"CHOOSING MARY? HOW CONTRARY!"

“CHOOSING MARY?  HOW CONTRARY!”

            In the Christian tradition, it is now the season of the Resurrection, the celebration of Jesus of Nazareth being brought back from the grave, emphasizing the idea that life and love are the final words in the universe, not violence and death.  Whatever one believes about the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, it cannot be denied that the Resurrection was the event that fired the first disciples.  While church tradition has over-emphasized the crucifixion as the central event, it was the Resurrection that brought the scattered and scared and disillusioned women and men disciples back together to become the primary witnesses to a whole new way of life.  Only later did they go back and reflect on the crucifixion.  Without the Resurrection, there would be no church and no witnesses.

            And, who is the primary witness?  If you are unfamiliar with the tradition (and even if you are familiar), you may be surprised to hear that the primary witnesses to the Resurrection are the women disciples, not the men.  And, there is ONE primary witness:  Mary from the town of Magdala, and she is commonly known as Mary Magdalena.  She is the only witness to the Resurrection mentioned in all 4 Gospels, and in the 20^th chapter of John’s Gospel, there is a powerful encounter between the risen Jesus and Mary from Magdala.  We’ll look at that encounter more carefully next week, but for today, I want to ask:  “What happened to Mary Magdalena?”

            Did she become a bishop?  Did she become a leader of the disciples?  Did she become a revered figure in the church tradition?  The answer is that we don’t know what happened to Mary Magdalena.  Though she is THE primary witness to the event that precipitated the church, she was written out of the history of the church for a long while.  Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that she was pushed back to the margins where the patriarchal society, in which Jesus lived, much preferred her to be.  The Gospel writers waste no time on this – right away in Luke, the “mansplaining” (did that term come from Rebecca Solnit?) begins.  When Mary and the other women disciples come to the men to tell them about the Resurrection, Luke 24:11 tells us that the men dismiss the women as hysterical and do not believe them.  Later on, it looks like someone added a verse 12 to try to redeem the men, indicating that Peter goes to the tomb to check it out.  In the earliest written account of the Resurrection in chapter 15 of Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians,  the list of witnesses to the Resurrection omits the women altogether – a quick erasure from the Gospel accounts, which at least indicate that the women, and especially Mary Magdalena, were the primary witnesses.

            The Gnostic gospels that did not make it into the Bible put Mary at a much higher place in the church circle.  In “The Gospel of Mary” she takes leadership and gathers the disciples and helps them to rally and begin to be the witnesses that they were meant to be.  But, the movement to squash the leadership of women in the church won out.  The egalitarian impetus of Jesus of Nazareth is blunted on many levels, including the erasure of the witness and discipleship of women.  For Mary Magdalena, the harshest blow came in 591 CE when Pope Gregory the Great pronounced that Mary Magdalena was a reformed prostitute, and this pronouncement stuck.  Growing up, I envisioned Mary Magdalena as the woman of the streets who anoints Jesus with oil and wipes his feet with her hair in Luke 7, though this woman is not named.  She is named “Mary” in John 12, but there she is clearly the sister of Martha and Lazarus. 

            Pope Gregory’s pronouncement sealed the deal that was already in the making in the male-dominated society.  The powerful witness of Mary Magdalena was reduced to her body and her sexuality.   The recent live televising of “Jesus Christ Superstar” had Mary play a very important part, but again as reformed prostitute and as the lover of Jesus, but she is off to the sidelines  and is not a central leader in the God movement.  In the best-selling “Da Vinci Code,” Mary becomes a central figure again, not as a leader of the church but as the bearer of the Holy Grail, the love child of Jesus and Mary.

            Here is the powerful and revolutionary idea behind those Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, an idea that can’t be suppressed by the mansplaining.  Jesus welcomed women as leaders and witnesses, and although I am certain that it pained the four Gospel writers to include the women as the primary witnesses to the Resurrection, the stories that they had received compelled them to do it.  Or, in the Nibs Stroupe theory, I believe that they were a deliberate contrary witness to the Pauline tradition, which left the women out completely.  Let me say here that I don’t think that Paul was as anti-women as he has often been portrayed, but the tradition that developed in his name certainly was.

            The power of the Resurrection is that it verified that Jesus overcame the domination of violence and death and welcomed all into the God movement, especially those who had been marginalized by society.  More on this next week, but for now, it’s worth repeating:  “Choosing Mary?  How contrary!”