Rescuing St Mary of Magdalene

 St Mary of Magdala has had a hard time of late, a pawn in culture wars between feministas on the one hand and a reactionary male priesthood on the other. At least so you would think given the ink thats been poured trying to re-imagine her in ways that somehow rescue her from her traditional place in history. She really is being re-imagined in her-story.

This process has involved everyone from Biblical scholars to Dan Brown, the novelist, with endless re-telling of her life that each time tries to grab her and liberate her from the Gospel text. Instead she is the vehicle for endless theories that would neutralise Jesus as the Christ, making him somewhat different from the God Man of the Scriptures. Mary, as one of the key witnesses, is re-mythologised, as Jesus’ wife, as the ‘female apostle’ or as ‘the whore’ to meet key ideological fantasies of their day, anything is possible so long as she can’t be allowed to speak on her own terms.

And in that vein this was reposted to my Facebook feed:

Richard Coles FB post this morning:

"It is the Feast of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Magdala, a first century fishing village on the Sea of Galilee. 

The notion that she was a prostitute goes back to some Easter sermons preached by Pope Gregory I at the end of the 6th C, in which he conflated her with Mary of Bethany and the unnamed pedicurist of Luke. Immoral enterprise also provided a narrative for the story of her seven exorcisms. Thereafter the repentant prostitute suited the purposes of preachers very well, it became fixed, and so the really significant thing about her - that she is the apostle to the apostles - gets obscured. 

In the Fouth Gospel she is the first to encounter the resurrected Christ in the garden on Easter morning where he was laid in the tomb. She mistakes him for a gardener until he says her name. She reaches out to him and he says, according to the Latin Bible, Noli me tangere, ‘Do not touch me’, but this is a poor translation of the Greek original Μή μου ἅπτου, in which the verb has continuous force, and means ‘Do not cling to me’ - something very different. The Latin error is depicted in Titian’s ravishing painting in the National Gallery (illustrated), so popular that it was retained in the gallery during the Second World War rather than being removed for safe keeping, to comfort Blitzed Londoners as they listened to Myra Hess play her arrangement of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring on a specially installed piano. This was in an age when those in authority understood the power of art to challenge, strengthen and console. 

Nevertheless, Mary’s identification with prostitution, and with moral damage, persists, and she is the patron of prostitution, penitent sinners, converts, the sexually tempted, fallen women and people ridiculed for their piety (as well as apothecaries, glove makers, contemplatives, parfumiers, tanners, hairdressers and pharmacists). 

I used to think it fitting, in a way, that the pub where Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England (though the Home Secretary may nurse ambitions here), shot her faithless lover is called the Magdala, named after the hometown of the most famous fallen woman in history. But it’s a different Magdala, in Abyssinia, where the British fought a battle in 1868."

It doesn’t take a genius to read the few mentions of Mary of Magdala to put together a basic profile. There is Mary who:

washes Jesus’ feet with ointment meant for his burial, the same Mary who comes to his tomb to anoint his dead body with the same spices.

There is another account of a woman who comes and washes Jesus feet, but with her hair, and without ointment. The religious folk assembled for the feast remonstrate because this is a woman with a bad reputation (impute what we like here) but Jesus’ response is the very heart of his message - forgiven much she loves him much, and much more than all the righteous people around him put together. It is a picture of a woman whose heart, soul, mind is enraptured with a depth of love for Jesus as the bringer of mercy, of forgiveness to her life. Maybe the connection of woman/feet washing/hair is a step of association too far, but the four Gospels are full of such unedited variants, for example feeding 5 or 7 thousand people, quite where was Jesus born - Nazareth or Bethlehem, and so on. Absolute accuracy is not seemingly a priority of our dear evangelists, and so trying to identify events narrated slightly differently has long called for creative associations being made. 

Then there is Mary’s association with Bethany, as the sister of Lazarus and Martha. It is Mary whose love forJesus stands out with such force. Just as it did with the woman wiping his feet. And just as it does in the account of Mary sitting enrapt at Jesus’ feet while her sister,the same Martha remonstrates with her being lazy. Here we see that same enrapt love which Jesus commends the woman who washes her feet with such fullness and tenderness.

And Mary throws herself at Jesus… feet yet again. What is it with this woman and Jesus feet? Later at the resurrection Jesus basically has to prise her off his feet for as he says ‘I have not yet ascended’. You get the impression that this woman of such deep love of Jesus really wouldn’t have let him go has she had her way. 

So in all these pictures we have the same elements… feet, passion, love, devotion. And the woman commended in the Gospels by Jesus for loving much, is one who washes his feet with her hair. 

Now ideologists want to liberate this image of womanhood from associations with prostitution. Sad to say that while most who use prostitutes are men, most prostitutes are women. Its a women’s thing, as they say, the oldest profession in the world. It was going on in Jericho before the walls fell down, and its going on today in every town and city on the planet. And its mostly women. So, this is an important women’s issue, and how Jesus responds has masses to say to these people who all too often are scorned, and are victims of abuse, control, sexual disease and often, though not always, already caught in a vicious poverty trap. That Jesus should chose one of those to anoint his feet on the eve of his Passion, that he should allow one of these to be the first to see his risen body, that he should commend one of these for the intimate, physical expression of their total love to him, that he should say that one of them experiencing forgiveness and mercy can open the door of the human heart for such Divinely focused love…is… important, even if uncomfortable for people wearing collars and being respectable, or for feminists whose ideological conviction can’t manage to compute the reality of women’s fall and having to receive forgiveness from…a man. 

Mary like Peter and Judas was a great sinner, and all three are woven into the narrative of the Cross. Only Mary, of the three, is there as a witness to what was happening. Peter’s was driven out into the night by cock crowd, while Judas was to hang himself having left the scene flinging thirty piece of silver across the temple floor. Like John she would be one of only two to witness BOTH the crucifixion AND the resurrection. Even the Mother of God is not ascribed that role, for she could not experience the power of Easter in the same power, because she was not one who could be ‘forgiven much’. The Cross speaks to the greatest of sinner far more than to those who are righteous, as Jesus makes clear time and again. Lost sheep and all that.  And so who better to be the first witness to Cross and resurrection than she who had been ‘forgiven much’. That’s the whole point of the whole Christian thing. And no one should sanitise that from her. 

And Mary can be that witness because, unlike the rest of us, ‘she loved much’. She not only experienced the depth of human slavery to sin (how else to describe that than that she is one who was possessed by seven demons) but in that knew the sheer raw power of being forgiven, not in a self-centred liberation but as an outflowing of love, love perhaps deeper than the universe had yet known apart from the heart of the God Man himself.  Who else could better sing the Easter Exultet… “O happy fault, O necessary Adam sin that won for us so great a redeemer?” She brings the message of hope, not as words about what Jesus did, but as the living embodiment of it all, in her flesh, where her stony heart and been turned to flesh, where the dead bones of her beaten body had become a temple of true, divine, eternal love. Mary of Magdala is THE witness precisely because she walks the walk, the ugly, shameful, demonic reality but that becomes the transfiguration of her humanity into real flesh and blood that can love abundantly without shame or the fear that shame brings: before them all she washes HIS feet with her hair, anointing them for his burial, testament to Love Incarnate, and so she is to be the one at the foot of the Cross to bear witness to what it really is all about.

If there is anything disturbing about the eradication of Mary Magdala is is that she has been sidelined from the Cross, erased from the iconography, relegated to the Myhrr bearers at the tomb, restricted to that weeping encounter with the gardner, the one rebuked - Noli Mi Tangere, and so taken her place alongside Thomas, the doubter. We just don’t like sinners in the picture, not real ones, not the shame inducing, filth daubed, wretches that we are but are afraid to see, to accept or to love. Yes Mary has been erased as the apostle to the apostles, but not by being branded a prostitute but by being stripped of her witness. She loved much, but like those clericalised guests, we want to say, ‘don’t you know who she is’ and so get her out of the picture, or at least make her look respectable. After all, thats not the picture women want to see of themselves in the mirror, not the picture we want our little girls to have of themselves. 

And so the Gospel message that is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is neutered, sanitised and re-structured.  The Christian message of hope is not that good people go to heaven, or that abusers will go to hell, or that the righteous males in positions of religious authority are the ones who get it, or that clerics (of whatever gender) are the one’s to get to witness and bear testimony (she is the ultimate challenge to the clericalist view of the Church where everything has to have a collar to be valued and have a real say). No, Mary’s voice as the forgiven woman possessed of seven devils, a woman with some sort of reputation that might mean she was a member of that most ancient of professions, is being stripped of its power, clericalised, sanitised and deformed into the anti-Gospel which we first see on the lips of those male clerics, those Pharisees convinced of their own righteousness because they kept the rules, who reprimanded Jesus for letting this woman with a reputation touch him and sensually so. They understood nothing. And it seems nothing much has changed in some circles today.