MARY MAGDALENE

Today is the feast day for Mary Magdalene, and when I saw that, I started to think about how much I love Mary Magdalene and how often I have written about her.

In fact, I started writing about Mary Magdalene in college, almost thirty years ago.  I was taking a poetry writing class and my professor was real big on structured, formal poetry, not the free verse that I had been doing since elementary school.  My professor wanted us to concentrate on form, on meter and rhyme and though I am still a free verse poet, I did fall in love with a particular type of poem called the villanelle. 

Perhaps the most recognizable villanelle is one by Dylan Thomas—if you remember the Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds, or the Robin Williams movie Dead Poet’s Society, then you will recognize this poem.  Thomas writes, “Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should burn and rave at close of day/rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

The villanelle intrigued me as a form because of the song-like quality of the meter which is iambic pentameter and the repetition of lines that form a refrain for each stanza.

And so when it came time to write my own, I chose to do a villanelle on the moment when Mary Magdalene goes back to the tomb on Easter morning.  Each stanza alternating between Mary and Jesus and beginning with these lines, “Mary, why do you weep over death, says He/Your Lord is alive, is no longer dead/Come back to the tomb, come back to me.”

And if you’re thinking, Kendra you were writing Bible-themed poetry in college, how did you not wind up in seminary immediately after graduation?  The answer is—I was close.  I was very close—this close to seminary.  But no regrets.  In the multi-verse, I’m sure there is a version of me that went to seminary right after college and is now the pastor of a Disciples of Christ church.  You lucked out with the Episcopal Church version of me.

Over and over, again and again, I have written different poems, different versions of Mary’s time in the garden on Easter morning where she greets the risen Jesus.

But one thing I have never addressed in my writing until just recently is the story of Mary Magdalene before she met Jesus.  Much like Jesus’ childhood, there is not a lot in the gospels on who Mary Magdalene was.  There is a common misconception that she was a prostitute, but the only thing we know for certain appears in Luke 8:1-3 which reads, “Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.”

In other words, we know that Mary had seven demons cast out of her and we know that she and these other women, some named, some unnamed are providing financially to Jesus’ ministry.  What does this mean for Mary?  It means it’s possible she had money.  Where did she get that money?  Possibly she was a widow.  But you see how even those two questions open the door for a huge Mary story that we are never shown.

Over the years, pop culture has portrayed Mary Magdalene in this early state in different ways.  The Chosen, from what I’ve seen, seems to portray Mary Magdalene as someone who is fundamentally good but is tormented by her demons in a mostly euphemistic way—at times she would not be out of place in a horror movie today.  But this Mary has suffered trauma and as a result suffers from depression.  She also has problems with alcohol. 

In the movie Mary Magdalene, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, Mary Magdalene is shown as someone her family considers possessed because she will not conform to society’s expectations of women at that time.  She will not be forced into marriage to her brother’s friend.  Her family drags her to the water and tries to exorcise her by almost drowning her.  This traumatizes Mary further.  Only when Jesus appears and offers Mary “purpose” that gives her agency over her life, is she relieved of her mental anguish.

In earlier performances of Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Weber, Mary is seen as a temptress.  And of course in books like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as perhaps the wife of Jesus.

All of these suppositions make compelling stories.

But who is the true Mary Magdalene?

It was a question I attempted to answer in my new book Your Light Has Come: The Miracles of Jesus when I decided to tackle Mary Magdalene and her seven demons.

My new book is written in the same style as my two books Witnesses to the Passion of Christ and Witnesses to the Resurrection.  Using, what I call “spare verse” poetry, that is free verse that concentrates on images and the importance of each individual word, I put myself in the heads of these people and write from their point of view as they either witness Jesus’ death or His resurrection, or in the case of my new book, I write from the point of view of the people who benefited from His healing miracles.

How in the world would I do Mary’s story justice when there is so much left unsaid?

I considered leaving her out of the book completely, but then I remembered she is such a big part of the other two books, that I would be leaving her story unfinished if I didn’t try to tell the story of the worst time of her life.

Everything I write in the book about Mary Magdalene is from my imagination, anchored only by the verses in Luke 8. 

I wrote Mary as someone suffering from deep grief and deep emotional pain—so severe that she has almost shut down physically—her behavior so odd that the only word the people had at the time to describe it was possession, because she is not herself.  Her first encounter with Jesus involves Him taking a literal physical burden off her shoulders and from then on, she begins to climb out of her pit and toward the first light of hope she has seen.

The exact circumstances of Mary’s first encounter with Jesus are not what’s important.

Because we know the results.

We know she followed Him.

We know she followed Him all the way to the cross.

We know He chose to make her the first witness to His resurrection.

Peter may have been the rock on which Jesus built His church.

But Mary was the apostle to the apostles.

It doesn’t matter where Mary started. 

It only matters where she wound up.

That’s how her story becomes a universal story.  That’s why her story is so appealing to so many women in particular—I’m not saying her story can’t be important to men—but to women—we know how women were treated in Biblical times. 

We also know how important Mary was to Jesus.

That makes her worth celebrating on this feast day, for her story can be our story.

God had great things planned for Mary Magdalene.

And He has great things planned for you and me.

Amen.