Sermon for 22nd of July, Feast of Mary Magdalene - Magdalen College Oxford Chapel

Lectionary Readings for the Festival of Mary Magdalene

Song of Solomon 3:1-4

Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. ‘I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.’ I sought him, but found him not. The sentinels found me, as they went about in the city. ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’ Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go until I brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

John 20:1-2, 11-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your

God.”’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon for the Festival of Mary Magdalene

This is a college named for a woman.

But the College was founded by a man, exclusively for male scholars, in 1458, and admitted women as scholars only 500-some-years later, in 1979, as is well-noted.

Why did William Waynflete name his grand college for a woman, Mary Magdalene? And why this particular woman?

In the College's own collection is a 15th-century manuscript that contains a medieval Life of Mary Magdalene. In it she is held up to sinners as an example of conversion, to penitents as a pledge of the certain hope of remission, to the faithful as a model of mercy, and to all Christian people as a proof of divine compassion.

But a medieval life would certainly be the most unreliable of accounts, as the New Testament offers us only glimpses of this Mary. It was, and is, a very human desire to fill in the gaps---to elaborate on what a medieval person might think a rather thin biography. In the medieval period the legends around Mary Magdalene's name became so many and so fanciful they cannot be believed.

This name, Mary. Two Marys loom large in the Christian tradition. One, the mother of Jesus, still dominates the Christian tradition as a figure of love, steadfastness, and many other ideal qualities.

But the other Mary, Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the Resurrection, The Apostle to the Apostles, what has happened to her name?

Let us go back to the depiction the Gospels give us, and to the history of how this Mary has been interpreted and misinterpreted through the centuries. Because these texts, and this history, affect how we have come to regard this Mary, and how we might recover her life as a model for those who lead the Church today.

There were too many Marys, to begin with. It was a common name in Jesus's time, perhaps because the name of Mariamme the Hasmonean, married in 37 B.C. to Herod the Great and killed by him eight years later, came to be associated with Hasmonean nationalists or sympathisers for independence. The name, Mary, multiplied after this murder in the generation before Jesus and on into the first century in Palestine.

In the gospel accounts, aside from Mary the mother of Jesus, there is Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene, who together stand at the foot of the Cross, in John's account. Matthew and Mark also name Mary the mother of James and Joseph.

And then there is Mary of Bethany---Mary the sister of Martha, and in John's account, also the sister of Lazarus.

This Mary of Bethany became conflated with Mary Magdalene early on, as commentators strove to make sense of them all.

But the critical element of confusion was occasioned by two phrases from Luke:

In chapter 8 he depicts Mary Magdalene as one from whom seven demons had gone out.

And in chapter 7 is the phrase about an unnamed woman who was a sinner.

This episode, a dramatic and moving one, is recorded by all four Evangelists, but this is Luke's version:

And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that Jesus was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.

It is only in Luke that this phrase appears---who was a sinner. The woman is unnamed in Mark, Matthew and Luke; only John names her as Mary of Bethany. But because Mary of Bethany became confused with Mary Magdalene and because Luke's phrase came to be added to John's version, penitent sinfulness came to be

attached to the figure of Mary Magdalene. The church then came to identify the seven demons that had possessed her as sexual sins. And so the figure of Mary Magdalene came to be associated with the character and role of a prostitute.

But this association is patently unbiblical.

In the year 591 Gregory the Great, a good administrator and a good pastor, but a bad exegete, sealed the identity of Mary Magdalene for the next 1400 years. In his homily on Luke's Gospel on Holy Cross day, September 14th, at the Basilica of S. Clemente in Rome, he proclaimed that

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected.     And what did these seven devils signify,

if not all the vices?. It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent

to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner....

Even earlier,

from the second century, the movement of asceticism within the church had strongly influenced ideas about sexuality;

from the third century, the church was already in the process of evolving as an ecclesiastical hierarchy, dominated by successors to Peter;

from the fourth century, the church was also in the process of becoming the church of the celibate, the male celibate.

The idea of the first sin as sexual in its nature, grew. As the exemplar of one who had repented of the violation of the church's canons of sexual propriety, Mary Magdalene came to be embraced with fervour and devotion by men and women alike---the model sinner.

The growing emphasis on personal responsibility for sin and a stress on penitence culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council's decree of 1215 that every person had to make annual individual confession to a priest. Mary Magdalene became, as a consequence, even more popular as the pre-eminent symbol of penance.

Perhaps the most vital strand to try to disentangle from the skein of the church's earliest history is its struggle to determine authority. Central to this struggle was the conflict between those who gave Mary Magdalene the most prominent role, and those who gave it to Peter.

The Gospel of Luke devotes considerably more space to women than the other canonical Gospels do, but Luke tends to define the women as followers, not as leaders. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, depicts several models of strong female leadership. John does not offer a list of the traditional exclusively all-male group of twelve disciples. The figure of Peter does not stand out in the first twenty chapters of John's Gospel, but Mary Magdalene's role is clearly emphasised, culminating in the moment of her recognition of the Resurrected Jesus.

Despite the variation in the four gospel resurrection narratives, what emerges as remarkable in them all is that Mary Magdalene appears at the tomb in each of these canonical gospels, either alone or in the company of others. She is not only always present but is also always listed first in this scene, even in Luke---the gospel that credits her with the lowest status, overall. She is thus one of the most consistent, stable elements in the New Testament resurrection narratives as a whole. She figures prominently, also, in the extra-canonical literature circulating at this time.

The criteria for apostolic authority from the earliest times was one: that of witness to the Resurrection and two: a commission from Jesus to witness. Mary Magdalene met both.

It was Luke's narrative that won out. The portrayal of Peter as the primary designate of authority won out over the testimony in the other three gospels of the prominence of Mary.

Within one generation of Paul, by the end of the second century, the radical nature of Jesus's egalitarian circle of followers had changed, the roles that women had taken in its earliest years diminished or eliminated.

It is likely that criticism from outside caused this change. It came from the patriarchal culture of the day, where the women's Jewish sisters were allowed only minimal leadership roles in the synagogue. Their own active roles in the emerging church came to be seen as shameful.

Jesus himself radically upended the social conventions of his time; he disregarded the gender of his followers. He did not relegate his female followers to a lesser role: he talked with them freely, he regarded them as friends, he entrusted them with revelation....

Out of the band of faithful women from Galilee, those who followed Jesus and ministered to his needs as he travelled throughout the country, Mary Magdalene emerges as the leader. She is the only one not identified by her relation to a father, brother, husband, or son. From the town of Magdala, meaning tower, Mary emerges from the Gospel texts as a tower of strength, independent, most prominent among this steadfast group of women. She is depicted as in no way less a disciple than Jesus's male followers. In the ultimate scene of the drama of Jesus's life, it was the women who stayed and the men who fled. It was Mary who was chosen by Jesus as his first witness.

This name, Mary.

Weeping in her grief, Mary did not see Jesus until he spoke her name. She did not perceive the truth of the Resurrection until she was named.

Then, hearing Jesus's voice and responding to the name he called, Mary looked up and saw the Risen Lord. And she never looked back.

We live in a new age. Two thousand years have passed since that first commission, to a woman. The church has been led by the successors of Peter, not by the successors of Mary. But at last the church has begun to reconsider what it lost when it marginalised the women who might have led it.

As we contemplate our own naming and our own calling, we can gaze at the figure of Mary Magdalene with new eyes, drawing upon the one whom Jesus himself chose to be The Apostle to the Apostles: she who was minister, herself, in love and faithfulness to Jesus, an active and courageous disciple, a tower of strength to those she led, the first witness to the Resurrection and first recipient of the commission to go out to all the world and witness to the Good News of God's love and grace in Christ.

May God grant us grace to hold close such a model of discipleship and leadership! Amen.