Mary Magdalene
Good afternoon to all of you, sisters and brothers. I
first want to wish you a happy feast of Mary Magdalene, patroness of the
mansplained and of the dismissed, of women on the move and women forced to
migrate, of women truth tellers, and women who are gospel proclaimers. I ask
that you pray with me now that the Spirit be with us this day.
We live in interesting times. Dangerous times, especially
for women, for children, for the vulnerable and the displaced. Our times are
dangerous to mental health, to physical health, especially to the physical
health of non-white, non-heteronormative bodies. It can be difficult to discern
how, or even if, individual lives matter. We are traversing, as a community, a
country, a church, a time in the world when for the poor and the excluded, the
displaced and the forgotten, as Jon Sobrino said, tomorrow is not guaranteed.
We live in dangerous times for truth, which is seemingly
under assault every day. Those who dare proclaim the truth (black lives matter,
ni una menos, families belong together) are ignored or maligned, not believed
or taken seriously, called hysterical or worse.
We continue to live in dangerous times for women,
especially. US women die in childbirth at alarming rates, especially women of
color. Black women are three times as likely to die in the US after giving
birth than white women. Intimate partner
violence harms 1 in 4 women, up to 20 persons a minute in this country. In
addition to this, sexual violence and harassment, environmental injustice, homophobia
and transphobia are crushing daily realities to so many women.
What, then, is good news today? If for Frederick Douglass
the question was what, to the slave, is the fourth of July, then what, to a woman
of color in the US of the 21st century, the age of #metoo, and
family separation, what to us is the feast of Mary Magdalene? How can we, in
these dark days, celebrate women and women’s leadership, when our sisters and
our children are cut down at every turn? Who is this woman who we claim to be a
towering figure in Christianity, the apostle to the apostles, the friend of
Christ? Where is she in all these narratives that border on despair?
I think we can find her if we pay attention. Remember,
attention is the expression of love, and Mary Magdalene was attentive. Mary,
whom Jesus called Magdalene, saw it all. She walked alongside Jesus in his best
moments, and stood at the cross at the absolute worst. She saw God,
collaborated with God, through moments of triumph but also, and more
importantly I think for us today, in moments of despair. She proclaimed the
truth and stood firm when she wasn’t believed. She was, for some time (as Jim
Martin reminds us every year at this time), the whole of the church, experiencing
the truth of the resurrection before anyone else, and she walked before us in
the need to share that hope-filled truth with a community that had lost hope.
The Magdalene is, foremost, a beacon of hope.
Biblical archaeologist and professor Joan Taylor noted in
a 2014 article that there was no town named “Magdala” in first-century
Palestine, or mentioned in the earliest NT writings.
There were towers (migdala) all over Palestine, ancient and contemporary, and
so the claim that the word “Magdalene” ties Mary to a particular location is
difficult to support. Instead, suggests Taylor, the possibility exists that
Jesus gave Mary a particular nickname, not unlike calling Simon Peter or the
Rock. Because of the ambiguity of the Aramaic word Magdala (Hebrew Migdala, or
tower), Taylor raises the possibility that Jesus named or called Mary “The
Tower” as a sign of her closeness to him, her prominence among his followers,
and her independence from patriarchal familial relationships (she’s not the
wife, or daughter of X).. Instead, Taylor says, “Perhaps, as Simon Peter was a
Rock, she was in some way the woman of the Tower.” (222)
But history has misunderstood and maligned Mary, whom
Jesus called Magdalene. Our tradition, steeped in male-dominance, relegated her
to a state of irrelevance, calling her a prostitute, a woman of ill-repute, a
whore. Artists and authors eagerly inscribed this image in our collective
imaginations, sullying not only the narrative of the Magdalene but the beauty
of women’s bodies, reducing her to sinful submission saved only by the merciful
Christ. She is depicted as a temptress and a seductress, a woman who used her
“wiles” until God put a stop to her awful behavior, aroused her shame, and set
her right. Sound familiar? A foil and a foe to Jesus’s mother, virginal and
“uncorrupted,” again reminding us that women’s bodies are only useful as
vehicles for sin.
Jesus did not see this. When Jesus looked at Mary, called
Magdalene, he saw a tower: a beacon, a fortress, a lookout. She stood out, she
stood tall, a marker, a sign. Can we see these things in her? I’ve already
talked a bit about how Mary Magdalene is a beacon of hope, having witnessed the
worst of Jesus’s suffering she is among the first to witness his triumph, and
must share this victory with the others. Hope works like that—not something we
contain merely within ourselves, a little propeller that pushes us forward to
the next day, but a combustion engine that propels us outward, into a community
that needs it most. Mary Magdalene is the woman who refuses to give in to
despair, who tends to the wounded and the dead, who finds in that tomb
nothing…nothing but promise, and who then turns and lets that joy overflow.
Mary Magdalene is a tower—the kind of tower that is a
fortress against assault. An independent woman (remember she is not named in
relation to any male family member) of means, my students frequently refer to
her as someone who “bankrolled Jesus’s ministry.” A source of strength and
refuge for Jesus and the other disciples, she also embodied, from the time she
left the empty tomb to the time she reached the other apostles, the whole of
the church and the essence of our ecclesial mission. That seed of hope let
loose in the world, that is what it means to be the church, reaching outward
toward the other. Mary proclaimed, like a banner you’d hang on a tower, or a
tower itself, the strength of the message of Christ. She was a tower in the
sense of an elevated pulpit: she stood and proclaimed the truth she housed in
her being—Christ is alive, even here, even now. And she didn’t change her tune,
even though the men dismissed her testimony. Like countless women before and
since, the men did not believe her. Patroness of the mansplained, indeed. So
many men did not believe her, in fact, that for centuries she was derided as a
prostitute—only a story of unbelievable redemption from horrible sin could
justify her nearness to the Truth. But we know better. Women tell the truth all
the time and are not believed, sometimes a truth they know with their own
bodies: I’ve seen it or experienced it, I KNOW. I’m sure many of us are in the
room right now. Me too.
Mary, whom Jesus called a tower, can be a person who
invites us to change our perspective. From a tower we can survey the landscape,
see with broader vision. The tower invites us to contemplate our smallness in
the scale of creation. It also allows us to see more. Perched in a tower, we
cannot help but look beyond: beyond our comfort or discomfort, beyond our
politics and religious boundaries, beyond our selfishness or our shame. In the
person of Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, hearer and proclaimer of the
Word of God, we have an invitation to not turn away from the suffering of those
in our families, on our borders, in the jails our taxes pay for; nor from the
suffering of the millions of migrants across the globe, many of them women and
children, vulnerable and unwelcome and disbelieved. They, too, proclaim the
truth, and we, like MM must hear them and proclaim the truth in hope.
Today we celebrate this towering woman, and we name,
acknowledge, and revere all the towering women who brought us to this
moment—the mothers and grandmothers who kept our faith alive and nurtured it
when we were children, the teachers and professors and mentors, the friends
we’ve made from surprising and reviled places, the misfits and the
misunderstood. We celebrate the ways in which this unlikely messenger bore the
whole church within her, like another Mary in the gospels bore the whole of God
within her. But we cannot merely celebrate this figure, we must go and do the
same: to whom will we proclaim the hope that is within us? For whom will we
stand up, even if we are disbelieved? On whose behalf will we challenge the
structures that keep people invisible, disposable, forgotten? And finally, who
will we choose to believe today, what voice crying out from the tomb, or the
detention center, or the jail, or the shelter, or the street corner?
Mary, whom Jesus called Magdalene, truth
teller, hope-bearer, towering woman, pray for us.
*************
Natalia Imperatori-Lee is an associate professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in New York and author of the forthcoming Cuéntame: Narrative in the Ecclesial Present (Orbis Books, 2018)
