a simple Easter reflection on St. Mary Magdalene's quiet, simple, and abiding love for Jesus...
EASTER SUNDAY READINGS:
Isaiah 25: 6-9:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And God will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; the Lord will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of the people will be taken away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited so that we might be made whole. And the Lord for whom we have waited has come to us with gladness and grace.
Psalm 125:
Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion
Which can never be removed and shall remain forever.
Peace be on Israel, peace be on Israel, peace be on Israel
Now and forever more.
Alleluia, allelu – alleluia, allelu – alleluia, allelu, alleluia…
GOSPEL: John 20: 1-18
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.’ Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. When Simon Peter came, following him, he went into the tomb.
He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself… They saw and believed but did not yet under-stand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. The disciples returned to their homes, but Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and 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 replied, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ As she said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not yet recognize him. 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, ‘Mary!’ And she turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said, ‘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.” So, 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.
The poet, Padraig O’Tuama formerly of the Corrymela Community in Belfast, Northern Ireland, wrote in the Community’s prayer book that it “was Mary Magdalene – and in the other gospels Mary the mother of Jesus and Johanna – who first encountered the risen Christ. In love they went to the men to proclaim this good news but as so often happens, their words were judged to be an idle tale – women’s talk – and they were rebuffed and not trusted. O’Tuama then offers this prayer:
O surprising Son of God: you revealed the truth to women who were not believed by men.
You are so often in the voices of the unbelieved and the ignored. So, bring us towards each other.
Bring us towards the truest truth. Because here, if anywhere, will we find you. Amen.
The appointed readings for today tell a simple but often confusing story – one that conflates Easter with Empire – the quiet presence of the Risen Christ’s love for his friends with bold, public proclaimations of theology where majestic hymns accompanied by brass choirs drown out the intimate whispers Jesus shared in private. Each of our four gospels tells us that Jesus comes to us quietly on Easter, softly and tenderly and in secret as the hymn puts it, not with shouts of glory or elegant processions, but confidentially while still encased in his wounds. Oddly most of my life I have participated in Easter with grand feasts, rich foods, tasteful table settings, uplifting music, and lofty words from my theological lexicon; when, in truth, the servant Christ of our scriptures sneaks in the back door to break bread simply and share the common cup of joy and grace. This year it feels like O’Tuama got it right: “Christ is so often found in the voices of the unbelieved and ignored.” Fr. Henri Nouwen said much the same thing to us last week, too:
I don’t think we’ll ever be able to penetrate the mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus until it strikes us that the major part of Jesus’ life was hidden. Even the “public” years remained essentially invisible as far as most people were concerned. Whereas the way of the world is to insist upon publicity, celebrity, popularity, and getting maximum exposure, God prefers to work in secret. You must let that mystery of God’s secrecy, God’s anonymity, sink deeply into your consciousness otherwise you’re looking at it from the wrong point of view. In God’s sight the things that really matter seldom take place in public. Jesus’ life is marked by an always deeper choice towards what is small, humble, poor, rejected, and despised…even on the feast day of resurrection.
I don’t know about you, but celebrating Easter in a small, humble, and even simple way resonates with soul this year. I still LOVE the smells and bells and revel in the majestic music of our tradition. But, when I listen to my heart this year, when I look carefully at the testimony of the early church, and the storytelling as recorded in the New Testament, it is the calmly loving quiet witness of Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, who pulls it all together.
To be honest, her constancy with Jesus throughout the passion, crucifixion, and dark night of waiting in anguish helps me see what a conscientious disciple looks like on Easter morning. Too often in the past I’ve been trapped in the trappings of this celebration more than its message. I’ve contributed to the bluster and noisy merrymaking of it – the aesthetic grandiosity, too – when a serene savoring of the peaceful presence of the sacred might be more in keeping with the shared simplicity of bread that is broken and a common cup.
· Last year at this time I don’t think I would’ve been able to say this as my disorientation was too great and I was lost in grief, but I am thankful to God for my enforced solitude because it has opened me to a deeper connection to the spirituality of Easter in general – and St. Mary Magdalene in particular.
· Over the next 50 days of Eastertide, I want to share with you some key insights I’ve gleaned from Magdalene about living from the heart as Christ’s disciple. The Reverend Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault writes:
The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, 'closer than your own heartbeat,' accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy. The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from anyone or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring – and this is the message we most need to hear on Easter.
In a sermon Bourgeault shared last week, she framed the importance of St. Mary Magdalene, the one who consistently loved and trusted Jesus, like this: “(Holy Week and Easter are the times) when we ritually re-live and re-claim the very epicenter of Christianity, as Jesus reveals the depth of love and wagers his very life for the reality of the premise he has staked his whole ministry on: that love is stronger than death.”
That love is the strongest power in the world — stronger than fear — stronger than hatred — stronger than division — stronger than violence. This is the moment when we again have the opportunity in a very special way to enter into this mystery of love with him, confront our own fears and shadows, and emerge as shareholders in his resurrection — not only through faith but through our own lived experience. You would think then, in a time such as this, as we stand on the threshold of this testimony, that our texts might give us an overview of Jesus’ teachings on love, and a reassurance that his love will remain alive and well beneath the surface as we work our way toward cosmic fulfillment. And yet the word “love” does not occur once in our Easter readings…
That’s easy to miss in our traditional Easter hoopla but impossible to overlook when Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles as she was once called and called anew by Pope Francis, becomes our guide to the feast. Contemporary scholarship with a deep reverence for orthodoxy and tradition has all but unanimously concluded that St. Mary Magdalene was the one disciple who got it before Easter: Her own heart was broken open by the love of Jesus where she learned to practice from the inside out a self-surrendering trust of God’s love that is greater than all the graves and can never be taken away. She embodied the early baptismal creed St. Paul shared in Philippians 2:
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any com-passion and sympathy, make my joy complete and be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind with Jesus. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was on Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited; rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant – and in humility shared love beyond the point of death – even death on a cross. Bourgeault adds this post-script:
Letting go is not in order to get something better. In and of itself it is the something better. For self-surrender, letting go, emptying ourselves of the lies, shame, fear, mistrust, and anxiety that guides so much of our culture so that our hearts might be filled with God’s love immediately restores the broken link with the dynamic ground of reality, which by its very nature flows forth from a fullness beyond all imagining.
By letting go Magdalene moved beyond the cultural misogyny of her era – even the prejudice of Peter and the other disciples. By letting go she became a trusted confident to Christ during his years of wandering and teaching in ancient Judea and Samaria. By letting go she found the courage to stand with Jesus is loving solidarity through his passion, at the foot of the cross AND his tomb, and then return after the Sabbath to continue her love by anointing his corpse with holy herbs and sacred oil. At first, today’s story tells us her grief blinded her to Christ’s resurrected presence, but when he speaks her name – not a sermon, not a theological treatise nor one of our grand hymns – just her name, Mary, the grief falls away and she recognizes Jesus as Rabbouni – teacher.
There are two truths here that I want to name briefly today – and spend some time with over the next 50 days much like the Scriptures tell us the first disciples did rethinking the meaning of love with Jesus before the Ascension – and they are: the intimacy and stillness of this encounter, and, the importance of sacred love. I have come to believe that the life of Jesus in general, and the events of Holy Week in particular, are sacramental. That is, they are visible signs of a deeper and more concentrated spiritual truth.
· The quiet intimacy that Jesus shares with Magdalene on Easter morning, then, becomes a paradigm for us, yes? It is a call both to contemplation and stillness. Easter Sunday with Mary Magdalene suggests more time with quiet and love than anything else including preaching, teaching, music and all the rest that has traditionally filled Easter celebrations.
· For the next 50 days I would like us to own this simplicity: let’s learn a little more about what Mary discovered through his discipleship. As much as I love saints Peter, Paul, John and the rest, Magdalene is who I need to listen to after Easter. Maybe that’s true for you, too because her witness is grounded in simplicity, love, and radical trust. What she gives us on Easter morning if we have eyes to see is “the meaning of Jesus that cuts much deeper than merely resuscitating a corpse.” She wants us to know that the real purpose of Christ’s sacrifice was:
To wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to new life. Jesus was not about proving that a body lives forever, but rather that the spiritual identity forged through kenotic self-surrender survives the grave and can never be taken away. Thus, the real domain of the Paschal Mystery is not dying, but dying-to-self.
Mary Magdalene is the master of compassionate contemplation and simplicity – and I want to spend more time with her. Because beyond the celebration she asks like Tina Turner: what’s love got to do with it – and shows us – everything. Simplicity, stillness,
and sacred love – that’s her testimony. And I can’t think of a more important message to focus upon right now when it feels like so much is at stake right here – in our nation – and throughout the world. A preacher far wiser than myself put it like this: It’s hard in this maelstrom of hatred, abandonment, and violence to keep a living connection to the Master of Love, whose death is not to appease an angry God, but a voluntary consummation of the path he has walked through life — through death — and into resurrection life.
So that’s what we’ll do – together and in private – between Easter 2021 and the Feast of Pentecost on Sunday, May 23rd: we’ll keep company with Jesus and Magdalene as they quietly teach us about love and trust.
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