“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 9: Mary Magdalene

Sunday, September 17, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Luke 8:1-3

Pastor Mike

We’re encountering Mary Magdalene this morning as a part of our series on call. I have to admit, it’s a bit misleading for me to cast her into this assembly of “minor characters” from the Bible. A true minor character would be someone like the second woman named in this passage, Joanna, who followed Jesus and helped fund his ministry even though she was married to one of Herod Antipas’ underlings. Now there’s a compact, unelaborated drama – perhaps for another time. But Mary Magdalene, the woman we hear about every Good Friday evening and Easter Sunday morning? Really? Truth is, from the beginning one of Christianity’s great fumbles has been its unwillingness to definitively answer this question about Mary Magdalene: major character or minor character? Let’s take stock of the mess the Church has made of her legacy.

In the year 591, Pope Gregory I turned a piece of interpretive gymnastics and guesswork into official church doctrine. If you have your Bible open to our passage, you’ll see that just prior to it, there’s a story that ends Luke chapter 7 and is titled something like “A Sinful Woman Forgiven. That story is about an unnamed woman known to everyone in her city as “a sinner” who crashes a dinner party at a Pharisee’s house so that she can anoint Jesus’ feet with ointment. The Pharisee criticizes Jesus for letting a sinner like this touch him. In the other Gospels, a similar scene of anointing is recorded, but the woman in those stories is explicitly named as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the setting for the story is totally different, the town of Bethany down near Jerusalem, not somewhere in Galilee. Pope Gregory, trying to harmonize these two similar stories decided that the “unnamed woman” in Luke 7 must be the same person as Mary of Bethany. Furthermore, because of the proximity of the “sinner” in Luke 7 to Mary Magdalene in Luke 8, he decided that the “sinful” woman and the woman “from whom seven demons had gone out” might as well be the same messed up person. Gregory declared as doctrine that Luke’s unnamed sinner from Luke 7, Mary Magdalene from Luke 8 and Mary of Bethany from the other Gospels were all the same person. This doctrine wasn’t corrected within the Catholic Church until 1969.

If we remember that in 591 most Christians in the world were Catholic Christians, and that most people alive were illiterate, we can understand that by flattening Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and the sinner into one person, Gregory made it difficult for folks to consider Mary Magdalene on the Bible’s own terms. Two common myths about Mary Magdalene dominated her memory. On the one hand, identifying her with the forgiven sinner in Luke 7 led the Church to construe her as a depraved prostitute, in desperate need of forgiveness and moral correction. Which, to be clear, is never even said about the Luke 7 woman; the Church just seems to think that sinful women must be prostitutes. On the other hand, identifying her with Mary of Bethany, to whom Jesus shows special affection, especially in John’s Gospel, brought on the idea that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ lover or wife, (again, reducing her to her sexuality). These two personas – Mary the sinful sex worker and Mary Christ’s spouse – both obscure the Mary who clearly meets us in the Gospels.

One of the few details that all four of the Gospels agree on is that Mary Magdalene participated in and witnessed the ministry, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Unlike the disciples, Mary did not abandon Jesus when he was arrested and executed. Unlike the disciples, Mary came on Easter morning to experience the shock and glory of the empty tomb. John goes so far as to tell us that Jesus appeared to Mary first after he was raised from the dead, and that Mary was the first Christian preacher, the first person ever sent out to announce to others, “I have seen the Lord.” Forgiven sinner? Wife of Christ? How about forceful, faithful, privileged disciple of Jesus.

We can’t blame it all on poor Pope Gregory and his imagination. Every year at the seminary I attended, our school holds a symposium celebrating excellence in African American theological scholarship and preaching. One of the years when I was a student, a black scholar, writer, and preacher named Renita Weems was the visiting speaker. During a chapel service, she gave a sermon on the first chapter of Acts, which tells the story of the disciple gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem after the ascension of Jesus, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come. As they wait, they decide that replacing Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and filling the twelfth apostle slot would be a good thing for them to do. Peter gets up and says that the requirements for apostleship should be that a person was there from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry until the end, and that they witnessed the resurrected Christ. Two men are put forward, prayers offered, lots cast. A man named Matthias becomes the new twelfth apostle.

After retelling the story, Dr. Weems was incredulous, and she posed a question to us, to the Church, to Simon Peter himself: Who is Matthias?

I still get chills when I remember that moment. The room erupted. Who is Mathias? Who is this man, who has been named before this moment, who is never named again after it? Who was not, according to any Gospel writer, in Galilee, or Jerusalem, or at the cross, or at the tomb, or present on Easter morning? Who is Mathias?

Dr. Weems wanted to know. Because right there all along there was a person who everyone knew had been there from the beginning to the end. What is more, she had been the first to go with Christ through the end into the new beginning! There already was someone who had been, without question, a resilient witness and a summoned preacher: Mary Magdalene.

Dr. Weems was helping us see that the Church had overlooked Mary right from the start. And by helping us see this, she was making two points, one about patriarchy, the shaping of power and imagination by and around men, and another about what happens when Christians get to conducting their business before the Spirit has come to them. When we operate with the same old resources, when we rush ahead without guidance from God, we end up carrying forward our same biases, blind spots, and failures of imagination. Christians know and have known that Mary Magdalene is important, singular, a disciple unlike any of the others. But with her obvious and original significance repressed, we end up with theories like the sinner or the spouse.

Perhaps the Word that God wants you to hear today is simply this: No matter how willfully other people, perhaps people even in the Church, have misrepresented who you are; no matter how willfully other people have excluded you from the circle of power, God knows you, calls you, and will use you.

As I learned some of the history of how Mary’s been interpreted, and as I remembered Renita Weems’s sermon, I started to wonder: If we don’t buy into the sinner or spouse theories, what was it about Mary Magdalene and her experience of Christ that filled her with such devotion and resilience? Is there anything else we can say know about her?

Luke provides the sole biographical detail: “The Twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been healed from evil spirits and authorities: Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out…” Scour the New Testament and that’s all there is. Mary, from whom seven demons had gone out. It’s not much, but it’s more than enough. Seven demons. Not seven sins. Seven demons.

We can take it literally: Mary was a victim of spiritual oppression. We can take it figuratively: Mary was tormented by a multiplicity of false selves – by masks, anxieties, shame. Either way, being demon possessed meant that Mary was unclean, ostracized, and probably debilitatingly sick. Spiritual trauma always registers in the body. The only other person from Jesus’ ministry who is this spiritually afflicted is the Gerasene Demoniac, from whom the Legion of demons gets cast out, and he had to live chained up in the graveyard outside his town because no one knew what else to do with him. The point is that Mary didn’t have a life or a chance at a life. She didn’t know who she really was. Through no fault of her own, mind you. Again, not seven sins, seven demons.

This is not the only place that a reference to seven demons appears in Luke’s Gospel. In chapter 11, Jesus teachers a crowd and he says this:

When [an] unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it returns, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. (11:24-26)

If we bring these two references to the seven spirits together, we can wonder if Mary had once been freed from a demon, from some spiritual affliction or inner falseness. Perhaps she had experienced healing and freedom once and made a fresh start, swept her life clean. If she had been freed only to fall again to false voices, how much greater her agony and confusion. Maybe Mary didn’t just hurt; maybe Mary despaired. It is one thing to deal with a devil. It’s another thing to deal with the shame that comes when we fall to the same devil, and end up worse off than before. Jesus did not just set Mary free. He set her really free. He cast out whatever the original oppression was and the subsequent cyclone of shame. He restored Mary to herself. Gave her a true self. Gave her a hope and a future. He didn’t just sweep her house clean, he filled it with power and faith.  

What I am getting at is this: Mary’s love for Jesus was proportionate to her experience of healing and liberation. Jesus came to her on her worst day, so she stayed by him on his worst day. Jesus did not abandon Mary to her futureless circumstances, so she did not abandon him to his futureless circumstances. Jesus was the first to see her liberated, and she was the first to see him liberated. They knew the truth about each other.

Many of us love Jesus in response to his forgiveness. Jesus does away with our indebtedness to God as creatures and sinners. Christians call that experience justification, and it is merciful and beautiful and life changing.

But there is something deeper. Jesus doesn’t just want to forgive us. He also wants to heal us, to set us free from the false voices, the false selves, the masks we wear, the forces that oppress us within and without. Christians call that experience sanctification, and it is character-making and lifelong. It feels like having seven devils leave one by one and then –ecstasy, joy, power.

Mary was a disciple. She models for all of us the possibility of being cleansed and centered and committed. How good is God, that the woman oppressed by seven demons is the same woman who came running from the tomb on Easter morning to proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!”

And it wasn’t the first time that she had seen him.

No, not for the first time.

Thanks be to God. Amen.