Feast of Mary Magdalene
By Bishop Edward Holland, Sunday 19th July, 2009
The Feast of St Mary Magdalene happens to be the anniversary of my consecration as a Bishop in 1986 so I am very happy to be celebrating it here in Copenhagen.
Mary Magdalene is often seen as a poor penitent sinner, a victim, someone rescued by Jesus from prostitution, who is described as suffering from seven demons, and who in several ways appears to be separated from God and all that he stands for.
Although I can see that is quite a helpful way of seeing her, since most of us at some time will experience a sense of being separated from God, I would really want to put a different emphasis on her significance. Mary has been called the first apostle since she is pictured by John, as we heard in our Gospel, as the first witness to the resurrection. Mary Magdalene is not just a poor passive receiver of the forgiveness of God that Jesus brings, she is a real human being who recognizes the goodness of God when she sees it and is attracted by it sufficiently to give her life to it.
She has been seen in a certain heretical and schismatic tradition as the lover of Jesus, indeed as the mother of his children and the foundress of a semi-divine dynasty, which continues into modern times giving birth to the fiction of the Da Vinci Code, for none of which is there the slightest evidence … Nevertheless it does point us to the reality of Jesus’s humanity, that he was a real flesh and blood man, that while he loved with the love of God in general he must also have loved particular people, had friends, people who attracted him and who touched his emotions. And Mary Magdalene may have been one of those and certainly she and her sister Martha and brother Lazarus do seem to have been a family with whom he felt very much at home.
Mary Magdalene and John who is called the beloved disciple, do appear to have been very close to Jesus, people with whom he shared himself. Mary’s significance is not only that she was a woman in trouble but she was capable of being a true friend, that she could give love as well as receive it. The Song of Solomon which we hear in our first reading speaks of God’s love for Israel in erotic terms, in the language used by lovers which expresses the spiritual and emotional in physical terms – two persons becoming one, something that the mystics through the centuries have found to be echoed in their own experience. Body, mind and spirit are all involved, for all are related and go into making us the persons we are.
If our bodies, minds or spirits are not engaged in our relationship with God, and especially our relationship with God as we know him in Jesus Christ, then that relationship is incomplete. St Paul writing to the Corinthians says that if anyone is in Christ he or she is a new creation, and creation is the Spirit of God working through the material stuff of this world, including our material bodies to make it the means of his love.
But it is something new, the old is superseded. The old Mary Magdalene may perhaps have been directionless, lost, not knowing the way to be, but all that is over, it is past and gone , which is why I say that I think it is the wrong emphasis to stress Mary’s sinfulness. That is finished. What we are interested in, what Jesus and God in him are interested in, is this new Mary, this new creation.
Mary Magdalene is free, she has discovered in Jesus an unconditional love which sees beneath the surface to the real woman, the woman made by God with the capacity to give herself, body, mind and spirit to the work of God’s love in our world. It’s what we are all called to – not to be miserable sinners but to stand tall, to walk strongly, to know we are wanted, we have a value, that we are instruments of God’s purpose. It’s what I was consecrated to in becoming a Bishop, it’s what we were all consecrated in our baptism, it’s what our dear Edith was giving herself to throughout her life.
But there is more – for it’s not just recognizing our own potential but that of others too. All others – the beggar sitting on the pavement, the starving African lying under a tree, the abused refugees in Darfur, the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan – all are given life by God to be instruments of his peace, love and new creation.
Whenever we brand anyone as beggar, hungry, refugee or terrorist we take away their humanity, we turn them into cardboard figures, defined by our reaction in one way or another to them. We deny them their wholeness, even their identity.
”Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation”. Well, everyone is in Christ because Christ is in them. As we recognize ourselves as people called by God, so we must recognize others too, all others, and there is at least some hope that that new creation may be discovered in them as well as us. And frankly unless it is, then it will not be discovered in us either. For it is either all of us or none.
As George Washington said to his fellow rebels in the face of the British enemy, “Gentlemen, unless we hang together we shall certainly hang separately”. So it is for us. We can only find our wholeness, our new creation, as part of the whole from which nothing and no one is excluded.
And our wholeness also includes the whole of the humanity of each of us, not just the tidy, attractive bits, but it all, warts, bad habits, failures, and weakness, the whole person. God in Christ loves it all, loves us all, all of each of us, and all of all of us, nothing is wasted or lost. And that is how we are to be with one another and with ourselves.
Amen
