The Gray Monk

Feast of St Mary Magdalen

+May I speak
and may you hear
in the name of God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen

“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.”

Those of you have managed to wade through Dan Browne’s book, “The Da Vinci Code” will have encountered his fictional version of why it was that this Mary was the bearer of the news of the resurrection. I do not plan to dwell on any of the fictions he has created around her – much of which does her almost as much discredit as the Medieval view, built on the 7th and 8th Century Western interpretation of the story of Mary Magdalen which has her as the “woman taken in adultery”, very probably the view the majority of us are familiar with.

So who exactly was she?

Well, there is a great deal we can glean from other sources. The Coptic Church claims her as “their” apostle and she is generally supposed to have died and been buried in Alexandria. The town from which she takes her name, Magdala, was located on the shores of Lake Galilee and was a very wealthy resort and commercial centre. It is located on a major route from North to South and at the time of the first century was a popular place for the ruling families of that area to have their villas at the seaside. It was almost certainly one of the many places Christ visited regularly on his travels – and her house was quite possibly where he stayed when there.

She was wealthy, again we learn this from other sources, some of them Christian and some even have her as the woman who washed Christ’s feet with her tears and anointed him with expensive perfume. Quite possibly she was a member of a noble family, and equally possibly, for it was not unusual in the Hellenic Jewish community in which she lived, a very shrewd business woman in her own right. She was almost certainly the major source of funds for Jesus’ mission over the three years between his baptism by John and his resurrection. We also know from the Gospels themselves, that she loved our Lord with all her heart and all her being.

And therein lays the very crux of her importance to us – as an example of the love epitomised by the Greek word “Philos” – to love without any constraint, reservation, qualification or sexual element. Her love for Christ is the human response to the love that Christ showed to the world. Mary was prepared to do exactly as he had commanded, give up everything, her wealth, her position of influence, even her status in her love for him. As St Paul wrote and we heard in our second lesson,

“The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.”

This is what the distraught Mary had to come to terms with at the empty tomb. That love sometimes means letting go of everything we hold in that love – in order to discover and even greater love. By no means an easy task, yet, she succeeded.

The strength and the depth of her unconditional love for our Lord made her the perfect candidate to be the first to see him face to face following the resurrection. She is the first to discover that in his kingdom there is a new creation, one which surpasses our understanding in this life.

Dan Browne and the later attempts to paint her as the fallen woman notwithstanding, Mary of Magdala shines out of the gospels as a woman of enormous faith and of even greater love of God. The line from Solomon’s great love song,

“When I found Him whom my soul loves,
I held him and would not let him go”

Could almost have been written for her. She like almost all those who encountered him, who heard his word and understood it, however dimly, held fast to the faith they learned from him and to the love he so generously bestowed upon the world. So, as we declare the faith she and others passed on to us, as we share in the communion of the saints gathered about this Eucharist, we should give thanks for her witness and for her example of love. And we should accept the charge laid on her as our own commandment:

“Go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

She obeyed that commandment – and so must we.

Amen