Mary
Magdalene, Apostle
July 22, 2007
Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert
The Holy Gospel according to
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.”
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the
tomb; and she 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 said to them, “They have
taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and
saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 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 to her,
“Mary!” She turned and said to him in
Hebrew, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher).
Jesus said to her, “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.’” 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 Gospel of the Lord.
Let us pray.
Our loving and gracious God, you
call us to be disciples and apostles to your mysteries, to your hope. Give us grace to be an ever-new community of
faith, hope, and love, now and forever. Amen.
I would like to ask you to stretch your imagination
with me a little bit this morning, to relax the rational mind a bit and perhaps
push the limits of what some have referred to as the “imaginal” capabilities of
the mind.
It has been a wonderful week of magical adventures,
of stretching the imagination, I know for me here at Immanuel, at least. First of all, teaching the Threes and Fours
for
One day while Kate and I were sitting on the magical
sea creatures’ rug with the Threes and Fours for music class with Miss Rebekah,
my imagination was stretched again.
Rebekah was showing the children how to say and then sing, “I believe,”
“I believe,” in sign language. And then
she said the Bible verse for the day, it was John 11:27: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” “Do you know who said that?” she asked the
children. I thought to myself, “Well,
sure, Peter said that.” But Rebekah
said, “Martha said that.” Martha? I thought. And so I went home; sure enough in Matthew,
Peter makes that historic confession of faith; but in the Gospel of John, it is
not Peter, it is Martha. Umm, I thought,
stretching my imagination, “How come I never saw that before?” Sometimes it helps to sit on the floor with
Threes and Fours to have your imagination stretched in new directions.
Then on Friday, it was also the Twins Game with
Loanne and Ralph Thrane, where by the eighth inning, when we had to leave, it
looked like the Twins were going to beat
And this morning, all in the very same week, the new
Evangelical Lutheran Worship Book has asked us to stretch our imaginations
beyond what most of us, including me, grew up in Sunday School imagining the
crowd of apostles around Jesus to look like, for the publication of the new
Evangelical Lutheran Worship Book, with this publication, Mary of Magdala,
sometimes called Miriam of Magdala, better known as Mary Magdalene, has taken
her place alongside the Sundays designated as, for example, St. Luke the
Evangelist Sunday, or St. James the Elder Sunday. For today, July 22, for the first time in the
history of the Christian church, all two thousand years of it, has now been
named Mary Magdalene the Apostle Sunday.
The compilers of the new worship book, along with many scholars, are
asking us to stretch our imagination to allow Mary of Magdala to take her
rightful place as an apostle, remembered now as the first witness to the
resurrection, and an apostle who preached the Gospel throughout the
Mediterranean world. Now, that stretches
the imagination beyond what our mind had imagined before.
Scholars will tell you, as will the author himself,
that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code,
while it may be based on a historical happening, is still largely fiction. It is not based on an accurate historical rendering
of the biblical character of Mary of Magdala, although we are indebted to Brown
for generating a good deal of interest in this character, who Bernard of
Clairvaux and
According to ancient tradition of the East, Mary
Magdalene was a wealthy woman from whom Christ expelled seven demons. The tradition of the wealthy benefactor is
well established in biblical scholarship.
She would have been a person of high social standing, who was not only a
leader in the early Christian church, but also supported it with her
wealth. Scholars now believe that the
seven demons in the culture of the East would have referred to something like
today we call the seven chakras, or energy centers, that it centered, to give a
person heightened spiritual clarity or insight, or in modern terminology
heightened spiritual wisdom or enlightenment.
There are important details that emerge in all four
Gospels about her. Mary Magdalene is the
only woman, besides Mother Mary, who is mentioned by name in all four Gospels,
and her name in all but one is the first listed at significant events in the
Gospel story. We are told that she is
one of the three, along with John the Apostle and Mother Mary, who wait at the
foot of the cross while all of the other disciples flee for their lives. But most significant, according to modern
scholars arguing for her apostolic place, along with others, is this: that she
is the first witness to the resurrection, as we have it in our Gospel lesson
from John for today, which would have given her apostolic standing and the
specific title of Apostle to the Apostles. The Eastern tradition also tells us that
after the ascension she journeyed to Rome, where she was given a hearing at the
court of Tiberius Caesar because of her high social standing, where she
protested the poor administration of justice by Pilate at Jesus’ trial, and
told Caesar that Jesus had risen from the dead.
To help demonstrate the resurrection, she picked up an egg from the
table. As the story goes, Caesar
responded that a human being “could no more raise from the dead than that egg
turn red.” As legend would have it, the
egg in her hand immediately turned red, which is why red eggs have been
exchanged at Easter throughout the Byzantine East up to this very day.
Why is all of this important? It is important because of a wild debate
underway in theological and biblical circles today about why Mary of Magdala
was so poorly regarded and even portrayed in Christian literature and art
throughout nearly 2,000 years of Christian history. And some scholars today are asking us to give
them a chance not only to set the record straight but to allow our imaginations
to stretch, in order to give Mary of Magdala her rightful place as an apostle
in the early Christian church.
Three decades ago, in 1969, the Roman church quietly
admitted that Mary of Magdala had been mistakenly cast as a woman of the
street, which, in effect, undermined her public role as apostle. How did this happen? In the year 591, Pope Gregory preached a
homily in which he said that the church had determined her identity as the sinner of all sinners, and from that
point on this became official church teaching about her.
However, a thousand years later, in 1896, the first
copy of the Gospel of Mary was discovered near
So why bother to add Mary Magdalene the Apostle
Sunday to the portraits of other church leaders recognized with special
Sundays this many years later, when all of what we have is based, at best, on
historical speculation and educated guesses and, at worst, on legend and
fiction? Because history over time, by
its very nature, seeks to redeem itself, and because even the details of the
Gospels that we have themselves, as they have come down to us ( ), an alternative current at work. Perhaps today the best we can do is allow the
word to stretch our imaginations a bit to allow for this alternative current,
given the bits and snatches of material that have come down to us today.
In her classic 1929 lecture to two women’s’ colleges
in London, the British author, Virginia Woolf, gives us a picture of what
stretching the imagination might mean for young women in 1929 to be writers in
a culture that only wished to discourage them from writing. Her famous little book was titled A Room of One’s Own, in which she argues
that in order for these young college women to whom she speaks, she argues that
they will need to find a room or a space of their own. Midway through this remarkable book, she
invites her students to stretch their imaginations and to imagine a fictional
character, who may, she says, have been Shakespeare’s sister, named Judith,
let’s say, born with a gift for genius no less than her acclaimed older
brother. “Let me imagine,” she writes,
“since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare
had a wonderfully gifted sister.” And
then she goes on to describe why this child’s gift never got on to paper. We wonder throughout the next chapters of the
book what difference the life of this gifted sister would mean, anyway, until
the very last page, where Virginia Woolf gives this challenge to the young
students, in 1929, mind you: “I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had
a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a
word. Now my belief is that this poet
who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many
others who are not here tonight. But she
lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need
only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.” She goes
on, “If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we
think, if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings
not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the
sky, too, and the trees, or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the
fact or it is a fact that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and
that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men
and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was
Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid
down.” She concludes her paper with these
words: “Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her
forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation,
without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born
again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot
expect, for that would be impossible.
But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to
work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.”
Fact or fiction, history or legend, we are part of a
glorious company of saints and apostles, each and every one of us, witnessing
to new possibilities yet today. The
issue is not only what might have been, but what the community of writers and
Virginia Woolf say, or what the community of Christians in Mary of Magdala's
day may have imagined one day for us, for they had a vision for a new community
of faith, hope, and love, that has come down to us in its various forms for us
to imagine today. For today we
continue, as did Mary and Martha, Peter and John, to be witnesses to a vision
for a new community of discipleship that is ever expanding in our life
together, indeed, in our work for the Gospel and the coming of the kingdom yet
today; for great apostles, just as great poets, never die.
All that God asks of us is to continue to stretch the
imagination, to embrace the kind of openness to the work of the Spirit in our
lives for the sake of the Threes and Fours, and all future generations, for who
knows what possibilities God is asking us to become in the future,
possibilities that we do not yet even see as of today.
Amen.