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April 16, 2006
The Gospel According to St. Mary Magdalene
Hosea 6: 1-3
John 20: 1-2, 11-18
April 16th, 2006
I suspect that many of us here this morning have read Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. If you have, as I have, your mind did a flip-flop when you noticed in the worship bulletin that I propose to speak about “The Gospel According to St. Mary Magdalene.”
Even though the novel is fiction that borrows from old legends and says things about Mary Magdalene’s relationship to Jesus that have no reliable foundation, we owe to her a debt of gratitude. Because, as we read this morning, it was this special woman who first announced those words that give us hope: “I have seen the Lord.”
This was the Gospel according to St. Mary Magdalene. Gospel means good news. It was good news. Her good news was, “I have seen the Lord.”
Only John among Jesus’ disciples saw Jesus on the cross. The rest of them heard about it but saw Jesus last when He was taken captive in the Garden of Gethsemane. Maybe word came to them from John that Mary Magdalene was there at the cross. In fact, if we read just what our Gospel lesson tells us, and try to see into the minds of Jesus’ disciples at that point, all they might have thought was that Mary told them she saw Jesus on the cross. Did they think at first that she was just verifying that their Lord was dead? What kind of good news is that?
But the tone of her voice and the look on her face were not the tone and look you’d expect to see in someone overcome with grief. There was excitement written on her face. “I have seen the Lord,” meant, “I have seen Him alive.” John tells us then that Mary told them what Jesus said to her—about ascending to the Father. They remembered how Jesus prayed, saying “Abba, Father.” It rang true what she said.
You and I know Mary meant Jesus was alive because we know the Easter story already. But Jesus’ disciples didn’t know what we know. And here I find the first remarkable aspect of the human story of the First Easter. The disciples believed Mary. Why did they believe her?
I have wondered the same question when I read the story in John 4 about Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Men believed her when she spoke of Jesus. Her reputation was more clouded than Mary Magdalene’s.
Mary Magdalene, Luke tells us, was one of several women who had been healed of evil spirits—seven of them, in fact. Somehow worse things have been imagined of her, that she was the woman caught in the act of adultery, or that she was the sinner woman of the streets who anointed and wept over and kissed Jesus’ feet as he reclined at dinner one evening, but all we know for sure was that Jesus had delivered Mary Magdalene of seven demons.
But the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well had a well-earned reputation. She had been married five times and was living with a sixth man to whom she was not married. Her reputation as a woman was pretty grim. But when she went back to her town and said of Him, “Can this be the Christ?” men followed her back to Jesus. They believed her. Why?
It is the question that comes to me when I see the disciples’ response to Mary Magdalene. Why did they believe her?
Is it not so that the disciples believed Mary Magdalene as Samaritan men believed the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well because the witness of these two women had a credibility that went beyond cultural definition? The encounter they had with Jesus made an impression on their faces, on their tone of voice, so that it was unmistakable that what they said was true. There was no reflex that said, “Excitable women, you know!” There was no cynicism that pointed back to their reputation and said, “Consider the source!” People believed these two women in what they said about Jesus because their encounter with Him was evidently real. It spoke from their depths that they had seen Jesus.
This is the first thing that grabs me about the first announcement of the Gospel from the lips of Mary Magdalene. She was believable because she had a real encounter with Jesus.
Later on the same kind of experience made Jesus’ fearful disciples believe Saul of Tarsus. This man whose reputation was black with dried blood as an insatiable persecutor of Christians compelled belief when he spoke of Jesus crucified and risen because he saw the Lord. He said as Mary Magdalene said, “I have seen the Lord,” and it was believable because the encounter with Jesus on the Damascus’ road changed Saul of Tarsus from a persecutor of Christians, from one who hated the Jesus he did not know—into the Apostle Paul—who said, “I am crucified with Christ.”
Happily, the list of those who saw Jesus alive is very long. The list came to include even men whose witness tradition said was worth listening too. So Peter and Matthew and the other disciples, and five hundred more saw Him, so that the Good News began to spread, “The Lord is alive.” And it has reached us two thousand years later so that we believe it.
But not all who hear about Jesus believe in Him. Islam is growing more rapidly than Christianity. I wonder if part of the reason for this is that it is possible to spread the rumor of Jesus’ resurrection as a religious story, to climb aboard the train of those who say it happened, without having had an encounter with Jesus personally.
Christendom, seen from one angle, is a vast cultural system under the influence of the Gospel story. But you and I know well that much has happened in Christendom that is shameful. The story of Christianity is full of stories that make us cringe. There is a difference between being part of the cultural system called “Christendom,” and having a personal relationship with Jesus.
You and I cannot see Jesus, so it can’t be the same for us as it was for Mary Magdalene. But if you have seen yourself realistically, how self-centered you naturally are, because everyone of us is, and recognize what the effects of self-centeredness are, and you look up at the cross and ask why Jesus suffered there—and realize it was so that you don’t have to bear the responsibility, the guilt of self-centeredness, it is impossible not to be filled with gratitude to that Jesus who hung on the cross.
As Charles Wesley put it in his wonderful song, “Died He for me who caused His pain? How can it be?” If you have realized what Jesus did out of love for you, and you feel beginning pangs of gratitude inside, you have begun to have the kind of encounter with Jesus that Mary Magdalene had. And if you let that gratitude start to take control of your life, it will be evident in you, so that if you speak softly, gently, and graciously about Jesus, people will believe you too.
It all began with Mary Magdalene who said, “I have seen the Lord.” She was believable not just because the truth of her encounter with Jesus was stamped on her face but also because she had been devoted to Jesus since well before His death.
And here I find the second remarkable aspect of the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene. Not only was she believable because she saw Jesus after He rose from the grave, but also because there was a momentum of devotion to Him that everyone who knew Jesus well knew existed between her.
She is the first lesson by example we find in the Gospels of what it is like to be devoted to Jesus, and what are the effects of such devotion on other people.
You and I have seen religious fanatics of many kinds. A fanatic may be defined as someone who doubles his efforts when he has forgotten the cause. Christian history like the history of every religion is filled with fanatics who torment their bodies, or who hate those who are different than they are, or who devise odd ways of living that they imagine are essential to their cause.
Now we see in Iraq and Palestine a kind of Muslim fanaticism that curdles the blood. We’ve even seen on the Purdue campus Christian witnesses whose oddness is repulsive Those who stand with placards with hateful words do no good. But Mary Magdalene’s devotion to Jesus had none of this oddness.
There was a personal quality in her devotion to Jesus that looked very much like a deep friendship. Because this is what it was. This was unique in her day. In those days it just was not done. Whereas you and I live in a culture where men and women can be friends, it was not so then. I am grateful for you women and men who are beloved to me. Though it is evident in the Gospels that Mary Magdalene was close to Jesus and this was unheard of culturally, we read no hint of criticism either of Jesus or Mary.
So John did not blush to report Easter morning as he did. Mary’s first instinct when she realized that the man who spoke to her outside the empty tomb was to say “Rabboni,” which means, “My rabbi.” I imagine the love, the intensity of her tone of voice. And then she moved toward Jesus to hold him. This is the intensity of affection in a deep friendship.
In the Gospel of Philip that was found with other early Christian writings found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt fifty or so years ago, we read of Jesus’ affection for Mary Magdalene in words that are unseemly to us. But merely from the four Gospels in our New Testament we can’t help but notice that there was a deep friendship between Mary and Jesus.
This tells us something about life in the community of Jesus, as it ought to be because this is how it was with Jesus and those who loved Him.
Indeed, a great part of the believability of the Gospel today hinges on the evident affection of people in the community of faith. A church in which people do not evidently love each other will wither and die. A church where people evidently love each other will thrive. The centripetal force of loving each other is powerful.
Why did thousands believe in Jesus at Pentecost? Did it have anything to do with the unity in heart and mind of those who spoke of Jesus’ death and resurrection, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit? And did the Holy Spirit have this kind of access to the personalities of these people as they spoke of Jesus because they were of one heart and mind?
And might it be that what any congregation needs as the prerequisite to the kind of growth that matters is evident affection for one another?
Did not Jesus tell us that people would know we are His friends if we love one another? So that Church growth that really matters hinges not on programs and buildings or sparkling, dynamic personalities in the pulpit but on the believable witness of people who have evidently had a personal encounter with Jesus and who love one another.
Is it evident we love one another? Is it evident that your engagement and mine is not with that cultural thing called “Christendom,” but with Jesus—having looked at Him from the foot of the cross in gratitude? And having looked at Jesus the gratitude we feel to Him spills over into love instead of judgment of one another. This is very attractive to see.
This morning the first Bible reading was from the ancient prophet Hosea. I chose this passage because Christians from of old saw it as one of the key prophecies of Jesus’ resurrection: “On the third day he [God], will raise us up.” We are raised with Christ, Paul wrote. There is such refreshment in the whole tenor of these few verses. There is affection in the prophet’s tone of voice, “Come, and let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his going forth is sure as the dawn. He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”
Some of us here today need very much to return to the Lord. Some of us need the refreshing shower of a rain as fell last night. You have maybe heard things that stir a longing in your heart for an encounter with Jesus that you sense will arise from the gratitude you begin to feel. You long to be part of a community where love abounds, where the tensions and strife of daily life are exchanged for what your heart needs.
I urge you to act on what you feel. Let gratitude to Jesus replace whatever religious notions you might have had—as you’ve compared this or that approach to religion and in bewilderment turned away from them all. Let affection follow your gratitude. If this comes hard determine to forgive those who have offended you no more than you have offended them. Let it become your habit of life. This is the Gospel delivered to us by Mary Magdalene.
Come; let us return to the Lord that he may heal us. Let us pray: O Lord we return with your servant Mary to the cross and look up; and we come with her to the tomb and say, “Rabboni,” my teacher, my friend. Help us too to see the Lord, to love Him and to love one another. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 16, 2006 09:30 AM