Mary of Magdala - Believe the Woman
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord" and she told them that he had said these things to her. John 20:18
Today is the Feast of Mary Magdalene. A complicated saint.
Well, probably every saint is complicated. Every person is complicated, with more story than we ever know. My mother’s name was Mary. And oh, the things I do not know about her!
Saints, like every other person, are known by snippets of their lives. What do we really know about Matthew? He was a tax collector. He left that past behind and followed when Jesus called. His name is attached to a gospel. The rest is obscure.
There is enough in the gospel record to know that Mary of Magdala, was close to Jesus. More than the many other Marys among his disciples. More than most of the apostles.
The snippets we know about Mary of Magdala are confused, because Mary was a common name. There were several Marys among Jesus’s disciples. That in itself is worth comment. In a time of oppression, under the thumb of the Roman Empire, parents named their daughters Mary—Miriam.
And who was Miriam? The sister of Moses, the one who sang and danced at the liberation of an enslaved people. So the people of Israel named their daughters Miriam, in hopes of another liberation.
This Mary fulfilled that hope, not in the way that was expected, but in the hope of the resurrection—liberation from sin, death, and the devil.
Mary was the first person to whom the resurrected Christ appeared, the first person sent to proclaim the resurrection.
She was not believed.
She was not the first woman not to be believed, nor the last. Why do we single out Thomas as a doubter, when every other apostle doubted Mary? Because he doubted the men.
She was a powerful person in the early church, so powerful that a pope in the middle ages felt the need to take her down a peg, to identify her with an unnamed woman in the gospels who repented of some unnamed sin. He put two and two together, came up with seventeen, and claimed that Mary of Magdala was a reformed prostitute.
The evidence just isn’t there, and if it were, it would hardly be the most salient point of her life. But the charge stuck. A false memory implanted, that’s what people “know” about Mary of Magdala.
Ah well. The slander is testimony to her significance.
Tell your truth, Mary. For every woman who is not believed. For every woman beloved by Jesus. For every woman who will rise.