Bury Parish Church

Today is St Mary Magdalene’s day.   There has been a lot of speculation in recent years about Mary, and her place in the early Church, and so I thought that I would try to set out in this letter just what we can reliably say about her, and then to see what that might have to say to us.

There is a taste for conspiracy theories today, and you will all have come across such theories about Mary Magdalene.   The Da Vinci Code was only the latest in a long line.   All that the Gospels (and they are the earliest evidence) tell us about her is that she was the first witness to Jesus’ Resurrection, and that she had in some earlier part of her life been possessed by ‘seven demons’ (see Luke 8.2).   People often assume that she was one and the same with the ‘woman who was a sinner’ who wept over Jesus and poured over him the jar of precious ointment (Luke 7.38.   See also Mark 14.3-8; Matthew 26.6-13; John 12.1-8), but we are not told any such thing.   The reason for assuming this – in later tradition she was assumed to be a prostitute - has not been, I think, any conspiracy by Church leaders wanting to deny the importance of women among the first disciples, but simply the fact of her name:  Magdala was a garrison town;  she is never referred to as ‘the sister of x’, or ‘the wife of y’, or ‘the mother of z’ which would have been normal for a ‘respectable woman’ in those days;  and the mention of the ‘seven demons’ in Luke 7.38  surely points to a wretched and damaged past.

All of that makes the fact of her being the first witness to the Resurrection the more remarkable.   If the first Christians had been in the business of making up stories to convince people that the Lord was risen, they would hardly have come up with this.   Women were not even admitted as witnesses in Jewish courts of law.

And then of course there is the account in St John’s Gospel (20.11 – 18) of her meeting with Jesus in the garden on Easter morning.   I love this story.   Christians have always been captivated by it.   Read it again, and notice particularly how St John conveys her complete devotion to Jesus, so that she seems unaware of everything else.   She sees ‘two angels in white’ inside the tomb, he tells us, but there is no word of her being shocked or amazed – she is just preoccupied by the need to discover where the body may be.   When Jesus first speaks to her, and she thinks that he is the gardener, she makes no attempt to explain whom she is talking about:  ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him’ – she assumes that he will understand what she means.   And then she is quite willing to contemplate bringing back the body on her own – hardly imaginable for one woman without help.   These are tiny details, but they all speak of her devotion.

And that, surely, is the point.   That is what enabled her – and Peter and the rest of them for that matter – to be effective tellers of the Good News.   She loved him, as they did, because she knew she was in his debt.  Remember Jesus’ question to Simon the Pharisee:  ‘A certain creditor had two debtors;  one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.   When they could not pay, he cancelled the debts for both of them.   Now which of them will love him more?’.   Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter who had denied him, and the other disciples who had run away:  they all knew how much they were in his debt.   We all have our own list of failures for which we need his forgiveness.   We all have our own list of his blessings to count.   It is only too easy to allow words of confession or thanksgiving in public worship to  wash over us without giving them a thought.  But Christians who have lost sight of the debt they owe to him will never make effective messengers of the Gospel.

Dear friends,

Many years ago, in my first teaching post, I was troubled about whether I should think about ordination.  There was a teacher at the school – a very stout gentleman who was something of an institution there.  Everyone called him by his surname – Mr Makinson.  He tended to pontificate rather than to converse, but he was a good Christian man, and more often than not he was right.  He was a wise old bird.  So I mentioned my concern.  And he fixed me with his eye, and demanded, quite sternly, ‘Do you believe in God, young man?’  And that was the end of the conversation.  If you believe in God, then you believe that he’s in charge, and you can leave it with him. 

But what does it mean to say God is in charge?  That God is simply a bigger version of all the kings, emperors, dictators and presidents the world has ever seen?  Get God on your side and you’ve cracked it?  He will sort it for you?   The great string puller in the sky, the Mr. Fix-It par excellence? 

While I’m writing this article I’m thinking of the readings for Sunday.  Two great ones: Elijah fleeing from Jezebel, and encountering God in that ‘still small voice’, and Jesus’ encounter with the man possessed by a legion of evil spirits.  Clearly, in both passages, God is in charge.  He commands the earthquake, wind and fire in Elijah’s story, and the storm at sea that Jesus has just silenced.  And he gives Elijah his marching orders.  When Jesus is confronted by this wild man who has to be restrained with chains, in Gentile territory, among the tombs, he shows no sign of fear.  God is not fazed by Elijah’s collapse, the terrible state of the man possessed, nor by the townsfolk’s response, which is to ask Jesus to leave. 

God is in charge, but we seem to spend the whole of our lives learning and re-learning that message.  So easily we are panicked, upset or discouraged.  We act out of fear rather than faith.  The state of the world around us can so easily eat away at our faith, too.   Can God really be in charge?  The complex moral choices facing our world, like the possibility of making artificial life, and the nightmare scenarios that are now possible.  The sheer instability of parts of our world – Iran probably looking to produce its own nuclear missiles, the growing chaos in Pakistan, with its own nuclear capacity.  The nightmare possibilities of our climate turning hostile to human life.  And yet, again and again, that is the Bible’s message.  God is in charge. 

But that doesn’t mean that we can shut our eyes, and leave everything to God.  The old cliché – ‘without God we cannot, without us God will not’ still holds.  God takes us seriously, and expects us to play our part.  Elijah wants out, but God won’t let him, and in that still small voice gives him his marching orders.  When the man is released from dark powers Jesus sends him home to tell others what God has done for him.  We mustn’t expect God to wave a magic wand.  We are part of the answer to the problems in our lives and in the life of the world.  But neither does God bully us or treat us like puppets. When the townspeople, frightened by Jesus’ power, wondering where it will lead, ask him to leave, he does so without anger.  And that’s because God’s power is always the power of love: the tenderness of his care for Elijah, the compassion that releases the man from his legions.  He is deliberately dependant upon our choices, yet always striving to bring the best out of us.  Inviting us to choose the hard path, the loving, generous, self-sacrificing and faithful path. 

We see this clearly in Jesus.  He willingly takes God’s way, the tough path, trusting God’s good purposes, even though it places him in the hands of the dark powers, and he must journey alone to the land of the tombs.  But God’s power of love raises him to life.  

God is in charge, but I still had to make up my mind, and decide what to do with my life.   Even them, I could only do that because I trusted that God was with me, and wouldn’t let me down.

Gordon

June 2010