Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles, as Reconciler

Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles, as Reconciler

Karen L. Howard, Ph.D.

Recently, I was asked to give a talk on Mary Magdalene as Reconciler.  When I was asked, I said, “Sure, Mary Magdalene is one of my favorites, and I pray to her quite regularly (I usually get a few raised eyebrows at that last part!).  I have long felt Mary Magdalene is in the New Testament what David was in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Both are passionately in love with God, but neither is far from sin or their human nature. I hadn’t really thought of her much as a reconciler though.  Whom was she reconciling?  the apostles?  the disciples?  Surely when you put twelve men together (or twelve women for that matter), there are bound to be conflicts and disagreements – look at Peter and Paul, or the two brothers, James and John, vying for who gets to sit at Jesus’ right and left side, or how did Matthew, a tax collector, fit into this mix?  OR, maybe she was trying to reconcile men and women, trying to show the male apostles that women can indeed have just as rich a prayer life and spirituality as men, something many women have been arguing for millennia.

But what does it mean to reconcile?  Is it just to make peace? to stop people from killing each other?  I once offered a retreat on St. Elizabeth of Portugal, who lived in the 13th century.  Whenever I offer retreats, I usually try to start with what the saint had written, but Elizabeth hadn’t written much – just a few letters.  She was married to King Denis by an arranged marriage when she was very young and she bore him two sons, but Denis was a philanderer.  He had other sons, whom Elizabeth also raised, but they all began to argue and fight with each other over the kingdoms of Spain, Portugal and Castile.  Her claim to fame was that she kept her sons and her husband’s illegitimate sons from killing each other, once even riding into battle to stop them.  

In the 19th century, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a huge tome entitled Leviathan, in which he argued for the construction of a Commonwealth, for the main purpose of keeping us from killing each other. He thought human nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Is a commonwealth or the state supposed to be a reconciler?  Our country right now is more in need of reconciliation that being its agent.   A step up perhaps, in the aftermath of the Reformation when all the different Protestant versions of Christianity were emerging and fighting among themselves, John Locke wrote his famous Letter on Toleration, begging his fellow Christians to just tolerate each other, or in our own day and times, Rodney King has asked us, “Can’t we all get along?”  Is that reconciling?  Is reconciling an attempt to make peace? by stopping the killing or tolerating each other? I would argue it is far more than that and Mary Magdalene knew that very well. 

Bishop Barron gave a talk a few years back around Lent about reconciliation and he looked at the etymology of the word.  Webster states that “reconciliation is the restoration of friendly relations,” but if one digs deeper into the root of the word, ciliation is from the Latin.  Cilia refers to eyelashes.  So, if one thinks of restoring people to an eyelash-to-eyelash relationship, that’s pretty close; that’s pretty intimate. 

Who is Mary Magdalene and what do we know of her?  Most scholars agree she was from Magdala, a seaside city west of Galilee in Roman Judea.  It was famous for its fishing and smoked fish as well as fine woolens and woolen dyes.  She is never named with a husband, but she did help provide resources for Jesus in his ministry along with other women, so we suspect she was wealthy and perhaps independent.   She certainly was a devoted follower of Jesus, a disciple, and some refer to her as an apostle.  Pope Francis, in moving her “memorial” to a “feast” in our liturgical calendar referred to her as the “Apostle of the Apostles” and he was not the only one to paint her in such a favorable light.  Hippolytus of Rome was one of the first to refer to her and the other women disciples as apostles in the 3rd century.  Gregory of Nyssa noted that she was the first witness to the resurrection, Augustine praised her as ”surpassingly ardent in her love from the other women who ministered to Jesus,” and Aquinas referred to her as the “Apostle of Apostles” in the 13th century.  The Eastern Church consistently saw her as a disciple and companion of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Pope Gregory I in 591, however, is the one who muddied the waters when he linked the story in Luke about Jesus curing Mary Magdalene from seven demons, with the sinful unnamed woman in the preceding chapter who was an adulterer who crashed a dinner party Jesus was attending and then washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.  He linked the two of them as well to Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister.  Pope Gregory’s poor exegesis conflated, or merged the stories together and the image of Mary Magdalene as a sinful adulterer stuck.  During the Middle Ages she was hailed as a devout penitent, but still as that sinful prostitute.  The Eastern Church never believed this conflation of texts, but in the West, it stuck up until the 20th century when several popes tried to rectify it. 

In the late 19th century, a manuscript was also discovered that was purported to be the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) written in the late 2nd or early 3rd century.  Mary Magdalene never wrote anything, and this work turned out to be an anonymous work perhaps about Mary Magdalene, but it is grouped together with a  number of early writings called the Gnostic writings.  Gnosis in Greek means knowledge, and in the early Church there were those considered to be Gnostics who were supposed to be privy to secret knowledge (think private revelation).  Others included the Gospel of Thomas, the Dialogue With the Savior, the Gospel of Philip, etc.  Many of these merged secular Greek philosophy with theology, and indeed the early Church does weave Plato and Aristotle though its teachings, and if Mary Magdalene was from Magdala, a Roman city in Judea, she may have been familiar with these philosophies. Magdala was a very bustling Hellenized city.  All these gnostic writings were excluded from the canon of the Bible for various reasons, and some were quite bizarre, e.g. Gospel of Thomas – women can be saved if Jesus turns them into men first – or in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was largely about her inner life, the cross and Jesus’ suffering were rejected as meaningless, the Son of Man is not really the Son of God, but that inner perfect “form” (think Plato) of the human person within each of us.  In the end, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene is by most scholars considered simply theological fiction.  

Mary Magdalene does appear, however, in the Gospels 12 times, more than any other woman.  First, she is possessed by seven demons and Jesus cures her of these demons.  All four gospels have her at the crucifixion, she prepares Jesus’ body for burial in Luke and Matthew, and all four gospels have her the first one to see Christ after the resurrection.  After she is initially cured by Jesus of those seven demons, she follows him, and NEVER LOOKS BACK. 

Where does she get such faith?  Certainly grace, but if we look more carefully at the demon passage, that might give us a clue.  We are introduced to Mary Magdalene in Luke (8:1-2) by name as this woman who is possessed by seven demons.  Seven is often a symbolic number in Scripture; it means complete.  (Think the seven days of creation in Genesis.)  If Mary Magdalen was plagued by seven demons, she may have been completely possessed, and yet Jesus cures her.  He frees her from all these demons.  During the Middle Ages, the Church began to identify those seven demons with the seven deadly sins: anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride and sloth.  Perhaps she had them all.  I’m sure she had to deal with lust if she was human, but after Pope Gregory paired her with the unnamed sinful prostitute in Luke, that image of prostitute has been hard to correct.  Scores of paintings and musical compositions were created in the High Middle Ages and up to the present-day art are still being created, depicting her as an adulterer. Think of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The DaVinci Code,” etc.  What is remarkable about Mary Magdalene is that once Jesus cured her, she never looked back.  To try to understand the changes in her, we can reflect on how those seven deadly sins began morphing into seven lively virtues, such as humility (pride), chastity (lust), generosity (greed), zeal (sloth), admiration (envy), forgiveness (anger) and asceticism (gluttony).  She does not follow Jesus and then deny him three times.  Nor does she follow Jesus and argue with other followers over who will sit at his left and who at his right.  She does not ask “Where are you going, Master?” before she follows him.  She does not need to be knocked down on the road to Damascus for Jesus to get her attention.  When all the other apostles ran away at the crucifixion, she stayed at the foot of the Cross, and in all four gospels, Jesus appears to her after the resurrection before anyone else.  She is rightly called the “Apostle of Apostles”.

So, how is she a reconciler?  I would argue she becomes a reconciler by the way she started living after Jesus cured her and how she began to set her own life in order.  Erik Varden is a Norwegian Catholic bishop and monk.  That may seem like an odd combination, but it was certainly the practice in the early Church.  Varden wrote a book last year entitled, Chastity, Reconciliation of the Senses.  If lust was one of Mary Magdalene’s demons, and I’m sure it was if she was human, then the virtue that began to quell her and clothe her would have been chastity. In Ignatian prayer, Ignatius uses a term: “agere contra” as a practice of working against a fault or a sin by suggesting one pursue the virtue most opposite the fault or sin. To act contrary to the vice or demon toward the opposite virtue may be the best remedy for arresting it. We could select any demon with its corresponding virtue, but since Varden chooses Chastity, we can look at that one.

Varden begins his book by spending a lot of time exploring the creation story in Genesis on how we are fashioned, in Imago Dei, and what the original paradise looked like.  There was a beautiful order and harmony there and since we were created in God’s image, there was an incredible beauty and harmony and order to our lives.  Augustine is one of the first who defined sin as disorder.  I would suggest that when Mary Magdalene  was cured of those seven demons, the encounter with Christ was so powerful that she began to tap into her own spiritual senses and try to bring harmony and balance to her own physical senses and appetites.  The Patristic fathers were great about discussing this, especially Origin, and he maintained that we each have a set of spiritual senses at our disposal if we quiet ourselves and open ourselves up to them.  You know what these are.  Think of the blind man Bartimaeus – What do you want of me?  I want to see, Lord (Mk 10:46-52).  So, Jesus cures him of his blindness, but not only physical blindness, but his inner blindness.  We know we can see things with our heart.  We hear Jesus’ voice in prayer, not orally with our physical ears, but in our inner ears that are attuned to him.  We taste the goodness of the Lord at Communion, not with our physical taste buds, but with or inner sense of taste. I would suggest that the more we are able to nourish our spiritual senses, begging God’s grace to do so, the more that we can balance our physical senses when they start to go astray and restore that order and harmony in our own lives.  To access these spiritual senses, however, we need regular periods of silence, we need regular periods of prayer.  Only then can we act as a reconciler to others by showing them the same thing.

Years ago our parish used a video series on Silence (The Big Silence, BBC) by a Benedictine monk, Fr. Christopher Jamison.  It was a type of realty TV series in which five people wanted to learn how to incorporate more silence into their lives.  A line in that series he kept coming back to is: “Silence is the gateway to the soul and the soul is the gateway to God.”  If we lose that silence, we may lose that access to God.  We are inundated with noise today.  We have to explicitly carve out time for silence and prayer in our lives.  If we are going to apply Ignatius’ “agree contra” as Mary Magdalene did and push back against those demons with a pursuit of virtue, we need to find the silence to do so, or as Fr. Jamison warns us, we may lose that gateway to our soul and to God.

At the above mentioned retreat, a question was posed the first night: “How many people have you brought closer to Christ (people who, after hanging around with you, come closer to Christ?)  If we are reconciled with our God, with our Sacred Trinity, it will show.  It will be attractive.  People will want some of that. 

Mary Magdalen is being held up to us as the Apostle of the Apostles, because once she encountered Jesus and was cured of her demons, she never looked back,  She stayed with Jesus and began to push back against those demons day by day to pursue the life of virtue, harmony, order, beauty and blessedness.  Below are some questions that might get us started on a similar path.

Questions:

1.    Do you have any demons in your life?  Can you identify one demon that keeps hounding you?  What is that one sin that keeps popping up in confession?

2.    How might you put something in place to push back against this demon?   e.g. viewing pornography will lead to all kinds of disorder in our lives.  What could we use to replace it?  Gossip can harm the Body of Christ and center an attitude of uncharity in our lives.  If that is your demon, what kinds of things can you do push back against that one?

3.    Part of being an Apostle was the commission to go out and spread the Good News.  We are each called to that by our baptism.  How can we be more like Mary Magdalene and share that harmony and wholeness that she may have found?  She can certainly be our role model for reconciliation in our modern times.  We might consider praying to her regularly and reflecting on her life to start. 

Mary Magdalene in Scripture

Freed from seven demons – Luke 8:1-3;     Mark 16:9

At the Crucifixion – Matthew 27:55-56;     Mark15:40-41

                                          Luke 23:49;     John 19:25

Prepares Jesus’ body for burial – Matthew 27:61;     Luke 23:55-56

First to witness Resurrection  -- Matthew 28:1-10;     Mark 16:1-11

                                                              Luke 24:1-11;     John 20:1-18