The Feast of Mary Magdalene Part Two: The Other Mary

While writing about Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, I stopped and looked up The Two Marys. The concept of the Three Marys is very old in Christian iconography, but when I looked up the two Marys what I got was the usual business about the two main Marys in Christianity, Mary Magdalene and Mary the Virgin.  Some articles were about the reconciling of the two, as if these two women actually had some debate between them. Many of the articles in the last few years about Mary Magdalene have attempted to rehabilitate her and make a new image, but at the end of the day, all of this business of the Virgin Mary contrasted to Mary Magdalene is just a recycling of the old dichotomy of Virgin versus Whore. No matter what we say, most of Mary Magdalene’s current gas comes from her old reputation. We are still obsessed with her sexuality, so obsessed that in speaking of these two Marys we have intentionally forgotten the Other Mary, Mary of Bethany.

            Mary of Bethany is neither virgin nor whore, and what is more, we cannot even call her forgotten, for anyone who knows their Bible knows her well. She actually has a much larger role than Mary Magdalene. So great is Mary of Bethany’s role, that her stories are appropriated to become Mary Magdalene’s.

We have to look at one story first, and we are not entirely sure who the protagonist is. It is the story of the Sinful Woman who comes to Jesus while he is at the home of Simon the Pharisee. She weeps and wipes his feet with her hair. Simon is outraged that a sinner would do this, crashing his party, but Jesus chides him.

            There is another story a little more famous. In ths story, positioned near Passover, which Saint John tells us is right after the resurrection of Lazarus, Mary, his sister, comes to the house of a man called Simon the Leper. Here she pours spikenard on Jesus’s feet, and it is Judas and the disciples who chide her for such a waste of wealth. Jesus chides them.

            I suppose it is entirely possible that twice Jesus went to the house of a man called Simon and every time he went a woman came in sobbing and anointing his feet with her hair, but it isn’t likely. It is more likely Mary of Bethany is the woman in both stories. A lot of misogynistic reinvention decided that Mary’s sin was sexual and not simply sexual but prostitution, and that this Mary was, somehow, also Mary Magdalene. We won’t deal with that last bit right now. Let’s deal with the first bit. Many men in the Bible confess themselves as sinful. When Isaiah is confronted by God in the temple he cries “Woe am I,  a sinner and a man of unclean lips.” No one believes that Isaiah was a male prostitute. What is more, the proper title for Mary in the first story is not Sinful Woman, but Penitent Woman, and everyone coming as a disciple to Jesus was supposed to be penitent. Simon asked why this sinner was in his house, but given the misogyny of Judaism, and Greece and ancient Rome and the societies Jesus lived among, sinner could have been synonymous simply with her being a woman crashing a men’s gathering.

It is fun to imagine that Mary is weeping at Jesus’s feet because she’s sorry for sinning, or sorry for being a whore, indeed this is the way she is betrayed in Franco Zefferilli’s Jesus of Nazareth. But it isn’t very realistic. It isn’t sensible. It makes far more sense that she is weeping because Jesus had brought her brother Lazarus from the dead and she has truly seen something new, a new way of life, a new revelation about life and death and Christ, in other words, she is making a revolution and starting again. Penitence. Though penitence may include sorrow, what it means is beginning again.