The Magdalene

Feast of the Magdalene
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
21 July 2024

[ video ]

This Sunday we celebrate the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, perhaps better named as The Magdalene.

As we reflect on this feast day and gather up fragments of wisdom for our own lives I want to suggest that we use three simple questions to go deeper in this sacred tradition.

Q1: Why did Jesus give her the nickname, Magdalene/Tower?

Mary was a very common name for Jewish girls in the time of Jesus. Half of the women at that time were named in honour of Miriam, (Mary), the sister of Moses. Like Miriam the sister of Moses, Mary the Magdalene was a woman who stood out from the crowd. Both Miriam and Mary were leaders whose status was no less than that of their brothers. 

Miriam was a prophet and a powerful voice in the circle around Moses. Indeed, she is remembered as having saved his life when he was just an infant. 

Migdal (“tower”) was a common name for villages across the holy land in biblical times, but Mary is never said to be “from Magdala.” Rather, “the Madgdalene” (meaning “the tower”) seems to have been a nickname given to Mary by Jesus, just as he gave similar pet names to Simon (“Peter/Rocky”) and to the sons of Zebedee (“Boanerges / sons of thunder”). 

In some way or other, Mary stood out from the crowd. She was a tower among the disciples, just as Simon was the rock on which Jesus built his first community of disciples. The Magdalene was also the leader of the Jesus women, just as Miriam led the women in their dancing and singing when God saved the Israelites at the Red Sea.

Most significantly, the Magdalene was the first disciple to whom Jesus appears after his resurrection. She is honoured as the Apostle to the Apostles, as Jesus sent her with the good news for her brothers.

Q2: How did the early church with its male leadership treat Mary?

Mary the Magdalene was a towering figure among the disciples of Jesus, although the male-dominated church that emerged after 100 years or so did not know what to do with this woman at the very heart of the apostolic community.

She was silenced and sidelined. As many women have been by the male church over the 2,000 years between the Magdalene and us.

Mary was overlooked and pushed aside as early as the time of Paul, just 20 years after Easter. Mary was never being included among the apostles let alone as one of the pillars of the early Jesus movement.

She was written out of the story by the second and third-century church leaders (all males, of course). In some cases, texts with her name were changed to substitute a more pliable woman into the storyline.

But when the Gospels came to be written after Paul, Peter, James and John were all dead and gone; memories of Mary remained.

The Gospels were written after the authentic letters of Paul and what Mary had done was told “in remembrance of her,” just as Jesus had said.

Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Mark 14:9 NRSV)

Eventually Pope Gregory I (590–604) determined that she had been a sex-worker before Jesus rescued her from a life of shame, except that in the Pope’s eyes the shame never quite got removed.

Despite all that, Mary’s special festival survived in the English Book of Common Prayer. The Magdelene is honoured with colleges at both Cambridge and Oxford, and her legacy has survived among the Anglicans even when her festival was downgraded in Rome.

Q3: What aspect of discipleship does she represent for us today?

In the last few decades the Magdalene has returned to the spotlight as the church struggles to make sense of mission in a post-Christian world.

Mary—the overlooked and despised woman—calls us back to the heart of our faith: our love for Jesus.

Like Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar we often don’t know how love Jesus.

Yet that is the one thing that actually matters.

Not our carefully crafted creeds and volumes of church regulations. Not our buildings and charitable institutions. Not the size of our membership nor the eloquence of our preachers.

All that matters is that we are disciples of Jesus.

In that lies wisdom for today.

---

For an earlier sermon on Mary Magdalene see: Mary the Tower (20 July 2019)