Mary Magdalene
1990 (Year A), 22 July /
Pentecost 7
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
At the theological college I went to, all the students had to spend one day a week, for fifteen weeks in a psychiatric hospital. For part of the day, with the help of two doctors, we looked at the way we related to each other and at how we felt when people got angry with us, what made us feel uneasy, what helped us experience security.
After coffee we went onto the wards. On the first day we were each taken to the entrance of a ward by a doctor and left there. ‘You are the chaplain to that ward now,’ he said, ‘Off you go and do your work’. Feeling near to panic, I went through the doors. There was a group of people at the far end of the ward so that’s where I headed.
‘Please can I join you?’ I remember saying, desperately hoping that they would say yes so that I could sit down with them. Nobody said anything, nobody even looked up. ‘Please can I sit down and join you?’ I asked again. Eventually, after what seemed an age a woman looked up at me and said ‘No, go away’. It was as if the world had come to an end, no one looked up at me, nobody smiled and said don’t be silly, come and sit down; there was nowhere to go except to turn and walk away. I can’t remember what happened afterwards, all I know is that I went. And now as I tell the story my stomach still churns.
Similar experiences will happen to us all, mostly they seem to come in childhood or adolescence when a teenager does not get included in the things that her friends are doing, or somebody is not chosen for a team, or maybe we’re rejected by our own parents. As we grow we find much more subtle ways of excluding people or avoiding them, but it’s still difficult to come to terms with the rejection from a job we’ve set our hearts on, and if we sense some rejection coming we’ll do almost anything to avoid that final confrontation.
When I was rejected in that ward it felt like death and I wanted to die. And that time would’ve been understood by the writers of the Bible as being a death, for those ancient writers had a much wider and more developed notion of life and death than we do. For them, life and death were more than simply something to do with the stopping of the heart and the drawing of the last breath. The Bible understood people as being alive when they shared relationships with one another, as being alive if they lived in a community which cared for its various members and their development. Death comes when you were excluded from that community. So life and death weren’t simply something to do with the state of the individual person’s health but with the relation between the person and the community. Life meant to be related to other people death meant being separated or excluded from them.
Mary Magdalene, if the tradition that she was a prostitute is correct, must have known all about death for she would have known all about being excluded and separated from most of her community. Things have not changed too much for we behave in much the same way today in our treatment of prostitutes or anybody else whose behaviour we disapprove of.
Jesus was killed precisely because he showed that un-relatedness is not the will of God and is not the way a society can be ordered. Yet the love of God, demonstrated in the resurrection, has power and that power is life giving, for it enables people who otherwise would have nothing in common to become brothers and sisters. The untouchables are brought back from the dead and into life in community.
Mary Magdalene stands as a triumphant example of the life-giving love which God has for all people. There are many more. The tax collector, the leper, the prodigal son, the Samaritan, all restored to the life which living with others in Christ brings. Her story, like all those others, is about the capacity of Jesus to bring life from death, not by being a magician or a miracle worker, but by having the authority to overcome the power of death which is at work in our world.
All this is very hard for us, for we too like the way things have always been, and we all have our own untouchables. God, through Mary calls us to find the Diving in the surprising and the unfamiliar, and through it to be included in life. Most merciful God, we fail to see you, even when you stand before us. Grant us so to recognise your strangeness, that we do not cling to our familiar grief, but may be freed to proclaim resurrection in the name of Christ. AMEN