“A Friend like Mary!”

Karen Sloan 11/10/2020

Readings - Luke 8:1-3, Mark 16:1-11

So today I would like to return to my book by Joan Chittister, on the friendship of women.  She leaves Mary Magdalene for last but clearly I am not doing that, because Mary in some ways is the most interesting woman in the bible.  Totally misjudged, attacked and denigrated as a prostitute and sinner, she has emerged as Jesus’s great friend, from the beginning to the end, and a significant voice in the early church.  

As Chittister says, “Mary Magdalene is the women who scripture calls by name in a time when women were seldom named in public documents at all. She is in fact named 14 times. She is clearly a very important and in fact very wealth women , who put her money where her mouth was and followed Jesus, becoming a disciple, after being healed by him.”

“She understood who Jesus was long before anyone else did and she supported him in his wild free ranging revolutionary approach to life and state and temple.  She was it seems the leader of a group of women  who supported Jesus out of their own resources,  and she never left his side for the rest of his life. She was there at the beginning of his ministry and was there a the end. She was there when they were following him in cheering throngs, and she was there when they we retaking his life, dashing it against the stones of the temple and state, turning on him, jeering him, shouting for his death, standing by while soldiers poked and prodded him to ignominy.  She tended his grave and shouted his dying glory and clung to his soul.  She knew him and did not flinch from the knowing.” 

She is found near the end of the story in all 4 gospels. Three of them name her as also present at the crucifixion, and in both Matt and Mark she is named first among the women who stayed and watched.  And of course she was the person who announced the empty tomb in all of them.  As Chittister says, “The life giving, victory of love over hate and violence,” that led us here today.

And what about after…

For Mary went on living and working for Jesus, when as Dawn Hutchinson, describes, she discovered that everything old had been made new through love” . She founded a community of followers, who did not keep silent, who lived the way of Jesus in the following years, and whose life was eventually recorded in a gospel. The Gospel of Mary, which we will look at later.

To understand more fully Mary’s role, I downloaded the movie Mary Magdalene that was released last year and watched it. It is powerful and controversial in some eyes, because it not only depicts a beautiful woman who was one of the disciples, but a Jesus, who is raw, and earthy and believable.  And the male disciples who just don’t get it…

Let me show you a clip in case you didn’t see it, this is actually the promo for the movie …

Sometimes we have to look behind us to get a clearer picture of the road before and ahead of us…

And often the road behind has been full of fake news, to put a modern spin on it. 

So let’s examine Mary a bit more closely.   Joan Chittister certainly has.

As Rosemary Radford Reuther explains, “for the first 5 centuries no writer misinterpreted Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. Rather she was seen as a leading disciple and image of the church.  It is only at the end of the 6thcentury when Pope Gregory the 1st in a sermon confuses the sinful woman of Luke 7 and Mary Magdalene in Luke 8 and identifies her as a repentant prostitute whose former sinfulness is contrasted with that of the virgin Mary, that things change”.  

Accident or intentional, who knows. There are lots of Marys in the bible.  Yet the anointing given by a women to Jesus while he was alive were not actually assigned in the gospels to Mary Magdalene at all. In Luke the woman who was a sinner has no name.  In the other 3 gospels, the anointing takes place in Bethany directly before Jesus passion. In John Mary of Bethany is named as the one who brings the ointment and Judas as the critic who accuses her of wasting money.

Perhaps Mary Magdalene’s strong witness and presence became a threat to leadership in the earlier church.  Like many female voices hers was removed . The Vatican corrected this view at the time of Vatican II, but the damage was done.  

We know that women have been marginalized for centuries both inside and outside the church, made into objects of sexuality but not substance, and it continues to this day.

So has Mary Magdalene left us anything other than the references in the bible, which know can be interpreted to deny her strong witness. .Well yes she has, in the form of the Gospel of Mary.  I spoke about this last year, but again I recommend you get a copy and read it, for it has become one of my favourites. It was not written by her, just as the synoptic gospels were not written by Jesus, but by people who knew her and her story.

The Gospel of Mary, is believed to have been written around 80 to 180 CE whose main figure is a woman, most likely Mary Magdalene. The movie clearly takes its inspiration from this gospel. It is part of the extracanonical writings, writings that existed at the time of the gospels found in the bible, but not included in the final cannon, because they were branded as heresies or died out before the cannon was put together.  It is believed that over 85% of the Christian literature from the first 2 centuries has been lost.  But some have re-emerged in recent times, in Egypt, the markets of Cairo and the libraries of ancient monasteries. They give us an insight about the diversity that existed at the time of the early Jesus movement and expand our thinking.

The Gospel of Mary disappeared for over 1500 years until a single fragmentary copy in a Coptic translation came to light in the late 19thcentury.  Two additional fragments have been found in the 20thcentury.  It is one of the writings that was found in material from the Nag Hammadi village in Egypt, but it was also in a 5C papyrus codex sold in Belin in 1896. Although it was originally composed in Greek, most of it survives only in the Coptic translation.  While written by someone else, it records the relationship between Jesus and Mary and the disciples.

A modern translation by Karen King, a Harvard Divinity School professor some 10 years ago has revived this ancient manuscript.

While only fewer than 8 pages survive, with the first 3 pages of chapter 1 missing and 3 pages of chapter 8, it gives an amazing glimpse into a kind of Christianity that existed at the time,  and Mary Magdalene’s role.

The Gospel of Mary offers a female account, a rarity, of a scene in which the resurrected Jesus comes to say goodbye and tells the disciples to preach, just as he does in the first 3 gospels, Matt , Mark and Luke, then leaves them.  

I don’t want to read the whole thing but give a summary of the over-arching theme.

And the over-arching theme is that Jesus teaches us how to be truly  and fully human. That through his teachings, and through Mary’s record, and in this gospel Mary is taught many things that Jesus taught no one else, Jesus primary purpose is in “making us human beings”. We are to see that Jesus is the child of humanity within us, speaking to us a deep level.  As the New New Testament says, “the Gospel of Mary does not point to how Jesus saves us, forgives us, or makes us holy.  Rather the focus of the teaching is on how to be real human beings.”

Jesus says, "Beware  that no one leads you astray saying, 'Look over here!' or 'Look over there!' For the child of Humanity is within you. Follow it! Those who seek it will find it.”    

Jesus says, "Go then, and proclaim the good news of  the realm. Do not lay down any rules beyond what I determined for you, nor give a law like the lawgiver, lest you be confined by it."

Levi says “We should clothe ourselves with the perfect human, acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us, and proclaim the good news”

Mary says “Let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us Humans." 

Here we see the emphasise on the goodness of humanity! Not as fallen creatures, but a marvel of creation. Capable of great things.

This is actually quite similar to the other gospels, and reveals that much of our doctrine and dogmas about sin, and condemned humanity comes from  later theologians. The gospels of Matt, Mark, and Luke talk about the realm or kingdom of God which is at hand or among you.  And they talk about living in God, living in Christ, and having a new radically new quality of life in Christ. 

Another theme of the gospel. Is about the good or God. Which comes after Mary’s statement about Jesus and our humanness

When Mary said this, she turned their heart to the Good, and they began to discuss the words of the Saviour.

Mary related God with the good.  She defines God as the good.  We hear it earlier when the text said, “she turned their heart to the good”. That the rise of the soul is about the journey towards goodness in ones’ inner consciousness, one’s behaviour and one’s relationships.   Here and now in the living. And the struggle they and we find in doing it.

Yet as Jesus says at the beginning of the gospel, the good which belongs to every nature, comes to restore it to its root. When we become a true human being.  We are in tune with that which is within us.

Of course, the disciples aren’t thrilled with being lectured by a woman, and Peter scolds her in the last chapter, chapter 10. Levi interceded, “Peter, he says,  you have always been a wrathful person, assuredly the saviour’s knowledge of her is completely reliable, that is why he loved her more than us.

He loved her more than us.  It is an image of a human Jesus and a beautiful faithful disciple.

As I have said, I have totally fallen in love with this writing.  

The child of humanity is within you. Jesus is within you. God is within you. The good is within you. We are Jesus and Gods beloved, we are loved for who we are, human beings, a marvel of life. All of us, black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight and everything in between, male and female. And we are called not to some other place, not really even to this church, but to the world.  To act in love.  

So, what do we do , in the 21stcentury, with this ancient message from a woman who stood beside the human Jesus through it all. Whose very life and the life of her community showed us a capacity for loyalty and love. For all people.

Perhaps I could make a sign.

Those who seek it will find it, go and follow it.  

Maybe we could think bigger and wider and more expansive. We have the resources within ourselves to change things, to give life rather than death and destruction.  Resources that we sometimes forget are there. We can be kind, we can be creative, we can be loving, and we can be inclusive.  

Mary reminds us and the disciples that Jesus is the child of humanity and leads us to be truly human, and as such can make a difference.  God is for and in all things, making things new.

If we choose to.

But choosing is hard.  The future is sometimes scary.  Sometimes we are very fragile in front of the future (quote from Jean Vanier)

Yet so long ago Mary chose.  And in that ways she gives us a great gift. A gift that says we are never alone in the face of so much challenge.  

Do we have people choosing now.

Of course we do, brave, faithful people.

I have just finished a book by Father Rod Bower  called Outspoken. He is the Anglican priest from Gosford NWS who puts up signs outside his church and on facebook, calling for justice and compassion for those marginalised in our society. Hence the reference to a sign!

He calls us to be outspoken on the things that diminish ours and others humanity, that seek to isolate, marginalise and denigrate those who look different from us, have a different faith, a different gender, a different home, a different economic level. And of course there is a price to pay for calling this out to our government leaders and our fellow Australians.  Some don’t like it. But he chooses to continue speaking up anyway. Not just speak but act. 

What about us.

It makes me even more willing to take what Jesus means to us, and live out his call, even here in our aging, but lively congregation. To see our resources and to make choices. We have always done that, so let’s not get timid now..

Many of us have been suggesting that if we are eventually going to get smaller and less able to be active in the community, then we should go out shouting and screaming, not in a whimper.  There are things we can do to help and include others, and it starts by keeping a broader wider vision.  

We have a building, we have people with time, we have a little bit of money and we have ideas.  We can create something here, that hopefully indicates to people that we are not dead yet. Far from it. So watch this space!

A writer for Sojourners, Kaitlin Curtice, recently asked, “what are we going to be as we head into the rest of 2020 and 2021, even during a pandemic.  Who are we going to be politically, religiously, as humans who walk this sacred earth?”  Good question.

I know in my heart what I am going to do, and that is to keep trying to be the best follower of Jesus I can be, in a world that thinks we are slightly crazy.

Because we know in our hearts the truth of our faith. The spirit, the energy, the presence of God never leaves us.  We search for that truth every Sunday, and in all the days in between, with the courage of 1st century Mary Magdalene and the 21st century example of Rod Bower, to follow.

Because it is the only way forward.

Let us say Amen to that.

Chittister, Joan, “Friendship of Women”, 2006.

Hal Taussig, Editor, “A New, New Testament”, 2013.

Father Rod Bower, “Outspoken”, 2018.