To a Church which was in many misogynist and gynophobic, Mary the mother of Jesus was safe, fulfilling – while undisputably in an extraordinary way – the traditional role of woman, that of wife and mother.  Now, Mary Magdalene’s role and importance in the Christian tradition come by nature of her being a woman also, but certainly an unconventional one.  She doesn’t appear to be married, and so is free to follow Jesus as she will; not being married she must have had her own source of income, since as we know she provided for him out of her own resources.  This particular kind of independence would certainly have made her suspect in a patriarchal society with clearly defined social ranks and distinctions.  At the same time, her “suspect” character gave her an odd sort of freedom – she could risk standing at the foot of the cross of a convicted criminal and insurrectionist, an act of love and solidarity which none of his male followers were willing to commit.  After Jesus’ death she witnesses his resurrection not by virtue of her purity, but of her impurity.  It is because she is a woman and through menstruation often ritually unclean, that she comes to perform a ritually unclean act – anointing, touching a dead body.  What the Mary of the gospels exemplifies is a kind of independent courage, and her depiction witnesses to the upside-down world in which it is the impure who are granted sight of real life, granted intimate knowledge of the resurrection, who literally, see God.  Little wonder that the Fathers of the Church cast her in the role of a prostitute early on.  As early at AD 591 Gregory the Great preached:  “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark.  And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices?...It is clear…that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her body in forbidden acts.”  So there we have one way of undermining her power both as a wild, independent woman as and an apostle.  The fact that she drops out of the early Church narratives after her encounter with the resurrected Christ, seems to hint that her presence and significance were too hot to handle.  Somehow her wild independence did not fit into the wider context, the wider construct.  Finally, her wild spirit, the Church relegates to the wilds.  As I mentioned, legend tells us she lived out her years in cave as a hermit.

The figure of Mary Magdalene challenges the Church with the question as to how we incorporate the wild spirits among us, but also within us.  She calls the Church to ask, how we discern a wild spirit, or an evil for that matter.  Mary Magdalene had seven demons – evil spirits – cast out of her, but that made her no less wild, crazy – if you will – in her courageness, in her commitment to follow and to do all she could for Jesus, in her boldness to carry the good news of his resurrection  The Scriptures are filled with wild people, wild spirits – Elijah, Judith, John the Baptist, Jesus, among many others.  And it’s the wild ones we remember, regardless of the fact that if they were around among us today we might just have them committed.  How do we incorporate the wild, the really wild without sanitizing it or demonising it, without making it safe, without neutering it so that we can dominate it?  How do we listen to its promptings in the voices and actions of those who are risk-takers and who hold out to the world and the Church an upside-down vision, which looks a lot like God’s vision?  In one of his late night conversations with Nicodemus, Jesus says “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)  The Church would be a better place, a healthier place, more honest and effective if we were more wild, if we really listened to the wild spirit in each other, and cultivated a real – a real – awareness of it in ourselves.  If were crazy enough, we might be more willing to stand at the crosses of our world’s suffering; and if we were wild enough, we might shout out in our lives the truth of resurrection.  Mary is complicated, yet in her complexity and without apology, she holds up a mirror to the Church and calls us to the walk on the wild side.

Pentecost 7: Sin and Betrayal

Amos 7.7-15

Psalm 85.8-13

Ephesians 1.3-14

Mark 6.14-29

You may have noticed that I don’t often talk about sin, not least of which because what so often goes by the name of sin and for which we condemn others and condemn ourselves, are merely mistakes we make in our attempts to do right, or they are the consequences of living in a complex world comprised not of black and white, but of shades of grey.  So much of what goes by the name of sin are normal mistakes we almost have to make in order to learn to get things right.  The New Testament Greek word for sin is harmatia, and it is essentially an archery term which means to “miss the mark.”  Yet, if you’ve done any archery at all you know that you have to miss the mark a lot before you actually hit the bulls-eye.  In fact, missing the mark is part of learning to hit the bulls-eye.  What normally passes for sin in our religious education, is like that.  We fail and fail as we learn to get things right. 

Now, while these sinnings – these failings – may cause distress, disappointment and heartache to those who feel their effects, there is a deeper and more insidious understanding of sin, an understanding which is deeply rooted in the Church’s tradition.  In this understanding, sin is a deliberate transgression of what one’s conscience regards as the divine law.  Sin in this sense requires three conditions: that the act be sinful, that I know and believe the act to be sinful, and that I freely consent to it nonetheless.  Without any of these it is not sin in the truest sense.  So, while sin has often been portrayed as a betrayal of God, it is equally a betrayal of self, because when we sin in this deep way you go against what our conscience knows to be right and good and truthful.  Perhaps there is no better example of this in the New Testament than the story of Herod and the execution of John the Baptist.  The writer of Mark tells us that Herod, while knowing John a righteous and holy man, and while he liked to listen to John, still put him in prison at the instigation of Herodias, his brother’s wife whom he had married.  Then later in order to save face and against his conscience – Mark tells us that Herod was deeply grieved – he had John executed.  Nowhere along the way does he voice or act upon what he believes and knows to be true; in this case that John is a righteous and holy man.  Herod is not a morally weak man or a morally ambivalent man.  Neither is he stupid or uninformed.  He understands the difference between right and wrong, and yet he cares more for what others think, willingly travelling upon the path of least resistance.  This is sin in the truest sense of the concept.  At every step of the way Herod betrays what he knows to be right, at every step of the way he betrays his conscience: he marries his brother’s wife, he imprisons John, and he eventually has John executed.  In him we see not a man who fails in his struggling to do right, but one who knowing what is right and having the power to do the right, nevertheless chooses otherwise.

Sin in its truest sense is more than the doing of wrongful acts, but it is also the wilful and knowing opposition to the right in order to save one’s skin, or save face, or avert an argument.  It is the choice of ignoring the right in the name of expedience or pragmatism or group solidarity;  and the effects of sin always return to wreak their vengeance.  Think for a moment on the history of our own country.  The compromises made with slavery – even by those who believed it to be fundamentally wrong – exacted eventually in the form of civil war a terrible toll on the nation and her people.  The character of Thomas More put this well in Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons when he said, “I believe, when statesmen forsake their private conscience for the sake of their public duties…they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”  Herod too must have known that this was true – this thing about the repercussions of sin – because when he heard about Jesus and his healings and miracles he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.” (Mark 6.16)  Having betrayed his conscience he could never now rest easy.  There would be repercussions and Jesus might just be one of them.  Sin in its truest sense is the betrayal of what we hold most dear or believe to be most true for the sake of getting on, even for  the sake of  some supposedly higher ideal.

We do not sin by accident, neither do we sin out of ignorance – both of those are called mistakes.  But sin is not a mistake.  We sin in the deliberate rejection of what we know to be true.  We sin in the conscious decision to shirk our personal responsibility to do what we know to be right.  Sin is the action of a responsible person acting irresponsibly.  For this reason it has been believed by the Church that children below a certain age – usually seven – cannot sin.  They simply do not have the responsible capabilities that the act of sin requires.  They make mistakes, they throw things, they struggle with trying to understand their world, but they do not sin.  They do not sin because they have not reached what moral theologians call the “age of reason.”  Sin requires reasonable and reasoning knowledge of the act.  And yet, for adults, mere ignorance of the facts when those facts are available to us does excuse sin.  Indeed to deliberately ignore information in order simply to spare ourselves the onus of responsibility is in itself a sin.  We know that the informations is available, we know that our encounter with it will lead us to understand better our responsibility, and yet we choose to ignore it, to keep ourselves in ignorance.

Sin in its truest sense is the deliberate doing of wrong, even when we know it to be wrong, even when we know the right.  It is what Herod did.  It is what we all do when, even in the name of some supposed higher good or purpose, we deny or betray our conscience, our beliefs.  In its deepest sense sin is not the little mistakes we make through life in our attempts to get things right (damaging and hurtful as they may be), but it is the clear and conscious denial of the right, it is the clear and conscious choice to do that which we know to be wrong.  It is the clear and conscious betrayal of our deepest selves, that place where God abides.    

Pentecost 5: "God Did Not Make Death"

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24 


Psalm 30

2 Corinthians 8:7-15

Mark 5:21-43

It can be difficult to take seriously the words from the Wisdom of Solomon: “God did not make death….[T]he generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth”.  (Wisdom 1:13-14)  In fact, how often have you heard the common opinion that hell is here on earth itself?  Certainly, for anyone suffering from a chronic illness or facing the death of a child such a passage begs the question, “If God does not create death, if the generative forces of the world are wholesome, then why is this happening to me or to those I love, or to anyone?”   Yet, oddly enough, it is these sorts of questions which the passage is attempting to address.  The writer is hoping to remind those who read or listen to his words that the death, decay and turmoil we often experience around us are not God’s plan or purpose for creation or for his creatures. 

While attributed to the wise king Solomon who ruled Israel in the 10^th century BC, the book was actually written much later; scholars believe somewhere in the 1^st or 2^nd centuries before the birth of Christ.  While the bulk of the Hebrew Scriptures is in fact written in Hebrew, this book is written in Greek, and most probably in Egypt during the time when Rome was beginning her domination of the area.  Living in such a place and under such conditions, the author knew all too well that there is wickedness, darkness and destruction in the world.  Yet in the midst of all this, the author is still willing to point out to his hearers or readers that overriding tenet of the Jewish tradition, the belief that God is good, and how at the beginning of creation God declared all things good: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31)   At the same time, the writer wants to point out how through our own actions – exemplified by the disobedience of our first parents – we invite into God’s world wickedness and deceit, unkindness and sorrow, which lead to all sorts of deaths.  In other places in the first chapter of Wisdom, the author specifically warns those who will listen: “Do not invite death by the error of your life or bring on destruction by the works of your hands” (Wisdom 1:12); and that “the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death...and made a covenant with him”. (Wisdom 1:16)  Yes, there is certainly death in the world, but it is not God’s doing or God intent.  God’s intent is for life and the creation’s purpose is to engender and support it.  The author indirectly asks those who read or hear his words to ponder upon the ways in which they have courted death rather than life in their dealings and actions.  All people of faith, all people of integrity are called to live in such a way that the inherent goodness of God’s creation is revealed, and that the forces of destruction are kept at bay or destroyed themselves.  We are all called to work for – and indeed demand – life out of the suffering, pain and chaos which so often confronts us.  We are called to be signs and makes signs, signs that tell people God is re-creating the world according to his original purposes.  It’s important to remember that the Greek word in the synoptic Gospels which we translate into “miracle”, is actually “sign” – the miracles are signs that God is putting the world back together.  A tradition in Judaism sees the world – from the time of the disobedience in the Garden of Eden – as literally falling apart; signs of its decay are illness, injustice, poverty, among the other and various evils which face human beings along with the rest of creation.  This view is accompanied by the idea of tikkun olam.  It means “repairing the world” or “healing and restoring the world”.  Tikkun olam proposes that perhaps human beings are to work in partnership with God to return creation to God’s original plan – life and wholeness.  In some sense tikkun olam is not too far from the Christian idea of “the kingdom of God” which each Christian is called to usher in and to reveal by their lives and actions.  Both affirm that “God did not make death and [that] the generative forces of the world are wholesome” (Wisdom 1:13, 14), and both demand human cooperation with God to bring God’s vision and purposes to fruition.

Jesus’ life and ministry is all about this.  The miracles are not some bits of wonder-working, but signs that God is inaugurating something new, that the world is bring repaired and that the kingdom of God is already among us.  Jesus heals the sick, signaling the life and wholeness which is God’s will, for “[God] created all things so that they might exist”. (Wisdom 1:14)  Jesus touches the bleeding and the dead, and signals the end of de-humanizing purity laws – all God’s creation is clean, for  “There is no destructive poison in” the generative forces of the world. (cf. Wisdom 1:14)  Jesus raises the dead as sign of God’s restoring the entire created order to new life for “the dominion of Hades is not on earth”.  And by these signs he encouraged others to make them too.  Like the woman with the hemorrhages who reaches out for healing.  She demands the wholeness which is God’s promise and that too is a sign of repair and renewal.  Like Jairus who is heartened by Jesus’ other signs and falls at his feet, begging him repeatedly to make his daughter well, that she might live.  He makes a sign of solidarity with the sick and defenseless, and that also is a sign of restoration.  Not Jesus, not the woman with the hemorrhages, not Jairus, none accept that death or disfigurement or hopelessness are part of God’s plan for creation or for their lives.  Certainly there are others around them who, like the writer of Wisdom says, consider death a friend and have made a covenant with him: those quacks whose ministrations that poor woman suffered for 12 years, or those friends and neighbors of Jairus who laugh at the possibility of life about to made manifest.  There are always those who in the midst of crisis or chaos speak the word of death, of disillusionment. 

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that affirmation of life means every sick person will be cured, or that no one will die.  However, the writer of Wisdom and what Jesus’ life witnesses to is the reality that life in all its many forms is the real narrative of the world, no matter what the death-dealers may say or think.  As Christians we are a people of life – that means that we are part of God’s putting things back together – and as such we always have to speak the word of life and demand life out of the darkest and most death-dealing corners of the world.  How often do we demand life in any one of its forms from the structures of our society, from our bankers or politicians?  How often do we demand life in the name of the most vulnerable in our world, those who find themselves for ever living in darkness and in the shadow of death.  How often do we demand life for our own selves?.  We willingly aand too often buy into the language of death, the language of poverty, the language of impossible, language of unnecessary limitations, instead of reaching out to the truth of life, abundance, possibility.  In the Book of Deuteronomy and shortly before he leaves them to enter the promised land, Moses said to the Israelites, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”   (Deuteronomy 30:19)  In all the events of our lives, this what we are called to do also – to choose life, to make signs of the kingdom, to repair the world’s brokenness, and lighten its darkest places.  We are called to reveal in our lives the inherent goodness in creation, and God’s plan and good purposes for it.