MOST RECENT SERMON

Base text of a sermon for  Sermon. Pentecost 6. Year C. Luke 10.38-42. Keeping Mary Magdalene

Both our Gospel, and the Saint we recognize today, the incredible Mary Magdalene are surrounded by assumptions and misunderstandings. In the case of the Gospel, they are simple, understandable and wholly innocent. In the case of Mary, they are far more complex, fraught with the exercise of power and misogyny.

In the Gospel we hear of Jesus and his disciples on their way entering “a certain” village and being welcomed by Martha who had a sister called Mary. The similarity of this story with the story recounted in the Gospel according to John, of Mary, her sister Martha, with their brother Lazarus, can easily make us assume that we are hearing the same story. But this is an assumption and, upon reflection, one that is, at the very least, open to speculation.

The account in John takes place in Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. Today, we are still in Galilee, miles away from Bethany, Jesus having set his face towards Jerusalem.  More importantly, in John the house that Jesus enters is identified as the home of Lazarus. Here in Luke, it is Martha’s home.

Now it did, in Jewish society, occasionally happen that a woman owned their own house and was the mistress of the home. But this virtually never occurred when there was a surviving male relative. In our account today, if Lazarus was in the picture, it would be described as his home. So, in Luke, Lazarus, is nowhere present. How does the square with the story in John?

All this to say that even our simplest of bible stories are actually rarely simple, often contradict or nuance other accounts and are always, always worthy of much study and attention, not unexamined assumptions.

When it comes to the sainted Mary Magdalene the common assumptions are far worse. For millennia, the church, popular culture and common knowledge assumed Mary worked as a prostitute. And though there has never been any scriptural or early church tradition evidence for this attempted denigration of Mary, it persisted and still persists. Movies made in the last five years still depict Mary in this way.

As far as damaging myths and attributions go – towards people and groups of people - we can seldom pinpoint a moment in time when the balance of the scales turned and a new, false and damaging story was created. But we can with Mary. It occurred on Easter Sunday in the year 591. As part of his sermon for Easter, Pope Gregory conflated Mary with the unnamed sinner woman who anointed Christ’s feet in chapter 7 of Luke, explaining her sins were sexual in nature. And thus, Mary forever after was seen as being a prostitute.

And we can perhaps, also think of other moments, in our own recent history when the same dynamics occurred.

In early October 2001, senior members of the Australian government, asserted that a group of people seeking asylum had, when attempting to reach Australian, deliberately sunk their boat which put their children into the water, obviously threatening their lives. Dubbed the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, the subsequent findings of an inquiry revealed conscious deception and misinformation on behalf of the government. By the time the report was released though, a year later,  it was too late. Illegals, as people seeking asylum were, and are vilified as, were prepared to sacrifice their own children to flout Australian law and force their way into our country.

Anyone working in the refugee field, heard this trope countlessly in the years ahead. We still hear it sometimes today, just as we still hear that Mary was a prostitute.

Of course, these misattributions do not arise in a vacuum. Children overboard struck and stuck because much of Australia had already deep and existing fears and hostility towards people seeking asylum. Mary was declared a prostitute, partly, because of the misogyny within the early church and the deep fear of sexuality and women’s power by church leaders. The tension concerning women’s place in the church had been there for centuries, today’s reading show us some of the origin of that tension.

As we noticed, the house is Martha’s home. We know the early Jesus movement was financed by wealthy women and met in their homes. These house gatherings were the early Church. And, in Greco-Roman society, the sphere of the home, of the household, was the sphere of the mother and women.

So, while the early church was within the homes of early followers, women’s leadership appears to have been accepted and normal. Once, however, the church became large enough to meet in public spaces, this changed. The public sphere, the public and market space was the sphere of the father and men. Women, it appears, were quickly sidelined and lost their status. And all this contributed to the mistrust of women disciples including Mary who we celebrate today.

Of course, this mistrust and fear of Mary never stopped people praying with her, venerating her, learning from her and entering into relationship with her. Just as, despite the harmful rhetoric of children overboard, people still formed deep relationships with refugees and people seeking asylum.

It is our relationship, walking alongside saints like Mary that allows us to learn from them and to share with them their deep communion with the Divine. And what we can learn from Mary is incredible.

Because Mary stood with many women until the bitter end, witnessing Jesus die on the cross even after all his male companions had fled and scattered, we learn from her how to bear witness to injustice and suffering, staying fully with those we love until they die.

And since Mary went to the tomb and stayed in her grief and from that depth of human grief, encountered risen divinity, we can learn to be in those spaces and times where the absence of those we love becomes a presence in and by itself …and know that the absence of human presence can, and will become divine presence.

Above all, Mary teaches us spiritual friendship. In both our canonical and other Gospels we see Mary and Jesus sharing a deep and transformative spiritual intimacy, showing us how to be with Christ as an intimate friend and companion.

Because the relationship of Mary and Jesus is the deepest of all relationships: that of a dedicated disciple with their beloved divine, creature to creator, human to God, person to perfection.

This intimate friendship  is so beautifully captured in the resurrection narrative of John. There, while at the tomb searching for Jesus’s body, Mary, mistakes Jesus to be the gardener. She asks where Jesus’s body is, wanting to be with him, even in death, just to have his body.

But then Jesus speaks her name, “Mary” –  and by that naming restores their relationship once sundered by his death.

He calls her by name, by the true self who she is, the deepest aspect of her being, to see him again, to see him anew, to see his resurrected body and, therefore the resurrection ahead for all of us.

This intimate calling by name, this open response of Mary – “teacher”, she cries in response to her name – her open response to view the real, this is the gift this saint gives us today. 

Because like her, like Mary, Christ also calls us by name, by our own name, seeing our real self, our deepest self, he calls us intimately and deeply from his deathless body, from his resurrected self and from his glorified soul,  so we too become deathless, and we too are resurrected and we too are glorified more and more – as Mary was. As Mary is.

In his name, Amen