Look Again

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 9, 2010

Look Again

Luke 8:1-3

Delicate silks, colorful cottons, flowing in the breeze.

The whisp of fragrant flowers,

an intoxicating perfume all around.

A smile that beckons,

even entices.

Who doesn’t know her?

More to the point,

who doesn’t know about her?

What kind of woman she is?

One look will tell you.

One look tells you she is a sinful woman,

the wrong kind of woman:

no virtue,

all vice.

Wherever she goes there is talk,

chatter, gossip:

“Look, there she is…

Surely she must have been forced she leave her hometown?

What respectable woman would paint her face

the way she does?

What man will lose himself in her perfume today?”

The portrait of a sinful woman;

the unsavory story that everyone is sure they know.

This is the portrait of Mary Magdalene.

A scandalous woman,

shameless,

a sinner.

The only problem is that this portrait

is utterly,

completely,

totally wrong.

For centuries whenever the name Mary Magdalene was spoken,

it was usually accompanied

by that harsh word “prostitute”.

This is deeply troubling 
because there is absolutely nothing in the Bible

that says, or even hints,

that Mary Magdalene might have been such a woman.

that she might have led such a life.

That word,

that life,

the brush that has painted the portrait we have of Mary

drags our attention, our focus, away from the real Mary,

the real portrait,

the Mary we find in the pages of the Bible,

if only we’d look again.

What does the Bible tell us about Mary?

Let’s start with the one thing we know,

even if we know nothing else about her:

We know that she was there on that first Easter Sunday,

that she was at the tomb,

that she had gone there in the darkness of the dawn.

We hear her name every Easter,

because all four of the gospel stories of the Resurrection -

all of them tell us that Mary was there.

Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John – they all agree.

Even if they don’t agree on who else was there,

they all agree that Mary Magdalene was there.

Mark tells us that she was accompanied by

“Mary, the mother of James and Salome”.

In Matthew’s gospel we read that she was accompanied by

“the other Mary”, presumably a reference to

“Mary the mother of James and Joseph”.

(Matthew 27:56)

Luke says her companions were

“Joanna, Mary the mother of James”,

and another unnamed women.

 (Luke 24:10)

John has Mary going to the tomb alone.

Whoever else was there,

the gospels tell us that an angel of the Lord

told Mary that Jesus had been raised,

raised from the dead,

and that she was to tell Jesus’ disciples the glorious news.

Not Peter,

not the “disciple whom Jesus loved”,

not Matthew,

not James:

Mary … Mary was the one charged with the responsibility

of telling the eleven

that Jesus had been “raised from the dead”.

(Matthew 28:7)

And, do you remember the disciples’ reaction to her news:

the “words seemed to them an idle tale

and they did not believe [her].”

(Luke 24:11)

Why not?

Probably for no other reason than she was a woman.

Why was Mary Magdalene called by God to this task?

Why was she the one who found the empty tomb,

who heard the words of the angel,

who, according to John’s gospel,

was the first to see our Risen Lord

in the garden outside the tomb?

If you subscribe to the theory that provided the story

for the book and movie “The DaVinci Code”

it was because Mary and Jesus

were husband and wife.

You remember the plotline from the book and movie:

Jesus and Mary were married,

and then after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection,

Mary gave birth to their child.

                                               

That story line came from a book

written around 200 years after Jesus’ resurrection,

a book we call “The Apocryphal Gospel of Philip”.

We call the book a gospel because it purported

to tell us about Jesus,

and we call it apocryphal because the book is

“of questionable authenticity”.

We don’t know who wrote it,

and it is rather an odd book,

but in it we find such an deliciously enticing passage,

a passage too good to let pass,

even if the rest of the book is of little interest:

Here’s what we read:

 “There were three who always walked with the Lord:

Mary, his mother and her sister, and Magdalene,

whom they call his lover….

The consort of Christ is Mary Magdalene.

The Lord loved Mary more than all the disciples,

and he kissed her on the mouth many times.”

It is from that passage, and those words

that some writers jumped to the conclusion

that Mary and Jesus had married.

If you read Dan Brown’s book

or saw Tom Hanks in the movie,

you’ve got to admit, it made a great story!

By the end of the 6th century, though,

church leaders decided they needed

to put this rumor to rest once and for all.

So a Pope named Gregory took the story that appears

right before the text we heard in our lesson,

the story of the sinful woman anointing Jesus

and made the story about Mary Magdalene

naming her sin as prostitution

(B. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, 190)

The label stuck, and with that

Mary Magdalene was pushed to the side,

no longer important to the story of our Lord or our faith.

But all any of us has to do

is spend a few minutes reading the Bible,

reading the handful of passages that speak of Mary

to learn that there’s nothing in the Bible

to support the Pope’s conclusion.

What does the Bible tell us about her?

Well, the passage we heard in our lesson

is the only reference to Mary Magdalene

outside of her presence

at the crucifixion and the empty tomb.

What we heard in those three verses

provides us with almost all we know

about Mary Magdalene.

We learn from the passage that she was a Jewish woman

who came from the town of Magdala,

a small fishing village 
on the western shore of the sea of Galilee.

We know, of course that Jesus spent much of his time

preaching and teaching in Galilee.

We also learn that she, along with the other women,

“provided for” Jesus and the disciples:

that meant that she probably cooked,

perhaps mended worn or torn clothes,

and probably had financial resources to help buy food

as Jesus and his group

traveled up and down the dusty roads of Judea.

Now, we cannot sweep aside the “seven demons” language.

What’s that all about?

We have to remember 
that there are many stories of Jesus healing

throughout the gospels,

including ridding many men and women of “demons”.

The reference to the demons may have referred to seizures

that we today we would call epilepsy,

or perhaps a variant on what we now call multiple sclerosis.

or cerebral palsy, or migraine headaches, or arthritis.

The profession of medicine was still in its infancy

during Jesus’ lifetime.

We cannot leap to the conclusion

that the reference to Mary’s demons

was an indirect reference to Mary’s immoral life.

Other sources outside of the Bible

not only provide no evidence at all

that Mary might have been a woman of enticement,

they suggest to the contrary

that she was a prominent figure

among all those who followed Jesus.

At last count there were more than 30 books called gospels,

books written in the first few hundred years

following Jesus’ resurrection

that attempted to recount his life.

Only four are canonical,

the rest we call apocryphal.

These apocryphal gospels were attributed to

to those closest to Jesus,

and among them one is attributed to Mary Magdalene!

In it she gathers the disciples and says to them,

“What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you.”

(The Gospel of Mary, Ehrman, Lost Scriptures)

Surely no such gospel would have been written

of someone of questionable reputation.

Mary Magdalene has been unfairly dismissed

and set aside over the centuries,

her character and reputation rubbed in the dirt.

We need to look again, look afresh at Mary,

We need to separate truth from gossip,

reality from rumor;

We need to have a true understanding of who she was.

Mary followed our Lord.

Mary provided for our Lord during his ministry;

Mary was there at his crucifixion,

even as the men scattered in fear.

John tells us she stood right there with Jesus’ mother

at the base of the cross as Jesus breathed his last.

And, of course, Mary was the first one at the tomb

on that first Easter morning,

the first one to hear the glorious news:

“he is not here, he has been raised.”

Mary Magdalene is a model of faith,

a woman who quietly served our Lord,

a woman who served in the name of our Lord.

She is one of the foundation stones

on which our church is built,

no less important than Peter and Paul.

Perhaps she wore delicate silks and colorful cottons;

perhaps the scent of her perfume lingered

long after she was gone;

perhaps she took from Greek and Roman culture

the practice of using what we now call makeup.

We don’t know whether she did,

but even if she did,

it wouldn’t matter.

                       

What matters,

all that matters, 
is that she was a woman of faith,

a model of faith,

a devoted follower of her Lord, our Lord,

a woman of courage, humility,

strength and conviction.

Why is it that we are always so willing to embrace rumors,

to believe the worst about others?

Why is it that we are so hesitant to look for ourselves,

to find out for ourselves,

to separate fact from fiction?

As we approach the end of our Easter season,

with Pentecost in just two weeks,

surely we owe it to the first celebrant of Easter,

to look again,

look afresh at her.

Surely we owe it to a model of faith for all of us:

to look at who she really was

and honor her name and her work.

Surely we owe that to the woman named

Mary Magdalene.

AMEN