Mary Magdalene: Conclusion

So we know that Mary is the woman who anoints Jesus’s feet, and in anointing them prepares him for his burial, that she weeps with love for him and doesn’t stint from doing extravagant and sometimes heedless things in her love for him. She does nothing by halves in regard to her devotion and, what is more, Jesus is pleased by this. We know that earlier when she is supposed to be helping Martha serve Jesus, performing in the role proper to a woman, something happens, the word of the presence of Christ compels her and she stops work to sit at the feet of Jesus. Her sister Martha demands that Jesus make Mary get up and help her serve, but she is also asking Jesus to insist that Mary behave more like a proper woman, and Jesus refuses.

There is something very special about the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Saint Martha should be loved and praised because when Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, it is she who goes out to see him and she who tells Jesus he could have saved Lazarus but even now he can do what he wishes. Martha is worthy of praise because, like Peter, she declares that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. But the interesting thing is in this story, Mary does none of these things. She stays in the house. She is so broken that the arrival of Jesus, her beloved, her master. does not make her go out to him. She may even be angry, for they sent for him and he did not come. But it is when she receives the private message that Jesus is calling for her that Mary finally runs out to him. Jesus is often full of cool, almost robotic, answers and in the Gospel of John is the coolest Jesus ever. When his own mother charges him to do something he says, “What is this to me, woman?” The Jesus of John is above regular human emotions, but when Mary sees him, she says nothing holy. She throws her rage at him and says, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!”

            And Jesus does something very shocking. The shortest verse in the Bible tells us.

            Jesus wept.

            And weeping, he demands to go to the tomb and raises up Lazarus. The relationship between Jesus and Mary of Bethany is not that she is the greatest disciple because she is the smartest, most active and has the best answers. Here there is clearly nothing but love between Mary and Jesus. Mary of Bethany is the person who can move Jesus to action, make him weep, understands him well, perhaps even shames him a little. Perhaps the incident with the oil sometime later. where she is called the Penitent Woman, is her repentance for her anger. Mary is the disciple par excellence because she is the lover and the beloved par excellence. Between she and Jesus is great love, affection and attraction, and the matter of discipleship is not about getting it right, or behaving in perfection. It is, clearly, a matter of love.

            I read an article where someone is asking, “Is Martha an invention meant to suppress Mary Magdalene? This is stupid, and simply an offshoot of the Virgin-Whore dichotomy.  There can only be two important women in the Bible. It makes little since that Lazarus had two sisters named Mary, and the one who does not resemble anything of Mary Magdalene is Martha. But as I began to meditate on Mary Magdalene another possibility seemed to insist itself. There is no saying it is right or absolute truth, but it is right for me and seems true to me. Mary of Bethany is deeply important to Jesus. She is a disciple of Jesus who sits at his feet. She is castigated by the disciples, by Simon the Leper/Pharisee and by her sister, but always upheld by Jesus who is quick to rebuke her accusers. She is an iconoclast. But oddly enough, Mary of Bethany disappears from the narrative right before Passover. She is not mentioned at all during the Passion. Aside form Mary the Mother of Jesus, the only other Mary who is mentioned at the Passion is Mary Magdalene. At Golgotha, Mary Magdalene weeps at the feet of Jesus the same way Mary of Bethany did earlier, and she brings myrrh and spices to the tomb. On Easter it is she whom Jesus greets. Mary of Bethany is gone, and that is strange for a woman so beloved by Jesus.

            What else is strange is Mary Magdalene is named once in the Gospels in the list of women who followed Jesus, and in this list we never hear of Martha and Mary of Bethany. What else is strange is though Mary Magdalene is named quite early, we never hear of her doing anything until the Passion story. In short, wherever Mary of Bethany is, Mary Magdalene is not, and vice versa.

            The life of Christ has been novelized and dramatized many times, and always in it, these two Marys have a strange place, both characters seeming unfinished. What if, minus the prostitution business, the medievalists had the right of it? We know that Simon Peter was Simon Bar Jonah of Capernaum, that Jesus made up this name, and the story of Jesus calling Simon the Rock has been made much of by many. It is correct to say many men have made much of it in order to bolster the claims of their churches and their positions in them. But there are many who point out that Mary is only sometimes called Mary of Magdala, and that Magdala can be the name of many places or no place. Where her Magdala is, is uncertain. Scholars also go further and point out that Magdala is a Latinized form of Migdol, or The Tower. If this is so, then Mary Magdalene may very not be a woman who comes from Magdala, but a woman who is (literally) christened by Christ  making Mary of Bethany’s epithet Magdalene. This is why looking at Mary of Bethany, and her relation to the personal avatar of God called Jesus is so vital.

Not only in the Latin tradition are the two women the same, but as early as the first centuries of the church there was a monastery dedicated to the Lady Mary, and this Lady Mary was not the Virgin, but the Companion of Jesus. So from very early on in the East these two women, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany, are seen as one. It is hard to believe that in the east, where Magdalene is reverenced, they would so easily forget Mary of Bethany whose place is so much more prominent. What is more, the treatment of Mary of Bethany in the canonical Gospels is the same as Mary Magdalene’s treatment in the Gnostic ones. The New Testament makes a great deal of Peter’s naming because, narrowly, it was seen as a way to assert the authority of bishops and popes and broadly, all men and all priests. The renaming of Mary of Bethany as Mary Magdalene would have been well known, but not well celebrated. Why would it be? From the standpoint of earthly power it did nothing for men. But from the standpoint of true power, which is based in love and grace and relation to the Divine it does everything. For all of us.