I guess you could call me broken, says one. I’m still lonely, says another, but now I can name it with a song.
In my poem, says another, I can forget I am forgotten.
Now I understand being misunderstood, says another. And another says, in a bold, undeniable voice of power, I won’t step down from myself again.
And they are beautiful, beautiful,
standing one by one at the mic
where they have come forth at last from behind the curtain.
Stafford’s poem summons something of St. Mary Magdalene’s beautiful spirit for us in the 21st century as she is incrementally welcomed back into our consciousness from behind the curtain of neglect, institutional fear of strong, spiritual women, and a culture of ignorance and neglect: she is beautiful in the fullness of her humanity. Her wisdom way celebrates that we are all created beautiful in the image of God; not born sinners, but rather lovers doing our best to be faithful to the sacred spark of the divine that was breathed into us at the start of the cosmos. Hers is a testi-mony to original blessing rather than original sin.
In the remaining fragments of the extra-canonical text that was crafted in her name at about the same time our gospel according to St. John was written, perhaps at the dawn of the second century of the common era, the Gospel of Mary begins with the apostle Peter asking the Risen Savior about sin, to which Jesus replied: “There is no such thing as sin; rather you yourselves are what produces divisions whenever you act in accordance with infidelity” – and when the Blessed One had said these things, he turned and greeted them all saying, “Peace be with you – acquire my peace within your hearts.” So says Jesus at the close of St. John’s gospel, too when he appears to the confused and afraid apostles – including Magdalene – who are hiding behind closed doors: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had spoken to her about his new life.”
And when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the disciples had met behind locked doors for fear of the authorities, Jesus appeared and stood among them saying, “Peace be with you.” He showed them his hands and his side – his wounds - and the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Risen Lord. Again, Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And he breathed on them saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the infidelity of any, those wounds will be forgiven; and if you bind them, they shall remain.
Peace be within you – breathing the holy spirit upon his frightened friends in a recreation of the beginning of the cosmos when God breathed the spirit upon the face of a formless void of chaos and filled the earth with life, order, and love – the Risen Christ gives the apostles his gift of trust, refreshment, and hope. Such was the testimony St. Mary Magdalene shared although it was intentionally mangled early on, systematically vilified over time, and carefully erased from history for nearly sixteen hundred years. In my personal and professional studies, I have long been hesitant to give attention to the so-called Gnostic Gospels be they of Magdalene, Thomas, or the others found in that cave in Egypt in 1945. They’ve struck me as obscure, incomplete, and sometimes weird.
But a I’ve come to realize, I am OFTEN late to the party in many parts of my life; I take a LONG time studying, watching, listening, and praying over wisdom that begins beyond my experience. When in doubt, my rock is unabashedly Jesus who teaches that we should, “Ask and the gift will come. Seek and we shall find, Knock, and the door will be opened unto us.” So, today I want to share some clarity with you about the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed the feet of Jesus as Messiah that welcomes both the Scriptures of tradition along with some texts that were once circulated within the early church but later hidden, lost, or even rejected by the hierarchy. Over the past ten years, I have been persuaded by serious scholars like Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, and Karen King that some (but not all) of these once lost but now found documents can illuminate and clarify parts of our trusted Biblical passages.
They can enrich our understanding of the diversity that was normative in the early church as well – and help us reclaim some theological and liturgical space for our own explorations as we search for ways to be faithful and real in this time of uncertainty. You see, most of these ancient but only recently recovered texts are dialogical, not didactic. They encourage the questions of life at least as much as the answers. They are at peace with paradox and trust that at the heart of creation is a love that carries us towards grace. So, the cloud of unknowing or the path of mystical revelation does not evoke stress in these writings. Kahlil Gibran suggests this in his poem “Fear.”
It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
When it comes to St. Mary Magdalene, these other gospel texts including one attributed to her own revelations about Jesus, help me grasp the sacramental truths of her story as it appears in each of our four canonical gospels. They remind me that what we are told in the Bible about Mary of Magdala is less linear history and more inward revelation. And I’ve had at least two epiphanies in reconsidering the stories of Christ’s anointing and why reclaiming Magdalene’s insights matter:
+ First, as the premiere witness to the Resurrection, the love Magdalene shares with Jesus offers us an alternative path of discipleship: hers is a spiritual formation of compassionate solidarity and liturgical affirmation rather than the traditional practices of renunciation and ascetism. Her commitment to seeing through the eye of the heart starts with love rather than logic, diversity in ways to pray rather than a one size fits all, hyper homogenized liturgy, dia-logue instead of lecture, orthopraxis not orthodoxy (that is, right practice not simply right belief), and trust rather than anxious fretting. Mary’s spiritual practices are like Pete Seeger’s song: to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.
+ Second, Mary’s presence throughout the life of Christ – especially her refusal to abandon Jesus during the Passion – contradicts what we have been taught about Christ’s death. Her prayerful presence outside the tomb pushes us to wonder: why have we missed, overlooked, or ignored her commitment to love and solidarity for so long? How did this come about? And what might happen if we integrated her spirituality of the heart as a corrective to our tradi-tion? The Reverend Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault is certain that the anointing Magdalene shared with Jesus changes the trajectory and meaning of the Paschal Mystery: where once we saw the Cross as Christ’s sacrificial payment to God to atone for human sin; now we see Jesus showing us: “How a spiritual identity forged through self-surrender survives the grave and can never be taken away.”
The Paschal Mystery is no longer about dying, it is about dying-to-self. It becomes the archetype for all our personal experiences of letting go and rising to new life along the pathway of becoming whole, reminding us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love for this is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be fully alive.
Bourgeault insists that Magdalene’s sacramental anointing of Jesus – and her solitary witness at the tomb – changes Christian faith from a passive spectator sport obsessed with the death of Jesus, in to a spirituality of life where our experiential prayers are more potent than any words or theological abstractions. When we practice incarnating the rhythm of life, death, and resurrection into our everyday experiences, the Passion of the Christ become the form of our life. Bourgeault puts it like this:
From the perspective of sacred wisdom, what can we say now about Christ’s passion? The key is to read the life of Jesus (and Magdalene) as a sacrament – as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace – whose purpose is not to arouse empathy (or pity) but to create empowerment and a solidarity of radical love. Jesus is not particularly interested in increasing either our guilt or our devotion, but rather, in deepening our capacity to move through our life as those who see the totality of creation as one living being. It is about acquiring non-dual vision so that we see ourselves within the whole of God’s presence even in our most unsettling moments.
This vision of the Paschal Mystery no longer emphasizes an external and historic atoning sacrificial lamb but celebrates the way of Jesus and Mary as sacred archetypes and spiritual guides who take us inward in order that our outward lives of love are strengthened. It is the practice of relinquishing control to pursuit of serenity, letting go and falling through fear so that we live into that love that will not let us go, a dying to self before death welcomes us into the unending unity of reality. Rumi was so spot on when he prayed, “What have I EVER lost by dying?”
I spent millons of years in the world of inorganic things as a star, as a rock...Then I died and became a plant--forgetting my former existence because of its otherness. Then I died and became an animal--Forgetting my life as a plant except for inclinations in the season of spring and sweet herbs-- like the inclination of babes toward their mother's breast Then I died and became a human, my intelligence ripened, awakening from greed and self-seeking to become wise and knowing I behold a hundred thousand intelligences most marvelous and remember my former states and inclinations. And when I die again, I will soar past the angels to places I cannot imagine: What have I ever lost by dying?
Scripture speaks of Mary Magdalene’s part in this cosmic clarification eight different times in each of the four canonical gospels: first, addressing the act of anointing Jesus for the grave and then as she becomes the first witness to Christ’s resurrection. Back in 1972, feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza made it clear that our stories of Mary’s place in early Christianity have been compromised from the start: all of the evangelists recognize her centrality during Christ’s passion and resurrection, but they are all equally silent about her engagement during the Lord’s earthly ministry. For one considered an intimate companion of Jesus from the start of his ministry in Galilee – the only one who continued a loving presence throughout his torture – why is she invisible during the rest of the story? St. Luke goes out of his way to diminish Magdalene in favor of St. Peter’s prominence. And St. Mark’s gospel goes so far as to render Mary speechless after witnessing the resurrection stating in his gospel’s closing verse: “she and the other women were told to speak with Peter and the other disciples … but they fled from the tomb trembling with shock and awe for fear had come upon them.” Fiorenza and other feminist theologians are equally critical of how Magdalene is depicted during the act of anointing Jesus where, in a word, she is written out of the story marking Jesus as Messiah.
Both St. Matthew and St. Mark show Jesus blessing the woman who anoints him, saying to his male disciples: “Truly I tell you from my heart that wherever my gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done here will be told and honored in memory of her.” Why, then, is the name of this holy and faithful woman we’ve been called to remember missing? In three of our four gospels, it has been omitted completely while St. John engages in an odd obscuring of one Mary for another that has left us scratching our heads for nearly sixteen hundred years.
It is small wonder that Bourgeault devoted a full decade of her life to studying and praying over the way tradition portrays women in the earliest days of the community and how that pattern continues to manipulate and marginalize women’s wisdom even now. Beyond the inconsistencies and invisibilities of scriptures, Bourgeault rightly asks: “Why is the apostle to the apostles not herself named and honored as an apostle? How did we get to a place where the apostle to the apostles is now thought of as just a penitent whore?” Bringing Mary back from behind the curtain of invisibility requires giving the anonymous woman at the center of our anointing stories the name Magdalene, she insists.
Magdalene’s undisputed presence in the Easter saga acquires a sacred symmetry and significance when she is restored to the work of anointing Jesus before the Cross. Doing so allows us to see: That Jesus’ passage is framed on either side by her parallel acts of anointing. At Bethany, she sends him forth to the cross wearing the unction of love. On Easter morning he awakens to that same fragrance of love as she arrives at the tomb with her spices and perfumes, expecting to anoint his body for death. He has been held in love throughout his entire passage. In so doing, Bruce Chilton writes, “Mary Magdalene establishes the place of anointing as a central – albeit forgotten – ritual in Christianity, one that helps us enter into Jesus’ death as we move forward to his resurrection.” Here’s what Scripture tells us about Magdalene and the anointing of Jesus.
+ Before and after the Cross, Matthew and Mark tell similar stories. At a private supper, an unnamed woman sneaks into the house of Simon the Leper and pours a jar of expansive, per-fumed oil on Jesus’ head. The disciples are scandalized: some because they saw this as an extravagant waste of resources, others because it was so sensual. To which Jesus replied: “You will always have the poor with you; that is, there will always be a need for acts of mercy. But I will not always be with you. She marked me with the sign of Messiahship in anticipation of my death. Blessed is she: let us always remember this in memory of her.” Note that here the woman is anonymous, the anointing takes place in Simon the Leper’s home, and it occurs shortly before the crucifixion.
+ In John’s gospel, the plot is much the same: before the Cross, Jesus is anointed with costly and highly perfumed oil. Only this time, the woman is given a name. Mary – Mary of Bethany – sister of Martha and Lazarus. In this story, the sensuality of anointing is exaggerated as we are told that Mary wiped the Messiah’s feet with her hair and the fragrance of the perfume filled the whole house. The disciples continue to argue about wasting resources while Jesus scolds them saying: this is a moment to cherish; enjoy it because it will not last forever.
+ Luke offers the greatest details, typical of his gospel, but switches locale and context to a dinner hosted by the Pharisee Simon. The still anonymous woman yet again invades the sanctity of this all-male supper, pours costly and fragrant oil over Jesus, wipes his feet with her tears, her hair, and her kisses and remains there while the men argue. The sheer sensual-ity outrages Simon who names the interloper a woman of the street – a sinner and whore - whom Jesus should have nothing to do with if he was truly holy. A sermonette about hospit-ality, grace, and forgiveness for those who have engaged in bold sins follows changing the meaning of this anointing: no longer does it mark Jesus as Messiah before his death, now it becomes a morality tale.
Both St. Mark and St. Luke mix into this shared story a unique and peculiar aside, namely that one of the female disciples following Jesus, Magdalene, had seven demons exorcised from her – maybe by Jesus himself. It didn’t take long before some started to associate the seven demons with sin. I think Bourgeault is on to something when she writes: the ancient logic went something like this:
Since the woman in Luke’s anointing was a sinner – and Magdalene had once been possessed by seven demons – Magdalene had to be a sinner, too. Simon the Leper was effusive about the sinful nature of the woman from the street, so Magdalene’s sin must have been lust which led her into a life of prostitution. Add to this the woman in St. John’s story of anointing Jesus was named Mary, albeit Mary of Bethany, so this must have been a mistake: Mary of Magdala and Mary of Bethany had to have been the same person.
Clearly misogyny and slander were involved in corrupting Magdalene’s legacy. So, too the place of competition and mistrust among the early disciples. This was a fluid time of profound diversity: there were Jewish/Christian congregations as well as Gentile/Christian communities; there were groups loyal to the brother of Jesus, James of Jerusalem, who honored the old ways and believers in Syria, Greece, and beyond who were inspired by the freedom promulgated by St. Paul in regions outside of Palestine. Add to this Magdalene’s gospel which emphasis a loving solidarity, seeing with the eyes of the heart, a ministry of quiet presence over institutional worship, and dialogue rather than catechism and a stark contrast to the style of St. Peter who cherished order, clear lines of authority and accountability, and his culture’s complicated roles concerning gender and privilege comes into view. Remember: Mary NEVER abandoned or betrayed Jesus while the same cannot be said for Peter or the rest of the brothers. “A means had to be devised to undercut Magdalene’s original authority,” writes Bourgeault, “some wanted and needed to move her from apostolacy to apostasy – and Luke handed them the raw materials on a silver platter.”
It is not an accident that the Roman Catholic Church intentionally assigned St. Luke’s story of the anointing of Jesus to be the gospel reading for the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene on July 22nd – a wicked error historically rejected entirely by Eastern Orthodoxy - and not corrected for fourteen hundred years. A homily from 591 of the Common Era by Pope Gregory the Great put it like this in a manner too long commonplace:
She who Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven demons were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven demons signify if not all the vices – the seven deadly sins – which makes it clear, dear brothers, that this woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she, therefore, once displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praise-worthy manner.
Other scholars suggest that there was also unconscious sabotage taking place as well. Think of what often happens during lectio divina – sacred and meditative reading – where Bible stories are shared, conflated, mixed in with personal feelings and biases without much careful research. Over the centuries, “the inevitable shadow side of the church’s increasing obsession with celibacy and sexual purity took root creating space for the deepening sickness in the soul of the Western Church at the end of the patristic era” to rise to the surface” where it became normative.
This soul sickness still exists as Pope Francis finds himself in a guerilla war against the old partisans of privilege in the Vatican. Fear of sexuality, the holy feminine, male superiority, sexual exploitation of children, and the culture of clerical exceptionalism continues to stain and violate the integrity of the wounded body of Christ in Rome. And not just Rome, right? We’re STILL struggling to protect the rights of women to control their own bodies – to secure equal pay for equal work – to live into the fullness of their sensuality without the double-standard condemnation of privileged males – the glass ceiling – mansplaining – and a culture of violence against women. Let’s be clear: the soul sickness is still a plague within the Body of Christ.
And… not but, but and… if brokenness still thrives among us so, too does the small but mighty presence of St. Mary Magdalene: gatekeeper of Christ’s wisdom, minister of a solidarity of love, confidant of Christ Jesus, shepherdess of the open heart that encouraged Jesus to fall through his fear of the Cross into the never-ending love and grace of God that we all might do likewise.
· Some sixteen hundred years after she was erased and silenced, she still shows up showing us what an anointing love means to the world. Mary is earthy and passionate. She is balanced and grounded. She was never trapped by the church’s obsession with monastic celibacy and still refuses to be co-opted into the hierarchy of pseudo-respectability.
· Somedays she’s “bursting into those closed dining halls of privilege,” as Bourgeault puts it, “to share the raw immediacy of her love for Jesus.” On other days she hunkered down in contem-plative prayer. Or sharing a quiet loving presence with an anxious soul. Or inviting us deeper into a spirituality of self-emptying.
Magdalene asks us to take anointing seriously: to be anointed with holy love from the inside out is how we multiply the miracle of falling through our fears into God’s grace. She calls us to practice being grounded in trust, so well-rehearsed in inner peace, so open to the presence of the holy within our humanity that those around us will want an anointing, too. We know, see, and feel every day the anguish, cruelty, fear, and suffering that screams for relief. Our souls ache and writhe in sorrow and solidarity. But what to do? How can we help? My hunch is that it has something to do with the way Magdalene experienced and shared God’s love: she carried the confidence of inner peace within herself so assuredly that outwardly she could stand with courage whenever the temptation to abandon Jesus in his anguish arose. Hers was a witness to love, a non-violent and non-anxious presence in a sea of suffering. Magdalene was intimately connected to the peace that passes understanding, trusting God’s peace to carry the day even beyond the obvious evidence because, you see, that is what God has been doing since before the beginning of time.
When I began these wee live-streaming reflections it was at the start of the pandemic – it was a time when we didn’t know what the hell was going on – and were filled with fear. I sensed that the least I could do from the safety and solitude of my study was offer a calmly word of encouragement that tried to ground us in God’s love. I spoke of nature’s rhythm as one clue that grace would, in time, win the day. I shared songs and poems with you – some spiritual practices to diminish our anxiety.
· We’ve been through two Lents together, two Easters, too – and now it’s a second spring moving towards summer. Many but not all of us have been vaccinated. Some are finding ways to return to the greater world even as some have had to work and be public through-out this time of fear and frustration.
· That means, I think, that the nature of my reflections must change: we’ve made it this far but now everything is shifting. Pent up fears are erupting in violence. Pent up racial injustice is exploding again on our streets. Pent up economic instability is being addressed in the nation’s capital, but many of the old white boys and girls are fighting to maintain the privileged ways that keep the wounded down and the broken without the resources we all need to thrive.
So, what my heart is saying that while some of us are going to be called out into the streets very soon to join with Dr. Barber and the Poor People’s Movement, and others of us are going to be asked to challenge racist/misogynist/nativist hatred in our extended families, we also need to have some among us who are so grounded in love and peace and trust that we can walk as non-anxious partners with Jesus and Magdalene and quietly anoint others with grace. Invite others into the inward journey so that our outward endeavors advance compassion and solidarity. That’s what I will be sharing with you over the next few weeks from the wisdom of St. Mary Magdalene: ways to nurture our souls inwardly so that our outward pursuit strengthens love and trust.
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