Tuesday, July 24, 2012

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 10th century as the “apostle to the apostles”, a title which became commonplace by 13th. 

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.

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