celebrating the feast day of mary magdalene...

This Saturday, July 22, is the Feast Day of St. Mary Magdalene. Pope Francis has advised the faithful to treat THIS feast day in the same manner as other festivals: with vigor, honor, and liturgical enthusiasm. The commitment of Francis stands as a small but vital sign to the wider church: Magdalene's witness is essential. It must not only be recovered - and celebrated - but also contemplatively explored as part of creation's healing. For that reason alone, this week's "Small is Holy" livestream on Sunday, July 23 will give attention to Magdalene (and briefly pause our consideration of Walter Wink's masterwork, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man.) 

As noted elsewhere, Magdalene is our tradition's original contemplative who not only learned to "see with the eyes of the heart" but let that charism shape her life into one of humble solidarity. Increasingly, Mary has become the spiritual archetype for living the extravagant grace of Jesus in clear defiance of the ascetic obsessions of a celibate institution. Most of traditional Christian spirituality, in the East as well as the West, embraces a literal kenosis or self-emptying. St. Paul articulated this in Philippians 2:

If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty 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 in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Historically, this has been practiced ascetically: fasting, celibacy, retreats, and the discarding of life's pleasure in pursuit of inner emptiness shapes this spirituality. Most religious traditions include a path of relinquishment and clearly it holds an obvious albeit literal appeal. But what if the spirituality of Jesus encourages a letting go through the abundance of grace, beauty, love, and solidarity? It is clear that the way of Jesus differs profoundly from that of John the Baptist: John came with fasting while Jesus encouraged feasting; John was considered a solitary hermit while Jesus was denigrated as a drunkard; John lived in the desert while Jesus not only engaged the world vigorously but built a small community of physical, emotional, and spiritual support. A literal - or fundamentalist - kenosis increasingly looks to me like the antithesis of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. The Rev. Melissa Florer-Bixler put it like this in a recent edition of The Christian Century:

My Mennonite sensibilities are out of place in this ritual. I prefer restraint and moderation. I am content with my small portion. Holes in T-shirts are a sign of a well-loved garment, and I’ve resoled the same shoes several times over the past decade. As for many Anabaptists, the image of Jesus I am most comfortable with is the itinerant preacher who owned no property, had no privately held money, and lived with few worldly possessions. And so it is an unsettling reminder that Jesus is often involved in extravagant consumption. The kingdom of God is like a wayward child who returns home after wasting half his father’s fortune—and in response his father throws him a lavish party. A shepherd, eschewing all sound financial advice and logic, leaves 99 sheep vulnerable while he goes off to search for the one. The kingdom of heaven is like a banquet for the poor. There is much more. Jesus produces more wine at the first public miracle in Cana than could be drunk at a hundred weddings—and this after the guests are already drunk. The miracle of the feeding of the crowds in the wilderness produces 12 baskets of leftovers. Several times, Jesus and his followers are accused of gluttony and drunkenness.

The significant differences between the paths of Jesus and John are clearly noted in Scripture (see Matthew 11). They are obvious, too by reading between the lines where abundance regularly trumps scarcity which invites questions about the institution's obsession with physical sacrifices that run counter to the embodied generosity of Jesus. With kindness, I think the best we can say is that from early on the masculo-centric hierarchy that came to shape and control Christianity applied a one-size-fits-all approach to spiritual practices that not only favored their culture's male initiation rites but did so counter to the living experience of Jesus of Nazareth. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault cuts to the chase:

Right here, I believe, we come to the fundamental problem with these celibate models of transformation. It's not merely their monochromatic viewpoint or the implicit devaluing of a whole other stream of Christian spiritual wisdom whose roots are in passionate human love. Rather, it is the fact that at key points they seem to be slightly out of kilter with the path of transformation that Jesus himself walked and taught. One might say that this model points us toward John the Baptist rather than Jesus: toward those ancient and time-honored practices of renunciation, asceticism, and self-concentration through abstinence, whereas if we really look closely, we see that Jesus himself seemed to be constantly pushing the envelope in the opposite direction — toward radical self-abandonment, reckless self-outpouring, and the transmutation of passion in complete self-giving.

Consider the iconography of the Baptist next to that of Magdalene: both are shrouded in symbols that tell dramatically different stories.

The Baptist is attired in a prophet's garb: he is wizened and wild-eyed, fervent in his rejection of the status quo, he is swathed in earth tones and sweat that challenge traditional notions of fashion and beauty.

Now look at Magdalene:

She is bathed in serenity not fervor. Her countenance is at rest not at war. And her symbolism speaks of compassionate engagement: the egg, sometimes red and sometimes white, recalls both pagan culture's sacramental understanding of eggs symbols of new life as well as the apocryphal story of Magdalene's visit to Tiberius Cesar in Rome.

Holding the egg out to him, she exclaimed for the first time what is now the universal Easter proclamation among Christians, "Christ is risen!" The emperor, mocking her, said that Jesus had no more risen than the egg in her hand was red. Immediately, the egg turned red as a sign from God to illustrate the truth of her message. The Emperor then heeded her complaints about Pilate condemning an innocent man to death, and had Pilate removed from Jerusalem under imperial displeasure. In another tradition, it is said that Mary Magdalene brought a basket of white boiled eggs with her on Easter morning to the tomb of Jesus—perhaps as a meal for herself and the others as they waited for someone to roll the stone away. When she arrived at the site of the Resurrection, finding the stone already rolled away, she also found that the eggs in her basket had turned into bright shades of color. (Gretchen Fitz, Catholic Company)

The witness and spirituality of Magdalene is saturated in the extravagant grace that Jesus shared. Further, in the extra-testamental texts widely circulated during the first two centuries of Christianity, Mary sounds more like her mentor than most of the other original male disciples. Not that they didn't get grace, that's not mine to say. It's more like they took longer to get it than Mary which must be why Magdalene was chosen by Jesus to be the apostle to the apostles. Increasingly open-hearted and intellectually vigorous Christian scholars see that the witness of Magdalene more closely resembles the words and deeds of the earthly Jesus and warrants our reconsideration. We'll give it a shot on Sunday @ 4 pm.